Even were President Bush’s more outlandish critics’ argument valid — arguing Iraq is a diversion in the war against the terrorists and daily evidence of the intervention of non-Iraqi elements disproves that highly parochial 2008 campaign slogan — there is growing complexity in the various theaters of the struggle elsewhere.

Again, the argument whether or not American initiative in taking on Saddam has exacerbated the conflict elsewhere is nullified by any examination of how the basis for the other struggles lay there long before Iraq hit the headlines.

Wherever one looks across the whole Islamic world from Casablanca to Zamboanga and to its appendages in Europe and North America, there is growing evidence of that complexity. Even “victory” in Iraq would only be an important milestone in putting down the reactionary movement to block modernization of Islamic societies and its parallel campaign destroy freedom in the rest of the world.

Nowhere, of course, is the conflict more treacherous than in the European and America Moslem communities. Even there the voice of modernity is drowned out by Saudi and Iranian-subsidized religious who have penetrated mosques and allied charity institutions in what was once called Christendom.

The continuing revelations of plotting – and accompanying braggadocio – of second and third generation United Kingdom-born Moslem is a barometer of the failure to reach the large immigrant populations living in the West. Intimidation, false ”politically correct” rationalizations, and lethargy have inhibited an Islamic reformation, one which probably must come from those very communities in the West.

The picture is no less bleak in theaters elsewhere.

Persia, a heartland of intellectual and cultural influence in the Islamic world, continues to force feed armed fanatics even while it fails to solve growing problems in Iran itself. The Tehran regime emboldens an otherwise bankrupt Syrian nepotism in its significant role in feeding the Iraqi insurgency, also acting as a transmission belt for Iranian direction to Hezbollah in dynamiting hope of a representative regime in multi-cultural Lebanon, and, through Hamas, feeding diehards in Palestine.

Afghanistan sees a return of old ethnic and feudal divides permitting reawakening of a neo-Taliban threatening not only the shaky central government established by the U.S. and its allies, but jeopardizing NATO’s experiment as substitute for failed United Nationa worldwide peacekeeping. The running Afghan sore makes infinitely harder President-Gen. Musharraf’s balancing act in neighboring Pakistan where conflict between its romantic raison d’etre as an Islamic state and a predominantly secular oligarchic elite is again up for grabs. Almost daily terrorist acts – from dissidents as old as the British Raj to those directly allied with al-Qaida – cripple an already impoverished economy, aggravating social problems Americans unacquainted with South Asia could not imagine but feeding fanaticism in Europe..

Next door in India there are increasing signs of awakening Islamic fanaticism – in part reverse coin of Hindu extremists – in a symbiotic relationship with Pakistan and Bangladesh with Indian politicians continuing to wish it away. And in that sardonic way history has sometimes, Indian economic progress – unleashed after four decades of Soviet planning – is in some ways adding fuel to these fires.

The old sore of Malay separatism allied with Islam has blossomed in southern Thailand, and while largely still isolated, could threaten the careful racial balancing act in neighboring Malaysia, always fraught. Southeast Asia has already demonstrated Islamofascists’ call for a regional movement, incorporating Indonesian, Malaysia, and Filipino fanatics, has resonance.

At the other end of the Islamic world, there is resurgence of Islamicists in Algeria, added to growing Moroccan complicity in terrorism in Spain.. The potential for their influence on France’s huge Arab and Moslem minority is ever present despite Paris’ tough-minded counterterrorist apparatus.

All this is not to say countermeasures have had no effect.

One must assume plots and leads and networks constantly are being wrapped up, quietly, by government agencies in a dozen countries. As this is written, for example, Australian and U.S. aid to Manila quietly move in on on the remnants of the 2002 Bali bombing in the southern Philippines

But “victory” or ‘defeat” in Iraq, however momentous in terms of psychological impact on Islamofascism, as Bush has rightly said, is only one campaign in a long struggle. A cliché to say it now. But while lip service is being paid to the concept daily in the U.S. Senate, there seems very little real appreciation for what it entails by way of dedication.

That the very nature of the struggle, the attempt of the terrorists by whatever means to disrupt our way of life, makes the pursuit of the struggle all the more demanding. Carrying on as far as possible with normalcy is part of what would constitute victory, but that very seeming complacency has a way of sapping the dedication to the long war.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.