Bush's Iraq war increased terror threat against Americans

September 24, 2006 8:04 AM |

An official government intelligence estimate of the terrorism threat
in the United States states flatly that President George W. Bush's
invasion of Iraq has spawned a new generation of Islamic radicalism
and increased the terrorist threat against the United States.

The bottom line: The Iraq war has not, as the Bush Administration
claims, made America safer but has actually increased the danger for
this country and all Americans.

Writes Mark Mazzetti in Sunday's New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence
agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq
has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the
overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more
direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented
either in recent White House documents or in a report released
Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several
officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who
have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal
appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies
since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16
disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global
Terrorism: Implications for the United States,'' it asserts that
Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized
and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, "Indicators of the Spread of the
Global Jihadist Movement," cites the Iraq war as a reason for the
diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report "says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism
problem worse," said one American intelligence official.
Adds Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent
Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential
terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster
than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S.
intelligence analysts have concluded.
A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the
"centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that
has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist
networks and cells that are united by little more than an
anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to
eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the
situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to
officials familiar with the classified document. "It's a very candid
assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the
estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends
written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003
invasion. "It's stating the obvious." The NIE, whose contents were
first reported by the New York Times,
coincides with public statements by senior intelligence officials
describing a different kind of conflict than the one outlined by
President Bush in a series of recent speeches marking the fifth
anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Together with our coalition partners," Bush said in an address
earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America,
"we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances,
killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in
America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they're
carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every
battlefront, and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

But the battlefronts intelligence analysts depict are far more
impenetrable and difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the
standard tools of warfare.

Although intelligence officials agree that the United States has
seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its
ability to plan and direct major operations, radical Islamic networks
have spread and decentralized.

Many of the new cells, the NIE concludes, have no connection to any
central structure and arose independently. The members of the cells
communicate only among themselves and derive their inspiration,
ideology and tactics from the more than 5,000 radical Islamic Web
sites. They spread the message that the Iraq war is a Western attempt
to conquer Islam by first occupying Iraq and establishing a permanent
presence in the Middle East.