Iraq war as incubator of terrorism

sfgate_get_fprefs();

You'll hear none of this from Washington, but the tendencies lines in Republic Of Iraq are turning down again.

A few years ago, the State Department published its yearly study on terrorism around the world. And like most written documents produced by the Shrub administration, it proved to be a deceptive piece of propaganda. It said, for example, "There was a noteworthy lessening in the figure of security incidents throughout much of Iraq, including a decrease in civilian casualties" and "enemy onslaughts in the last one-fourth of the year."

Strictly speaking, that is true. But as Ambassador Dell Dailey, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, stood at the dais presenting this decision early this month, he was certainly aware that he was offering information that was four calendar months out of date. I can't believe he didn't cognize that in the first calendar months of 2008, the state of affairs have reversed.

In this year's first quarter, the figure of fatal bombardments in Republic Of Iraq spiked. Every month, ever-more American and Iraki soldiers were being killed. For both, the figure of deceases have doubled since December. Bigger Numbers of Iraki civilians are dying, too.

These statistics come up from the Republic Of Republic Of Iraq Index, a widely respected digest of Iraq information published by the Brookings Institution. The Numbers for April are uncomplete but still propose that the unfortunate tendency is continuing. See the dual self-destruction bombardment of a wedding ceremony political party in Diyala state this month. It killed at least 35 people and hurt more than than 60 others.

Even with the addition in violence, Republic Of Iraq stays far safer than a twelvemonth ago, before President Bush's troop escalation. In the last few months, no aliens have got been kidnapped. No choppers have got been shot down.

Still, I establish the State Department's up-to-the-minute Panglossian verbal description of the warfare particularly crying not just because the statistics were out of date. This report, the Shrub administration's ain assessment, painted a deeply distressing image of the war's consequence on the remainder of the Center East.

It showed that the warfare is breeding violent insurrectionist cells across the Arab world. Some of these insurrectionists mean to fall in the fighting against the United States in Iraq. Other extremists, trained in Iraq, are taking up weaponry and recruiting self-destruction bombers to assail their ain authorities back home.

No 1 mentioned this during the long news conference about the terrorist report, and the document's writers made no attempt to pull that decision from the disparate facts scattered about the 15,000-word chapter on the Center East. But for anyone taking the clip to read it, the decision was inescapable.

In Kingdom Of Morocco last year, "a series of self-destruction bombs shattered the relative letup in terrorist violence" over the former five years, the study said. "Extremist veteran soldiers returning from Iraq" were preparation inexperienced insurrectionist fighters, who then carried out bloody onslaughts in Casablanca and other cities. King Mohamed six observed that security in his corner of the Center East is now "linked to the security of the region."

In neighbour Algeria, insurrectionists "used propaganda based on the phone call to struggle in Republic Of Republic Of Iraq as a hook to enroll immature people, many of whom never made it to Iraq but were redirected" to local insurrectionist cells instead. They carried out "high-profile terrorist onslaughts throughout the country."

Since 2003, insurrectionists have got poured back and forth across Saudi Arabian Arabia's boundary line with Iraq, and shortly after the warfare began, they started setting off monolithic bombs and violent death aliens at home.

Gen. Mansour al-Turki, Saudi Arabian Arabian Arabia's Inside Ministry spokesman, once told me that Saudi activists "wanted to distribute their warfare against the United States and establish that doing this was easier in their ain country."

He drew this conclusion, he said, from interviews with insurrectionists he had arrested.

"The invasion of Republic Of Iraq enabled them to convert others in the state to share their goals. For that reason, the invasion was very of import to them."

The panic study described similar forms in Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Republic Of Yemen and elsewhere. Still, asked in an NPR interview last hebdomad whether the Republic Of Iraq warfare is spawning insurrectionist force in other countries, Dailey offered an amazing reply that contradicted his ain report. The war, he said, "has not spawned it at all."

In 2005, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, came to American Capital to warn the Shrub disposal that the Republic Of Iraq warfare threatened "to convey other states in the part into the conflict."

"This is a very unsafe situation," he said. "A very baleful situation."

Then, as now, no 1 seemed interested in listening.

Joel Brinkley is a professor of news media at Leland Stanford University and a former foreign policy letter writer for the New House Of York Times. E-mail him at . Contact us at .