"WAR ON TERRORISM" CREATES TERRORISM
War radicalized most, probes find

From the Boston Globe courtesy of This Modern World:

New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.

The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central front" in a battle against the United States.

And

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."

''Only a few were involved in past Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya," the Israeli study says. Out of the 154 fighters analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism, including six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said the report, compiled by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel.

American intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the suicide bombers wreaking havoc in Iraq: Prior to the Iraq war, they were not Islamic extremists seeking to attack the United States, as Al Qaeda did four years ago, but are part of a new generation of terrorists responding to calls to defend their fellow Muslims from ''crusaders" and ''infidels."

''The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created," said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Click here for the rest (emphasis mine).

This is so utterly obvious that I've been saying pretty much the same thing from almost the beginning of Real Art: "the war on terrorism" is really a war that creates more terrorism. It's good that there is actually now some real research supporting this observation, but it's really amazing that nobody in the mainstream thought about it during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Bin Laden and his cohorts have been perfectly clear about their grievances. They resent US support of tyrannical governments in the Middle East that enrich themselves with oil profits while average citizens wallow in poverty. They resent US support of whatever barbaric abuses Israel heaps on the Palestinians. They resent US troops in Muslim lands. These are reasonable complaints, and our government can easily accommodate them. Unfortunately, the elites who own our government are just fine with the way things are now, and all war all the time plays into the hands of Republican fear mongering for votes. The writing is on the wall, but the powers that be just don't care. Consequently, terrorism will continue, both in Iraq, and in Europe and the United States.

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