New Terror Study

Peter Bergen, working with Paul Cruickshank, has recently released a new study about post-9/11 terrorism rates. Their main finding:

The rate of fatal terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups, and the number of civilians killed in those attacks, has risen sharply since the invasion of Iraq. Comparing the period before the war (Sept. 12, 2001, to March 20, 2003) and the period since, there has been a 607% rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks - and a 237% jump in the fatality rate.

The authors relied upon data from the Rand Corp. and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.

Much of this violence is in Afghanistan and Iraq -- fight them there, so "we" don't have to fight them here, right? Well, that's not a complete explanation:

even after excluding these two hot spots, there has been a 35% rise in the number of terrorist attacks globally and a 25% increase in attacks on Western targets....

This has particularly been the case in the Arab world, whose countries excluding Iraq have seen 783% more fatalities from jihadist terrorism since the U.S. invasion....

Excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, we see a 150% increase globally in the rate of suicide attacks by jihadist groups since the war began.

The authors, who are fellows at NYU's Center on Law and Security, also found evidence of so-called "blowback" attacks in Saudi Arabia, France and Jordan. Those are attacks perpetrated by veterans of the Iraq insurgency.

The study does not include violence by Palestinian extremists. These are acts of violence by al Qaeda-inspired Sunni extremists.

Good news: Not counting civilian contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan, only 18 American civilians have been terror victims since the start of the Iraq war.

The full study results are in the March/April Mother Jones. There's plenty more there, including this nugget about the country that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11:

Mohammed Hafez, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, in a study of the 101 identified suicide attackers in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2006, found that more than 40 percent were Saudi....

The Israeli researcher Reuven Paz, using information posted on Al Qaeda-linked websites between October 2004 and March 2005, found that of the 33 suicide attacks listed, 23 were conducted by Saudis, and only 1 by an Iraqi. Similarly, in June 2005 the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute of Washington, D.C. found by tracking both jihadist websites and media reports that of the 199 Sunni extremists who had died in Iraq either in suicide attacks or in action against Coalition or Iraqi forces, 104 were from Saudi Arabia and only 21 from Iraq.

Read the entire article at MJ.

Hat tip: AlterNet also has a story about this study: "The War on Terror Is the Leading Cause of Terrorism."


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"Open University of Jihad"

Over the past decade, I've written a couple of book chapters about the use of the internet by transnational political activists. Environment, human rights, and peace organizations, for example, utilize the internet to communicate instantly with thousands of like-minded people around the world. Technology helps overcome resource mobilization costs for social movements.

This use of the web generally helps progressive organizations promote their causes, typically in the face of well-funded corporate and national political opponents.

Of course, the technology has a dark side as well -- and this has been apparent, literally, since 9/11.

Indeed, terrorist use of the internet seems to be booming. Today's Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article by reporter Dan Murphy, "Iraq, Internet fuel growth of global jihad."

"The world is just starting to understand the real influence of the Internet as an open university of jihad,'' says Reuven Paz, the head of the Project for the Research of Islamic Movements in Israel. "Like the attacks in Madrid, the bombings in London should be viewed as an export of the war in Iraq to Europe, based on local adherents of global jihad rather than on volunteers from the heart of the Arab world."

I've already discussed the role of the Iraq war in dispersing global terror; this time, I'm interested in the additional role of the 'net and other mass media communications:

the confluence of America's decision to invade Iraq and new communication technologies that has created the most powerful machine for recruiting new terrorists in history, says Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who has tracked jihadi websites since the late 1990s.

Terror expert Peter Bergen wrote last year that the web emerged as the main terror home base before the Iraq war began:

To the extent that Al Qaeda -- "the base" in Arabic -- has a new base, it is, to a surprising degree, on the web. According to a U.S. government contractor who specializes in analyzing jihadist chat rooms and websites, web traffic was "tremendously energized" in the period before the Iraq war.

The security experts discussing this issue recognize the virtues of the internet: speed, wide distribution and low cost. Back to Murphy's story:

Insurgent[s] in "martyrdom operations" appear on websites within days of attacks in Iraq, and the latest calls to carry jihad to Western capitals from the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's No. 2 and Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, spread around the globe within minutes.

"Whatever framework we use to talk about Iraq - take Afghanistan for instance - it's whatever happened there, but on steroids,'' says Toby Craig Jones, a political scientist and analyst of events in Saudi Arabia for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. "It seems to be proceeding much more quickly this time."

The Bush administration often worries publicly about the effect of Aljazeera TV broadcasts on "the Arab street," and I'm confident that the CIA is watching back-alley jihadist blogs and websites, but it's not clear to me that even close scrutiny of the communication outlets can do much to stop future attacks.

In the case of the London bombs, intelligence and government officials were apparently taken by surprise because they did not detect an increase in terror "chatter" prior to the attacks.

Unfortunately, the web may be so vast that jihadists will remain at least a step ahead of those trying to monitor their activities.

Osama endorses Bush

Literally, of course, Osama bin Laden didn't endorse the President. But he didn't endorse Kerry either and the talking heads on TV (at least some I've seen on CNN and MSNBC, save Keith Olbermann) act as if he did.

It is ridiculous.

OBL is a terrorist and is obviously still at-large. If he appeared in the tape (the CIA apparently thinks it was him) and is as healthy as he looks, then three plus years after September 11, 2001, OBL does not seem to be too much the worse for the wear.

Sometime in 2002, of course, George W. Bush decided to turn the war on terror away from Osama bin Laden and focus on Iraq. Real resources were diverted, including Arabic speakers, special forces, spying technology, etc.

In an interview that year, the President famously said:

I truly am not that concerned about him [OBL]. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became -- we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore.

Obviously, there's no way of knowing with certainty whether the US could have captured and killed OBL by now with more effort; yet, it is fairly clear that George W. Bush is fixated on state sponsorship of terror and seems to ignore the reality of non-state networks of terrorists.

Moreover, it is true that the US thought OBL was at Tora Bora in December 2001. And journalist Peter Bergen points out that the US military, as John Kerry says, didn't take it seriously enough and "outsourced" his capture:

Sadly, there were probably more American journalists at the battle of Tora Bora than there were US troops. And in that sense, Sen. Kerry's charge that Tora Bora was a missed opportunity to bring bin Laden to justice isn't "garbage", but an accurate reflection of the historical record.

So bin Laden escaped when the US had a serious chance to get him, right at the beginning of the "war on terror."

So...if you were OBL and looked at the 2 candidates, who would you support? The relatively unknown challenger is a US Senator and former soldier who wrote a book in 1997 about the need to confront new transnational threats like terrorism (though the book focuses primarily on transnational crime, it does mention the prospect of nuclear terror). He has publicly called for returning the focus of the war on terror on to OBL and wants to rebuild America's relations with the rest of the world.

By contrast, the incumbent botched Tora Bora, focused tremendous international attention on the wrong war, consumed $200 billion doing it, lost the cooperation of much of the world, and now serves as the primary recruiting poster. Plus, one of OBL's goals is to foment a global clash of civilizations, Islam against the West. At various times, Bush has threatened to bumble into that.

If OBL were going to make an endorsement, I do think it is rather obvious he'd prefer Bush to Kerry.


Update. Billmon's Whiskey Bar is open again and his latest post is "Osama's Endorsement." He calls the tape "virtual terrorism," an interesting phrase, and argues that al Qaeda is now acting as a 527 organization..

Summer reading

Inspired by Chris at Explananda, I just bought Evelyn Waugh's Scoop at bookcloseouts.com. Some years ago, probably in The New Republic, I read a comprehensive bibliographic essay that made me want to read Waugh.

So now I can -- and will.

Of course, this discount bookseller has a coupon that saves the buyer $5 on every $35 order (enter code habit with password bookcloseouts). Thus, I simply had to shop around for some additional purchases. My soon-to-be-11-year-old wanted some book giveaways for her party, so this was readily accomplished.

While searching around, I couldn't help but notice that the book sales lists provide some interesting sociological insights about Iraq and the wider war on terrorism.

For example, the neocons (and other hawks) have apparently saturated their market. Consider this:

Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: Remaindered.

Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan, While America Sleeps: Remaindered.

Laurie Mylroie, The War Against America: Remaindered.

Laurie Mylroie, Bush vs. the Beltway: Remaindered.

Judith Miller, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War: Remaindered.

Also for sale is an odd-looking book by the NRA's Wayne LaPierre about gun ownership and his version of "homeland security." It sounded scary.

For the conservative non-reader, Miller's book is also available in audio cassette.

They also had plenty of books by Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, but I won't link to them.

Before my readers shout in triumph about the failure of these conservative books to sell, note that there are also plenty of books for sale by Bush critics.

Norman Mailer, Why Are We at War?: Remaindered

Scott Ritter, Endgame: Solving the Iraq Crisis: Remaindered.

Gore Vidal, Dreaming War: Remaindered.

Ritter was treated unfairly by his former weapons inspector colleagues, but Mailer and Vidal are novelists writing about public affairs. Yawn.

If the hawks and doves aren't selling, what about the owls?

Um, not so good:

Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden: Remaindered.

General Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars: Remaindered.

Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Remaindered.

Philip B. Heymann, Terrorism and America: Remaindered.

Mark Jeurgensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: Remaindered.

Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: Remaindered.

Shibley Telhami, The Stakes: Remaindered.

Strobe Talbott, The Age of Terror: Remaindered.

I don't know that it means anything, but there are 100s of copies of the neocon books and only 14 of Talbott's (though there are also 14 in paperback). Then again, there are plenty of copies of Vidal too.

Many would list Pollack with the hawks since his book helped convince many liberals to support the Iraq war. And Dershowitz has been criticized by the left for supporting torture, so he might not belong on this list either.

Telhami is a first-rate scholar and Jeurgensmeyer won the 2003 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, so don't make too much of their places on this list. And I used Heymann's book for my US Foreign Policy class in spring 2002.

Now, of course, this list proves that there are plenty of pertinent and cheap books available for my courses.