The War of Unintended Consequences

Here he must mean "hypothesis" in the same sense that some conservatives refer to evolution as a mere "theory." There was nothing hypothetical about the Madrid bombers' fixation on Iraq. With glee, they watched videos of Spanish intelligence officers being murdered in Iraq and declared that Spain must pay for supporting the U.S. military campaign. Bouyeri slit the throat of his already dead victim in emulation of the decapitation videos from Iraq. The London bombers' obsession with the Iraq war has been amply documented by the press; prebombing assessments by the United Kingdom's Joint Terrorism Analysis Center had warned that "events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK."

The appearance of so many self-starters is just one of the consequences of the war in Iraq. Our book examines other results, such as the spread of Iraqi bomb-making technology to Saudi Arabia, the recrudescence of Islamism in Syria, the sudden eruption of Islamist violence in Kuwait and Qatar, and attacks on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Aqaba. In short, the Iraq war has not just revived a jihad that had lost momentum after the Taliban were toppled; it has also turbocharged it.

The U.S. intelligence community and its partners around the world are now justifiably worried about veterans of the insurgency in Iraq returning to their home countries to carry out attacks. In February 2005, CIA Director Porter Goss told a Senate panel that those "who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focused on acts of urban terrorism." Yet Falkenrath considers this scenario unlikely; in his view, "The publicly available evidence suggests that for now, at least, Iraq is more of a terrorist graveyard than a breeding ground: a bloody, terrible, but faraway free-fire zone to which surviving members of al Qaeda and its allies have traveled to fight the United States and its allies."

He is wrong, for multiple reasons. first, a careful reader of The Next Attack would have noted that the book cites studies by the Israeli terrorism expert Reuven Paz and the Saudi security analyst Nawaf Obaid demonstrating that the foreign fighters are overwhelmingly not "surviving members of al Qaeda and its allies," but rather young Muslims with no background in Islamist activism. No one, not even Falkenrath, can know how many of them are getting killed, much less claim that Iraq is turning into "a terrorist graveyard." Second, we argue that plenty of attention is being paid to foreign jihadists but not enough is being paid to the emergence of an Iraqi jihadist movement. That movement did not exist before the invasion, and its emergence is a worrisome development. (Just days after the book's publication, Iraqis bombed three hotels in Amman, Jordan.) The ranks of Ansar al-Sunna, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers probably now include several thousand Iraqi terrorists.

The Next Attack explains why U.S. activity in Iraq has galvanized some Muslims. Several developments have come together to make this happen: the emergence of a new umma -- the transnational community of Muslims -- thanks to the Internet, the global crisis of Muslim clerical authority, and the worsening of the United States' image in the Muslim world. Our discussion of how decades of Islamization have bred greater religious (rather than ethnic or national) self-identification synthesizes new scholarship by researchers such as Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel, and Farhad Khosrokhavar. To Falkenrath, however, "the evidence presented ... is flimsy." He accuses us of supplying only one poll to prove our case. In fact, we refer to other polls showing, for example, that 41 percent of Muslims under the age of 35 in the United Kingdom define themselves as solely Muslim rather than as both British and Muslim. In France, the number of Muslims who identify themselves as "believing and practicing" increased by 25 percent between 1994 and 2001.

Falkenrath derides our assessment that "America's image in the Muslim world has never been more battered" and that the jihadist worldview is making inroads. To reflect the latest findings, we cite, as Falkenrath notes, a poll by the Pew Research Center reporting a slight uptick in the United States' popularity. But the poll's text clearly indicates that these changes occurred in outlier countries: Lebanon, which has a large Christian population; Morocco, historically more pro-Western than most Muslim countries; and Jordan, where the United States' rating could hardly have gotten worse after the 2004 poll, which found that 98 percent of Jordanians disapproved of the United States. (Meanwhile, support for both bin Laden and suicide bombings has increased in Jordan.) Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, testified before Congress last November that public opinion about the United States in the Muslim world remains negative because of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and because "the ongoing conflict in Iraq continues to fuel anti-Americanism." "The war on terrorism is perceived negatively in the region," he said. "And the perception that the United States acts unilaterally in foreign policy is a big negative not only in the Mideast but around the world."