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A boost for Osama

Richard Norton-Taylor

It is absurd for our leaders to go on denying that the Iraq invasion increased the terrorist threat.

A MONTH before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair was privately warned by his top intelligence advisers that an invasion would increase the terrorist threat against Britain. The U.K.'s joint intelligence committee (JIC) advised him in February 2003 that "Al-Qaeda and associated groups continue to represent by far the greatest threat to western interests and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq."

The JIC would have provided a better service to the British public and the country's national interest had it not connived in the misleading intelligence dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons programme and allowed Mr. Blair to persuade MPs and military chiefs to go to war.

Now, more than three and a half years later, in their first official assessment of global terrorism since the invasion of Iraq, 16 separate U.S. intelligence agencies have agreed what was obvious then. Their National Intelligence Estimate, leaked last weekend, says the Iraq invasion has indeed increased the terrorist threat by encouraging the spread of Islamic radicalism across the world.

The CIA also admitted recently what its more competent officers had known from the start: there never was any link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. It is a sad irony that, having exaggerated the influence of Osama bin Laden's network, by their actions the U.S. and Britain have succeeded in increasing it.

Its influence is held up by governments as a useful tool to frighten the public and promote their anti-terrorist agenda. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and would-be successor to Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was at it on Monday. In his speech to the Labour party conference, echoing Bush-Blair rhetoric, he praised the Prime Minister for realising that "no one can be neutral in the fight against terrorism." Earlier, on BBC radio, Mr. Brown endorsed what he called "the liberation of Iraq" and spoke of a "a new generation of Al-Qaeda terrorists."

Mr. Brown has clearly done his homework — there are few more damaging attacks that can be made against a prospective Prime Minister than to say he is soft on security. To be fair, he did also make the point that the battle against Islamist extremism cannot be fought by military or police measures alone and that it was a battle for hearts and minds.

That battle is not being won. There is no doubt that Al-Qaeda as a hierarchical organisation has been weakened by the capture and killing of some of its leaders in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Its communications and finances are more vulnerable to disruption as the result of action by national counter-terrorist agencies.

Al-Qaeda may be losing the support of most Arabs in the Middle East, as Mr. Azzam suggests. But by pointing to the dangers it poses, and the continuing terrorist threat, Ministers are inadvertently presenting it with a huge propaganda success, whatever its actual influence on the ground. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Richard Norton-Taylor is security affairs editor of The Guardian.)

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