The US-led international response to the Islamic State’s advances in Iraq and Syria is more extensive and fraught with danger than the war on terror declared by president George W Bush in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It is a response that contains the seeds of continued failure in confronting terrorism and threatens to give rise to groups that may be even more extreme than the Islamic State, hard though that may be to imagine.

Bush concluded within weeks of the 9/11 attacks that al-Qaeda was as much a product of US support for autocratic Arab regimes as it was the result of politically bankrupt Arab leaders. His acknowledgement amounted to an admission of failure of a US policy designed to maintain stability in a key geo-strategic and volatile part of the world.

A decade later, discontent with failed regimes produced popular revolts that toppled the autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere in the region, mass protests erupted in Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Oman. Bahrain’s minority Sunni rulers brutally suppressed a Shia uprising. Egypt’s transition was routed with a military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Syria is in its fourth year of a bloody civil war that has fuelled the rise of the Islamic State, a jihadist group that makes al-Qaeda look like a lesser evil.

…James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Wurzburg and the author of the blog, the Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.