A Knight in Dragonland

There is an article in the New York Times regarding the National Intelligence Assessment on the state of global terrorism. The emphasis present throughout this post is my own.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

For those of you not familiar with the medical term “metastasis”, I’ll explain. Metastasis is the process whereby a primary cancer mutates and evolves to have the ability to spread from its site of origin to disparate sites. For example, prostate cancer often spreads to the bone and breast cancer to the lung & brain. Most of the time, the presence of metastasis can be easily translated into the following prognosis – you’re fucked.

Let’s continue, shall we?

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,� cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,� said one American intelligence official.

Hmmmmm. Wow. Never would have expected that. I’m glad that our national intelligence agencies can come up with an idea that’s glaringly obvious to a large portion of the general public. Of course, as usual, the administration tried to smother the facts:

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Reading between the lines of the first two statements that I emphasized, I give a hearty “Feh!” to the last line that I highlighted. But wait, there’s more … it just keeps getting “better”:

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

And this …

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+� to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.�

Thank you, President Bush & company, for taking the unity inspired by the attacks of 9/11 and squandering it in an Iraqi hellhole, making the world a much more dangerous place for my children.