How To Lose The War On Terror For Dummies

While the reasons for invading Iraq were evaporating as fast as water on the June Iraqi sand we experienced another Mission Accomplished moment. Yes folks Iraq was finally Free. Well, not really, the US pretty much still controls everything, is responsible for security and will decide who can and can't run for office in the Free elections to be held in January, but those are just minor details.

Update
Juan Cole discusses the hand over.

So, we are winning the "War on Terror", right? Peter Bergen in Mother Jones does a pretty good job of laying out why we are not.

"In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement—a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism."

The fact that the Iraq War has actually made the US less safe from terrorism is starting to show up in polling data. 55% of those polled recently think that the invasion of Iraq is creating more terrorists.

It's unfortunate that the Bush Administration has managed to alienate most of our long term allies, but as Bergen says it's very dangerous that the Iraq war alienated the moderate Muslim world.

"The damage to U.S. interests is hard to overestimate. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan academic who is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on Al Qaeda, points out that "sadness and anger about Iraq, even among moderate Muslims, is being harnessed and exploited by terrorist and extremist groups worldwide to grow in strength, size, and influence." Similarly, Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says the Iraq war "accelerated terrorism" by "metastasizing" Al Qaeda. Today, Al Qaeda is more than the narrowly defined group that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001; it is a growing global movement that has been energized by the war in Iraq".