Is war in Iraq boon to terror recruitment?

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 24, 2006 | by Karen DeYoung Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- The war in Iraq has become the primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers are increasing faster than the United States and its allies are eliminating the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. Rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, it concludes that the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said Saturday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

The NIE, whose contents were first reported by the New York Times, coincides with public statements by senior intelligence officials describing a different kind of conflict than the one outlined by President Bush in a series of recent speeches marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Together with our coalition partners," Bush said in an address earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America, "we've removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they're carried out. We're on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we'll accept nothing less than complete victory."

But the battlefronts intelligence analysts depict are far more impenetrable and difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the standard tools of warfare.

Although intelligence officials agree that the United States has seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaida and disrupted its ability to plan and direct major operations, radical Islam has spread and decentralized.

Many of the new cells, the NIE concludes, have no connection to any central structure and arose independently. They communicate only among themselves and derive their inspiration, ideology and tactics from the more than 5,000 radical Islamic Web sites. They spread the message that the Iraq war is a Western attempt to conquer Islam by first occupying Iraq and establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East.

The April NIE, titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," does not offer policy prescriptions.

"What these guys at NIC are supposed to do is to lay it out in very clear, understandable terms," said the intelligence official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. "It's not the role of the NIC to offer recommendations." Rather, it "basically states the conditions" as the intelligence community sees them, he said.

The National Intelligence Council is tasked with providing long- term assessments of strategic issues for the president and senior policymakers in the form of National Intelligence Estimates. Composed of current and former senior intelligence and national security officials, it is currently chaired by Thomas Fingar, the former head of the State Department's intelligence bureau and now deputy for analysis to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

An NIE drawn up in the fall of 2002 concluded that Iraq had "continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs," possessed stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." All of those judgments, which provided the political and national security underpinnings for the Iraq invasion, turned out to be false.

As part of the intelligence reforms enacted in 2004, control of the NIC was transferred from the CIA director to Negroponte's newly created office, with a mandate to cast a wider net for information throughout the 16-agency intelligence community and among non- governmental experts.

Negroponte announced last month that the council would begin drafting a new NIE on Iraq in response to a request from the Senate intelligence committee. That estimate is still in the early planning stages, intelligence officials said Saturday. But while the April NIE does not deal specifically with conditions in Iraq, many of its judgments emphasize the influence of the Iraqi war over the spread of global terrorism.

According to officials familiar with the document, it describes the situation in Iraq as promoting the spread of radical Islam by providing a focal point with constant reinforcement of an anti- American message for disaffected Muslims. The Web sites provide a narrative of a war with frequent victories for the insurgents and describe an occupation that they say regularly targets Islam and its adherents. They also distribute increasingly frequent and sophisticated messages from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Muslims wherever they are to take up arms against the "Crusaders" on behalf of Iraq.