CIA: Bush Policy Spreads Terrorism

The CIA and the US State Department now acknowledge that President Bush's invasion of Iraq has created an anti-US movement in the Islamic world where none had existed before.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was in disarray and unable to mount a credible threat to American interests. Now, because of President Bush's invasion of Iraq, scores of militant Islamic groups are joining the al-Qaida network to strike American targets. These small militant groups, once focused on exclusively on overthrowing their local governments, "have been caught by bin Laden's vision, and poisoned by it . . . they will now look at the U.S., Israel and the Saudis as targets," a senior intelligence official said last week.

J. Cofer Black, the State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, and a former head of the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center, gave the same message to a House International Relations subcommittee last Thursday, saying that bin Laden's "virulent anti-American rhetoric . . . has been picked up by a number of Islamic extremist movements which exist around the globe."

The result, according to the senior intelligence analyst, is that the U.S. war on terrorism after Iraq "may transition from defeating a group to fighting a movement." Black said the spread of bin Laden's ideology "greatly complicates our task in stamping out al Qaeda and poses a threat in its own right for the foreseeable future." He described "scores" of extremist groups such as Jemaah Islamiah that have "gravitated to al Qaeda in recent years where before such linkages did not exist."

"It would be fair to say that we are seeing greater cooperation between al Qaeda and smaller Islamic extremist groups as well as even more localized organizations," Black said.

In addition, the "Sunni Triangle" in Iraq is now being used as a training ground for international terrorism. Foreign Islamic jihadists are infiltrating the area to test themselves against US forces occupying Iraq. "We will contain and defeat them in Iraq," Black said, "but they will create a new Rolodex of fellow jihadists and people with whom they can work in the [Persian] Gulf in the future."

I don't even know what to say about this, it's so disheartening. It confirms what many in the United States, and most people in the rest of the world believed would happen if President Bush invaded Iraq without UN backing. Only God and President Bush alone know why he committed our nation to a unilateral invasion. The reasons changed weekly and are still undergoing revisions, and at this point he, himself may not even remember.

Whatever the reasons, President Bush's foreign policy has created a vast anti-American movement in the world, where none existed before. And before we come out the other side of this, countless American soldiers and citizens will pay for Bush's Iraq screw-up with their lives.