Friday, March 04, 2005
Analyst: Iraq is a 'beacon'for terrorists
DAVOS, Switzerland - The war in Iraq has become a homing beacon for Islamic militancy, threatening to destabilize neighboring countries and embolden terrorists to attack elsewhere, a senior RAND Corp. analyst told business and political elites at the World Economic Forum yesterday.
The head of Human Rights Watch echoed that sentiment, warning high-profile abuse scandals such as Abu Ghraib have become the "recruitment poster"for terrorists around the globe.
"In terms of perception, we've already lost the war," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst who heads the Washington office of RAND Corp., a think-tank known for its problem-solving research. "I believe that a cult of the insurgent has emerged from Iraq."
Hoffman did not say whether he thought the 2003 invasion was justified, but did criticize the Bush administration for failing to consider it's consequences.
"Our failure there was to not anticipate the repercussions and the blowback that Iraq could bring, and the fact that Iraq would become a clarion call for the Islamist cause," Hoffman said.
He said the success of the insurgency has shown potential terrorists everywhere how best to defeat a superpower. That, he added, will come back to haunt the West.
"The insurgents have been able to inflict a degree of pain on the United States military, the most vaunted military in the world, that Saddam Hussein's conventional forces couldn't have achieved,"Hoffman said. "The foreign jihadists who have come to Iraq, when this ends, are going to go back to their own countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, but also Europe. . . . These people are going to have been trained in urban terrorism."...
..."The pictures from Abu Ghraib have become the recruitment posters for terrorists around the world," said Roth, referring to photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American jailers.
He said the scandal "was not an aberration . . . Abu Ghraib was the predictable consequence of policy decisions taken at senior levels of the Bush administration." ...
