Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank have a new piece posted at Mother Jones claiming that “The Iraq Effect” has increased terrorism sevenfold worldwide. It’s already been picked up by the HuffPo and will likely burble its way through the Left part of the blogosphere after making Memeorandum.
As my first guest-posts here—“Are Terrorists Doritos?” and “Are Terrorists Doritos? (Part 2… Hey!)”—are on this very topic, it is worth briefly noting how unimpressive the Bergen-Cruickshank piece really is.
In my “Part 2,” I reviewed data compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and released in conjunction with the annual State Department Country Reports on Terrorism to note that—excluding Iraq—high fatality terror attacks actually decreased in 2005—the most recent year for which there was data. I also noted that:
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.
Do Bergen and Cruickshank have anything to add to this? Here’s their big picture:
Our study shows that the Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.
Note that last bit—excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, that sevenfold increase drops to 35 percent.
Their numbers are drawn from the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database; the authors only included attacks that caused at least one fatality and were attributed by RAND to a known jihadist group. The authors claim this will tend to understate the number of terror attacks, but it is a notably broader definition than used by the NCTC. I also note that my “Part 2” discusses the inherent problems and limitations of various methodologies for classifying attacks.
Bergen and Cruickshank add the following caveat, almost in passing:
Of course, just because jihadist terrorism has risen in the period after the invasion of Iraq, it does not follow that events in Iraq itself caused the change. For example, a rise in attacks in the Kashmir conflict and the Chechen separatist war against Russian forces may have nothing to do with the war in Iraq.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the latter, but attacks in the Kashmir conflict probably have nothing to do with the war in Iraq. And what Bergen and Cruickshank do not mention is that, according to the NCTC, India was the site of more than 12 percent of all terrorist attacks worldwide in 2005, and home to more terrorism-related fatalities than any other nation except Iraq. Lumping India in their results probably accounts for a decent chunk of that remaining 35 percent increase.
Indeed, Bergen and Cruickshank tacitly admit as much:
But the most direct test of The Iraq Effect–whether the United States and its allies have suffered more jihadist terrorism after the invasion than before–shows that the rate of jihadist attacks on Western interests and citizens around the world (outside of Afghanistan and Iraq) has risen by a quarter, from 7.2 to 9 a year, while the yearly fatality rate in these attacks has increased by 4 percent from 191 to 198.
There you have it. Using a broad definition of terror attacks, the increase in fatalities from jihadist attacks on Western interests and citizens around the world was seven people annually.
That’s some “Iraq Effect.”
mmmmmm…
that was delicious. when’s desert?
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe after mountains.
Mountains of CHOCOLATE, that is!
Uh, is it just me, or does clicking the “read the rest” link just send you to the comments?
God damn it. First Jeff and his endless teases of shaven Britney Spears pics and now entire posts disappear.
Who’s running this fucking asylum, anyway?
My pre-alphie appearance non-point:
Do you know how many bags of Doritos 600,000 billion can buy?
Don’t fight back! It’ll only make them more angry.
They love it when you kill them.
I’m about to release another study of this phenomenon:
Shortly after 9-11, when most of the country, including the anti-war crowd, supported the President, terrorist attacks fell to an ALL TIME LOW.
When CODEPINK.ORG and MOVEON.ORG were registered as domains, terrorism shot up seven-fold.
Thus, there is a direct link between terrorist acts and the anti-war movement that will be irrefutably evident.
You know, I know this is going to sound crazy, but is it possible that the increase in terror attacks is due to terrorists?
BECAUSE OF THE JIHAD!
BECAUSE OF THE POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC!!!
Yeah, huh.
Does it occur to these idjits that the places in the world where, at least according to media reporting, the bulk of the increases are?
India, Thailand, Singapore.
Countries in which there is a non-AQ related Islamist insurgency going on, with the stated goal of undermining or overthrowing local (and in some cases national) governments and replacing them with shari’a.
TW: It doesn’t matter where these Islamists are, people61 are in danger.
Mother Jones is the NEW New Testament. Turn the other corpse baby.
When Clint Eastwood was interviewed about his movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” he said “War is a futile exercise at best.”
It’s just more of the theme from the amoral Left this Iraq Effect halps promulgate – Resistance is futile and if you DO try and resist, YOU are the problem.
In the six years after the Polish Army began to fight the invading German forces in 1939, deaths resulting from World War increased from 0 to about 60,000,000.
Damn those Polacks!
I just ran75 with that to fulfil the Godwin Obligation.
Not all Doritos are terrorists (particularly the Cool Ranch), but all terrorists are Doritos.
The media likes the lens of “creating terrorists.” It helps them sidestep discussion of terrorism as an ideology that they help promulgate, and focus on angry brown people, with which they are very comfortable.
It helps to think all those brown people live in squalor because they don’t have any more. As it is convenient to think all those brown people hate us because we do not give them any more.
Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. are wealthy and civilized because we built everything on the backs of brown/purple/red/yellow/black/periwinkle-skinned slaves. They built this world, we just live in it!
Oh, and how do these ninnies deal with immunization shots? Those hurt, man!
You’d be glad to know that this piece was read almost in its entirety on CSPAN morning show.
Let me suggest another thesis that Mr. Bergen
should be aware, in light of his opening to
his “Holy War” book, where he visited the old
British cementary in Peshawar, where veterans
of the NorthWest Frontier came to rest in peace.
The Taliban, and Al Queda arose from splinter factions of the Peshawar Circle,(Sheik Younis) in the first case, Hekmatyar and Abdur Raisul Sayyaf)
in a predominantly secular, at least partially urbanized nation like Afghanistan. People like Mullah Omar, and Zawahiri, want to recreate the
pattern in similar nations like Iraq, destroying
schools, mosques, hospitals, turning man against
man, recruiting the victims of their own crimes
to their cause. They are helped by the no-nothing
drum beat about the front lines in the war, that begins with the Daily Mail, & USA today, to the Observer and the NY Times, all the way over to the
Al Jazeeras and the Al Queda media company. London
bombers didn’t go to Iraq, they went ot Pakistan,
the Madrid bombers didn’t come from there either,
(as EJ Epstein points out, the network’s elements
were essentially in place even before 9/11. The
Indian bombers, mostly rise out of the HUM nad Lashkar et Toiba, also from Pakistan, the Casablanca bombings, happened before Iraq, Beslan
arises out of the centuries long Chechen quagmire,
The London “baby bottle” bombers rise from that
same atmosphere.