Jez. This is unbelievable.
Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.
Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."
Low's comments came during a rare briefing by the council on its new report on long-term global trends. It took a year to produce and includes the analysis of 1,000 U.S. and foreign experts. Within the 119-page report is an evaluation of Iraq's new role as a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.
]President Bush has frequently described the Iraq war as an integral part of U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. But the council's report suggests the conflict has also helped terrorists by creating a haven for them in the chaos of war.
Something tells me these guys aren't going to last very long under the Poss Goss Directorate.
Just a guess.
"The al-Qa'ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.
According to the NIC report, Iraq has joined the list of conflicts -- including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, and independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao in the Philippines, and southern Thailand -- that have deepened solidarity among Muslims and helped spread radical Islamic ideology.
This is huge.
This is a complete repudiation of the entire current and former rationale for entering Iraq, coming directly from the highest intellectual echelons of the intelligence community.
The report goes on to map a very bleak future for the aggressive counter-terrorism movement.
At the same time, the report says that by 2020, al Qaeda "will be superseded" by other Islamic extremist groups that will merge with local separatist movements. Most terrorism experts say this is already well underway. The NIC says this kind of ever-morphing decentralized movement is much more difficult to uncover and defeat.
Terrorists are able to easily communicate, train and recruit through the Internet, and their threat will become "an eclectic array of groups, cells and individuals that do not need a stationary headquarters," the council's report says. "Training materials, targeting guidance, weapons know-how, and fund-raising will become virtual (i.e. online)."
Amazing. The strategic implications of this go on forever. Two years after eliminating a major trainground for the classic terrorist movement in Afghanastan, we made perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in our natiion's history, invading Iraq. Now we have essentially created a more decentralized and flexible form of terrorism--a breeding ground for all the terrorist movements of the future.
Amazing.
If America is ever attacked by terrorists with WMD, when we trace their backgrounds, they in all likelihood will have got their start in Iraq.
Thanks, Mr. President. You boldness and resolve truly have left you a legacy, though perhaps not the one you hoped for.