A week ago, Richard Clarke was explaining why the war in Iraq undermines the war on terror.
The president of Egypt said, “If you invade Iraq, you will create a hundred bin Ladens.” He lives in the Arab world. He knows. It’s turned out to be true. It is now much more difficult for us to win the battle of ideas as well as arresting and killing them, and we’re going to face a second generation of al-Qaeda.
In case there was any doubt as to the accuracy of Clarke’s claim, the Washington Post noted yesterday that the war in Iraq is drawing many in the Islamic world to embrace al Queda’s message, making the terrorist network even more dangerous as a long-term threat.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has accelerated the spread of Osama bin Laden’s anti-Americanism among once local Islamic militant movements, increasing danger to the United States as the al Qaeda network is becoming less able to mount attacks, according to senior intelligence officials at the CIA and State Department.
[…]
The result, according to the senior intelligence analyst, is that the U.S. war on terrorism after Iraq “may transition from defeating a group to fighting a movement.” [J. Cofer Black, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator] said the spread of bin Laden’s ideology “greatly complicates our task in stamping out al Qaeda and poses a threat in its own right for the foreseeable future.”
This is the kind of crisis that will be incredibly difficult to fix, whether we get rid of Bush in November or not.