A lede from Mark Mazetti’s story in Sunday’s New York Times (via the IHT, so you don’t have to register):

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The story, also picked up by Karen DeYoung for the Washington Post, became the usual political fodder. As it turns out, I had just posted a short piece here Friday on the same subject, though I lack access to the NIE. Of course, if you read Mark Mazetti’s NYT article, you will discover he has not read it, either:

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

I tend to be a little suspicious of such pieces. For example, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post did the same type of story regarding a classified report on the situation in Anbar province. Later, we learn that Bill Roggio’s sources in the military and intelligence who have actually seen the entire report are angry over the media’s characterization of the report. Mr. Mazetti’s portrayal of the story raises questions also, which I will address along the way.

For the sake of argument, I will take the NYT story largely at face value. After you read my initial entry, you can follow the jump to learn why the story may be good news. I’ll wait for you to come back.

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[shuffles feet, whistles to self]

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[briefly thinks of the fugly Barbra Streisand braless in a translucent dress; immediately blots out that thought with thoughts of Jessica Biel kissing a woman and her Gene Simmons-length tongue.]

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Ready?

The main problem with my initial entry is shared by the NYT and WaPo pieces, as well as the reports mentioned in both (except possibly the NIE).  That problem is the lack of hard data to support or undermine claims of increased terrorism that can be attributed to the Iraq campaign. 

The statements of those claiming responsibility for terror attacks—mentioned in the WaPo story as part of what the intell community considered—is weak evidence at best.  When OBL’s big grievance was US troops based in Saudi Arabia, he attacked them in Yemen and Somalia. The recently released AQ tape of OBL with two of the 9/11 bombers has the latter saying that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya. The US invasion of Afghanistan would have sufficed as the grievance du jour, even assuming for the sake of argument that AQ or Zarqawi would not simply have started up again elsewhere, for any pursuit would also constitute a grievance in the mind of the jihadi.

It turns out that not only does such numerical data exist, but it is also in the public domain.  The data is compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and released in conjunction with the annual State Department Country Reports on Terrorism.  It also turns out that Washington Post. Interestingly, Mazetti focused his story on the soaring number of insurgent attacks on civilians in Iraq, whereas DeYoung focused on a “nearly fourfold” increase in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2005.

What the Mazetti and DeYoung stories shared in common was burying the fact that the 2004 report was assembled under a narrower statutory definition of terrorism, limited to attacks involving citizens or territory of more than one country.  That fact is inconvenient to someone who wants to paint the most dire picture possible.

Another fact—buried by DeYoung and omitted by Mazetti—is that in July 2005, NCTC released revised 2004 figures compiled under the new definition.  What’s more, they made available a graphic presentation of the data. However, it’s in Adobe Acrobat format, so I present here the most significant of the NCTC charts:

It should be noted that the 2004 data was still not directly comparable to the 2005 data.  It should also be noted that the NCTC itself notes the limitations of its current methodology. I would wager that the data compiled by the intell agencies—assuming it is different from the NCTC data—would be subject to many of the same limitations.  Nevertheless, it would appear that the alleged increase in serious terror attacks worldwide is really an increase in serious terror attacks carried out in Iraq.

Here, the critics of the Bush Administration want to have their red velvet cake and eat it, too.  After all, the critics often take issue with the characterization of such attacks as terror attacks.  Indeed, Reuters refuses to call those committing such attacks terrorists, preferring to label them as “insurgents” or “militants.” Yet the same attacks morph into terror attacks when it is time to argue that Iraq has become the world’s premiere terror training camp.

As I noted in the initial entry, the course of the Iraq campaign has largely been one of the jihadis’ failure to score any significant military victories against the Coalition, causing them to turn to a strategy of stoking sectarian violence.  However, as also noted previously, this sectarian violence was almost inevitable, even following a complete military success.  Moreover, the level of sectarian violence is only now reaching the average level of such violence during the latter decades of Saddam’s reign of terror against the Shia and Kurds.  It is far from clear that sectarian violence perpetrated by the Shia and Kurds will lead to these groups taking up jihad against the US, given that they are the chief beneficiaries of our current policy.  Nor is it clear that the Sunni population now being protected by Coalition forces from the full force of these revenge killings will be keen to do so, though this seems at least more plausible—assuming any significant number of Sunni insurgents of a jihadi bent actually survive the current situation.

Thus, we are left to examine the contingent of foreign jihadis entering Iraq to commit acts of terror.  On this point we have a July 14, 2006 briefing from Colonel Sean B. MacFarland, Commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armor Division in Iraq, describing the nature of the enemy generally:

You have the foreign fighter, al Qaeda guys.  They’re very few in number, although as far as we can tell, they constitute about 100 percent of the suicide bombers.  Sometimes it’s tough to tell after a suicide bombing what exactly the suicide guy’s nationality was, for obvious reasons, but when we can tell, they tend to be foreign fighters.

Then you have your local AQ sympathizers, but they’re also relatively small in number, but they are a very lethal part of the insurgency here.

And then the vast majority are either the rejectionists, who reject the government of Iraq for various either ethnic or political reasons; or you have just the organized criminal element that’s out there.

So the number of jihadis and AQ sympathizers is small.  And it does not appear that the Sunnis go in for suicide bombing.

There is also the Brookings Institute’s Iraq Index (Acrobat format), which carries estimates that foreign fighters make up somewhere between 800-2,000 of the estimated 20,000+ strong insurgency.

As noted in my prior entry, it is estimated that as many as 80,000 foot soldiers trained at Al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan probably returned to their homes in Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian countries.  Thus, the notion that there may be, in any given month, 2,000 jihadis getting on-the-job training in Iraq does not suggest that the terrorists are “making more” than the Coalition is able to introduce to Paradise.  Moreover, the public opinion polls cited in my prior entry suggest that US policy is not turning the entire region into a petrie dish for the jihadi ideology.

There remains the problem of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda but without a direct connection to OBL or his top lieutenants.  There is also the fact that cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.  But it should be considered that the bottomless pit of jihadi grievences would present these problems regardless of whether the US invaded Iraq.  Moreover, the NCTC data tends to suggest that they have yet to make a meaningful impact on the war.

As with my initial entry, I note that the inherent problem of compiling, let alone analyzing data on this subject makes firm conclusions difficult.  We have no way of actually knowing whether US policy helped create more terrorists than any of the alternative policies.  Had the US not invaded Afghanistan, the US might have been seen as “the weak horse” again, encouraging jihadi recruitment.  Had the US stopped with Afghanistan—and perhaps even achieved a better result, as some like to believe—it could have been seen as a “humiliation” and a new grievance du jour. Indeed, a decisive US victory or loss in Iraq may have the same effects.  I merely set the data out for people to ponder and discuss.