You didn't read it. 'The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created,' said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Two new studies, one by the Saudi government and one by an Israeli think tank, which "painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States" have found that most foreign fighters in Iraq were not terrorists before the Iraq war, but were "radicalized by the war itself." The Boston Globe reported on Sunday that the studies "cast doubt" on claims by President Bush that terrorists have "seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the 'central front' in a battle against the United States."
However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.
A separate Israeli analysis [by Global Research in International Affairs] of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, 'the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq.'
The Globe also reports that American intelligence officials and terrorism experts have a very similar picture of these fighters: that prior to the Iraq war, they were not extremists who wanted to attack the US in an Al Qaeda-like manner, but "are part of a new generation of terrorists responding to calls to defend their fellow Muslims from 'crusaders and 'infidels.' "
'The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created,' said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. |
