[plus evidence that the Iraq war really is spawning terrorism -- all based on the State Department's own report data]
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/11/INUN10G5DE.DTL
Sunday, May 11, 2008 (page G-8)
San Francisco Chronicle
Iraq war as incubator of terrorism
Joel Brinkley
You'll hear none of this from Washington, but the trends lines in Iraq
are turning down again.
A few days ago, the State Department published its annual report on
terrorism around the world. And like most documents produced by the
Bush administration, it proved to be a misleading piece of propaganda.
It said, for example, "There was a notable reduction in the number of
security incidents throughout much of Iraq, including a decrease in
civilian casualties" and "enemy attacks in the last quarter of the
year."
Strictly speaking, that is true. But as Ambassador Dell Dailey, the
State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, stood at the podium
presenting this conclusion early this month, he was certainly aware
that he was offering information that was four months out of date. I
can't believe he didn't know that in the first months of 2008, the
situation has reversed.
In this year's first quarter, the number of fatal bombings in Iraq
spiked. Every month, ever-more American and Iraqi soldiers were being
killed. For both, the number of deaths has doubled since December.
Larger numbers of Iraqi civilians are dying, too.
These statistics come from the Iraq Index, a widely respected
compilation of Iraq data published by the Brookings Institution. The
numbers for April are incomplete but still suggest that the unfortunate
trend is continuing. Consider the double suicide bombing of a wedding
party in Diyala province this month. It killed at least 35 people and
wounded more than 60 others.
Even with the increase in violence, Iraq remains far safer than a year
ago, before President Bush's troop escalation. In the last few months,
no foreigners have been kidnapped. No helicopters have been shot down.
Still, I found the State Department's latest Panglossian description of
the war particularly egregious not just because the statistics were out
of date. This report, the Bush administration's own assessment, painted
a deeply troubling picture of the war's effect on the rest of the
Middle East.
It showed that the war is breeding violent insurgent cells across the
Arab world. Some of these insurgents intend to join the fight against
the United States in Iraq. Other extremists, trained in Iraq, are
taking up arms and recruiting suicide bombers to attack their own
governments back home.
No one mentioned this during the long news conference about the
terrorist report, and the document's authors made no effort to draw
that conclusion from the disparate facts scattered about the
15,000-word chapter on the Middle East. But for anyone taking the time
to read it, the conclusion was inescapable.
In Morocco last year, "a series of suicide bombs shattered the relative
lull in terrorist violence" over the previous five years, the report
said. "Extremist veterans returning from Iraq" were training
inexperienced insurgent fighters, who then carried out bloody attacks
in Casablanca and other cities. King Mohamed VI observed that security
in his corner of the Middle East is now "linked to the security of the
region."
In neighboring Algeria, insurgents "used propaganda based on the call
to fight in Iraq as a hook to recruit young people, many of whom never
made it to Iraq but were redirected" to local insurgent cells instead.
They carried out "high-profile terrorist attacks throughout the
country."
Since 2003, insurgents have poured back and forth across Saudi Arabia's
border with Iraq, and shortly after the war began, they started setting
off massive bombs and killing foreigners at home.
Gen. Mansour al-Turki, Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry spokesman, once
told me that Saudi militants "wanted to spread their war against the
United States and found that doing this was easier in their own
country."
He drew this conclusion, he said, from interviews with insurgents he
had arrested.
"The invasion of Iraq enabled them to convince others in the country to
share their goals. For that reason, the invasion was very important to
them."
The terror report described similar patterns in Jordan, Syria, Kuwait,
Yemen and elsewhere. Still, asked in an NPR interview last week whether
the Iraq war is spawning insurgent violence in other countries, Dailey
offered an astonishing answer that contradicted his own report. The
war, he said, "has not spawned it at all."
In 2005, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to
Washington to warn the Bush administration that the Iraq war threatened
"to bring other countries in the region into the conflict."
"This is a very dangerous situation," he said. "A very threatening
situation."
Then, as now, no one seemed interested in listening.
Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a
former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. E-mail him
at brinkley at foreign-matters.com. Contact us at insight at sfchronicle.com.
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