With Barack Obama preparing to assume the Presidency, it's a good time to cast around for neat descriptions of a changed world.

Gilles Kepel, author of 'Beyond Terror and Martyrdom'

Gilles Kepel, a noted French scholar of Islam, has a succinct delineation of how things have changed in the seven years since 9/11, in a new book, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom.

Both of the grand narratives at work since the attacks on New York and Washington have run into the ground, he argues.

Those narratives were the Global War on Terror, the project of George W. Bush and the neocons, and the Global Jihad, as authored by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Both these narratives were intended to swing public opinion behind them – creating mass support within their respective constituencies for a highly aggressive, combative posture. Violence first; politics, maybe, later.

Both narratives, Kepel argues, foundered on the same issue: the occupation of Iraq. The United States succeeded in creating a new army of jihadists able to cripple all efforts at rebuilding the country, at least until the twin developments of the military surge and the Sunni Awakening, by which time the U.S. had long since lost the argument anyway.

And for Al Qaeda, the bloodshed unleashed by its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was such that jihad became fitna. Put crudely, holy war became civil war. The horrendous violence between Sunni and Shi'a had a profoundly alienating effect across the Muslim world and support for bin Laden declined sharply.

The great irony resulting from this mutual ideological knockout is the rise of a foe shared equally by AQ and the US: Iran.

Kepel's not the first to put forward this line of argument but it is, among other things, a very tidy encapsulation of the law of unintended consequences. Otherwise known as the cock-up theory of history.