Report: Iraq War Made Terror Worse

[evil twin]

A research paper prepared for the British Ministy of Defense comes to the same conclusion, namely that The Iraq war has acted as a "recruiting sergeant" for extremists.

BBC news story.

[sweetjazz]

[ QUOTE ]
The premise has strong parallels with global warming.

Have average temperatures increased? yes
Has terrorism increased? yes

Is temperature increase attributable to human activity? There are logical arguments why it might be, there are logical arguments why it might not be.

Is Iraq resposible for the terrorism increase?
There are logical arguments on both sides of that issue.

Is there science to back up the claim of human responsibility? Some, but controversial

Is there science to back up the claim that Iraq has increased terrorism? None, and none is possible, because the conditions are not reproducible.

I would guess that there is a lot of overlap between individuals who are on the same side of global warming and Iraq.

[/ QUOTE ]

Huh? It's so obvious without a doubt that the Iraq invasion has led to a dramatic increase in terrorism within Iraq, primarily against Iraqis. To say that these attacks are not related to the American decision to invade Iraq is absurd.

On the other hand, it's much less clear exactly how the events in Iraq have affected particular terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda, and their plans to engage in terrorism in specific places outside of Iraq, such as the United States or Europe.

It's hard for me to say what you are referring to when you talk about "terrorism" in general and your answers seem to conflate terrorism in general with terrorism against U.S. interests with terrorism on U.S. soil.

It's also impossible to say how 9/11 itself affected al Qaeda and its use of terror in the United States. It seems that many Islamic radicals disagreed with the attack on strategic grounds, as an attack outside their primary sphere of concern (the Muslim world) that would do more harm than good from their perspective (in particular, increase the Western troop levels in Muslim lands)..

(As a side remark, "how frequently have we been attacked lately" is a terrible metric to judge the success of the war on terrorism. On that scale, we were safest on September 10, 2001.)

[Copernicus]

"It's so obvious without a doubt that the Iraq invasion has led to a dramatic increase in terrorism within Iraq, primarily against Iraqis."

that has nothing to do with the thread. the claim is that the war in Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism against the US

[sweetjazz]

[ QUOTE ]
"It's so obvious without a doubt that the Iraq invasion has led to a dramatic increase in terrorism within Iraq, primarily against Iraqis."

that has nothing to do with the thread. the claim is that the war in Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism against the US

[/ QUOTE ]

If that's your definition of terrorism, then how has terrorism increased? Or did you mean that the threat of terrorism has increased? If so, how do you measure that?

[Copernicus]

read the reports of the original leaks and the actual NIE report and come back when youre prepared to discuss the thread..

[sweetjazz]

[ QUOTE ]
Did anybody else read the "Key Judgments" that were released and think this was something that could have been written by a semi-aware college freshman?

[/ QUOTE ]

The report consists of a lot of vague observations that half-intelligent people have been able to figure out on their own. I see no evidence that any intelligence outside of reading a daily newspaper is involved.