The war on terror that creates the preconditions for more terror

A bunch of articles have popped up in the past few days warning of Al Qaeda's resurgence.

Most of the pieces link the recent spate of bombings in Turkey and Saudi Arabia with a new strategy that, according to the LA Times, "illustrates that Al Qaeda has survived by mutating into a more decentralized network relying on local allies to launch more frequent attacks on varied targets." In other words, the group is now more into franchising than carrying out its own operations.

Time Magazine elaborates:

The paradox of al-Qaeda in the two years since 9/11 has been that while the efforts of U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have battered its core transnational networks, al-Qaeda as a movement or an idea — as distinct from a narrow clandestine organizational network — has actually grown. Analysts believe the international intelligence and security cooperation has severely impeded al-Qaeda's ability to conduct highly sophisticated transnational terror operations such as the attacks in New York and Washington, but that Bin Laden's movement has adapted by morphing into a far more decentralized entity relying principally on the structures and energies of pre-existing local groups ideologically in synch with al-Qaeda.

Thus, Dave Montgomery and Warren P. Strobel of Knight Ridder Newspapers warn that the group "is as lethal as ever, despite the U.S.-led war on terrorism. The organization essentially is reinventing itself to compensate for losses in its ranks."

Now, where does Iraq fit into this scenario? Montgomery and Strobel report that, to correspond with this reorganization, "the United States has diverted more than half the manpower and technology that had been targeted on al-Qaida to the war in Iraq."

Furthermore, Germany's foreign spy chief has warned that "Anti-American and anti-Western sentiment is growing out of anger at the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," which Al Qaeda is exploiting to help fill its ranks. He's not yelling at the wind, either. Recall the Pew Center poll from a few months ago, "Views of a Changing World 2003," which found that Anti-American sentiment went through the roof over the past year. As one might suspect, the animosity is greatest in the Muslim world.

The war on terror, in short, is breeding more terrorists and more people sympathetic to Al Qaeda's aims. Bush can trumpet the point that the US is hunting down and killing "evil-doers," but the simple fact is that US policy, rather than "draining the swamp" of discontent, is filling it to the point of overflow.