A classified US intelligence examination of the effects of the Iraq war indicates that it is making the threat of terror worse. Such a finding surely did not require a famous intelligence body; any layman in any country could have told the world that the war in Iraq has definitely increased the threat of terrorism and has helped fuel radicalism everywhere in the world.
By stating that the Iraq war has triggered more, not less, terrorism, the 30-page document known as the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is stating the obvious. The document’s conclusion is that Al-Qaeda has now mutated into a global franchise of semi-autonomous cells. Rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the war in Iraq has made Iraq and its immediate vicinity as well as the world a more dangerous place than before the war began. The invasion of Iraq and the insurgency that has followed have inspired new and old extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. Although the United States has seriously damaged the leadership of Al-Qaeda, branches have spread and decentralized. 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.
Although the conclusions of the NIE have been reflected in a number of public statements by senior intelligence officials this year and is all the more significant for reflecting the views of no fewer than 16 US spy agencies, the White House refuses to agree. It persists in the claim that going to war was the right thing to do. The world, President Bush once said, is now a safer place — despite, he failed to add, the indiscriminate killing of civilians by death squads, insurgents and militias which has reached unprecedented levels; despite the inability of state institutions to bring the perpetrators to justice and to provide adequate protection for ordinary Iraqis; despite human rights violations occurring at an alarming daily rate in Iraq; despite hundreds of bodies bearing signs of severe torture and execution-style killing continuing to appear throughout the country; and despite terror attacks, the growth of sectarian militias who are holding the rule of law in contempt, and the emergence of organized crime reflecting a lack of centralized and authorized control over the use of force in the country which results in indiscriminate killings of civilians.
Though the findings of the report are far from surprising, what might raise some eyebrows is that this is the first official US assessment of international terrorism since the Iraq war began. For three-and-a-half years the US has not sought to discover what makes a terrorist. A president who has invested huge amounts of time, money and political capital on what has entered the lexicon as the “war on terror” has taken more than three years before producing the first formal examination of global terrorist trends. This long wait for an assessment, now matter how naive, is the true surprise.
