Iraq war as incubator of terrorism

[Road Dawg]

Iraq war as incubator of terrorism
Joel Brinkley
Sunday, May 11, 2008

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this conclusion early this month, he was certainly aware that he was offering information that was four months out of date.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Department's latest Panglossian description of the war particularly egregious not just because the statistics were out of date.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@foreign- matters.com. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle .com.

This article appeared on page G - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate. com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi? f=/c/a/2008/ 05/10/INUN10G5DE .DTL