Intelligence report says war spawns terror

WASHINGTON – The war in Iraq has become the primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers are increasing faster than the United States and its allies are eliminating the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the “centrality” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ensuing insurgency as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. Rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, it concludes, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

“It’s a very candid assessment,” said one intelligence official of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the 2003 invasion. “It’s stating the obvious.”

The NIE, whose contents were first reported by the New York Times, joins public statements by senior intelligence officials in describing a different kind of conflict than the one outlined over the past month by President Bush in a series of speeches marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“Together with our coalition partners,” Bush said in an address earlier this month to the Military Officers Association of America, “we’ve removed terrorist sanctuaries, disrupted their finances, killed and captured key operatives, broken up terrorist cells in America and other nations, and stopped new attacks before they’re carried out. We’re on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”

But the battlefronts intelligence analysts describe are difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the standard tools of warfare.

Although intelligence officials agree that the United States has seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaida and disrupted its ability to plan and direct major operations, radical Islam has spread and decentralized.

Many of the new cells, the NIE concludes, have no connection to any central structure and arose independently. They communicate only among themselves and derive their inspiration and their ideology from the more than 5,000 radical Islamic Web sites. They are motivated by what those sites describe as a Western attempt to occupy Iraq and establish a permanent presence in the Middle East.

The sites announce regular victories by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. military forces and describe an occupation that they say regularly targets Islam and its adherents. They also distribute increasingly frequent and sophisticated messages from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging disaffected Muslims to take up arms against the “Crusaders” on behalf of Iraq.

The NIE describes the war in Iraq as reinforcing the diffusion of radical Islam through the Internet and the media outlets that closely track insurgent assaults.

Many of the classified documents’ conclusions were outlined in April by Gen. Michael Hayden, then-deputy to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. In a sober and comprehensive address to an armed-forces group in Texas – which intelligence officials said drew heavily from the NIE judgments – Hayden warned that if current trends continue, “threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide.”