How the war on terror made the world a more terrifying place

Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect," with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by US and British forces. An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the repeated denials of President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found that the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began in March 2003. The study compared the period between the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq with the period since the invasion. The count–excluding the Arab-Israel conflict–shows that the number of deaths due to terrorism rose from 729 to 5,420. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Center on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine. Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamic fundamentalists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the Sept. 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297. Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq, President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people." Last month John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq War had been a recruiting factor for al-Qaida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't." Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States"–partially declassified last October–stated that "the Iraq War has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives." The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qaida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea. "Our study shows that the Iraq War has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third." In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect," the authors had focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods–from September 2001 to Mar. 20, 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion), and Mar. 21, 2003, to Sept. 30, 2006. The research has been based on the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database. The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalizing Muslims is widely backed by security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials said that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously. Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the British Secret Service said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet. "Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."