How was the war in Iraq expected to impact global terrorism?

Yet a closer look at Iraq and the problem of spillover suggests that a massive civil war there would also exacerbate many problems of terrorism and create new ones. Many civil wars have been breeding grounds for particularly noxious terrorist groups, while others have created hospitable sanctuaries for existing terrorist groups to train, recruit, and mount operations-at times against foes entirely unconnected to the civil war."

'If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons,' Bush said from the Oval Office. 'We are in a war that will set the course for this new century and determine the destiny of millions across the world.'...

Bush, for his part, has never wavered in his position that Iraq is inextricably linked to the War on Terror.

'This war will be difficult, this war will be long, and this war will end in the defeat of the terrorists and totalitarians and a victory for the cause of freedom and liberty,' Bush said recently....

'A failed Iraq would make America less secure. A failed Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will provide a safe haven for terrorists and extremists,' Bush said last month."

The Iraq conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight."

"A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.

The assessment, completed last month and circulated among government agencies, was described in recent days by several Congressional and intelligence officials. The officials said it made clear that the war was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict…

The officials said the report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980's. It was during that conflict, primarily rural and conventional, that the United States provided arms to Osama bin Laden and other militants, who later formed Al Qaeda…

Previous warnings of this kind have been less detailed, as when Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence, told Congress earlier in the year that jihadists who survive the continued fighting in Iraq would leave there 'experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism,' and form 'a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries.'"

Iraq…could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."

The data suggest that the long slow erosion of positive feelings about the United States has given way to a landslide during the period of the war on terror, and especially during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. A long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, a central country within the historic realm of Islam and a longtime seat of the caliphate, will make it difficult to reverse these impressions. Positive perceptions about the reconstruction of Iraq may help, but they will have to be strong ones, widely affirmed by Iraqis themselves, to reverse this trend.

The occupation of Iraq presents other, related dangers in the war on terrorism. First, it seems highly likely that Iraq itself will become a central theater for Islamists seeking to attack the United States. … Iraq will attract those fighters who are prepared to carry on classic guerrilla warfare-as many of the trainees of the Afghan camps are capable of-while those with specific terrorist training will continue to focus on U.S. and Western interests elsewhere..."