In an email I got this evening, here’s how Peter Bergen introduced the new article he’s written with Paul Cruickshank on Iraq and Jihadist terrorism …
Paul Cruickshank of NYU’s Center on Law and Security and I coauthored this attached study which we believe is the first attempt to measure the effect of the Iraq war on jihadist terrorism. The headline– a sevenfold increase in jihadist terrorist attacks since the beginning of the Iraq war compared to the period after the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of iraq in March 2003. Much of that increase is accounted by jihadist terror attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we also found enormous increases in the Arab world outside Iraq and some real increases in attacks against US NATO allies. The only good news was in Southeast Asia where there was a 67% drop, but that had little to do with events in Iraq.
Here’s the article.
If you approach the Iraq War in common sense terms rather than as an exercise in ideological grandiosity and historical narcissicism, the results are not surprising. Grim, but not surprising.
