Yesterday’s State Department report on global terrorism included sobering and dejecting data. Terrorist attacks worldwide shot up 25% of the year before, while terrorist fatalities went up 40%. The results were particularly awful in Iraq — the State Department found that terrorism in the war-torn country claimed 65% of the worldwide total of terrorist-related deaths in 2006. Nearly half of the attacks counted in the world occurred in Iraq, which saw a stunning 91% increase in the number of terrorist incidents.
But to hear the State Department explain the results to reporters, all of this may be good for our counterterrorism efforts.
At yesterday’s briefing on the report, a reporter asked whether, in light of the skyrocketing death count in Iraq, the Iraq war has “been good for the effort to reduce terrorism generally.” Frank C. Urbancic, the State Department’s Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism, agreed and defended the war, stating that “if the battle against terrorism isn’t in Iraq, it’s going to be somewhere else.”
He then added, “I mean, Iraq is at least a relatively friendly place. The people of Iraq are deserving people and they deserve better and it’s good for us to help them.”
This is one of the dumber things I’ve heard in quite a while. For one thing, it’s not at all clear what Iraqis being “deserving people” has to do with this. Either the war is helping to reduce terrorism or it’s not. As Amanda at TP noted, “[A]ccording to Urbancic’s logic, it is good that the terrorists are in Iraq — rather than in another country — because it is a ‘relatively friendly place’ and the ‘people of Iraq are deserving people.'”
Moreover, the State Department’s conclusions are the opposite of the conclusion drawn by the National Intelligence Estimate.
Perhaps the State Department’s Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism has forgotten — or more likely, he hopes that we’ve forgotten — but the effect of the war in Iraq is quite clear.
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.
If I’m in the State Department’s press office and I have to try to spin the results of the latest report, I’m not sure what I’d say, either. But to even suggest that the war in Iraq has helped reduce terrorism generally is a special kind of stupid.
Post Script: As long as we’re on the subject, I thought I’d also highlight my favorite far-right blog post of the day:
Good news is no news, at least when it comes to the war on terrorism.
On Monday evening, the State Department released its annual Country Reports on Terrorism showing a number of interesting findings, including steep declines in terrorist attacks and murders in many regions of the globe. That has not been the lede story in America’s liberal media, however. Instead, they’ve chosen to focus their attentions on how terrorism has increased in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
There those biased news outlets go again, highlighting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, just because we happen to be fighting wars there. What about the lack of terrorism in, say, Norway? Why isn’t that on the front page?