U.S. losing terror war because of Iraq, poll says

Bob Deans

WASHINGTON - The United States is losing its fight against terrorism and the Iraq war is the biggest reason why, more than eight of ten American terrorism and national security experts concluded in a poll released yesterday.

One participant in the survey, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beachhead at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey, the traditional land bridge linking the Middle East to Europe.

“The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror,” said the former official, Michael Scheuer, the author of Imperial Hubris, a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. “It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential.”

Scheuer, a former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, is one of more than 100 national security and terrorism analysts who were surveyed this spring for the nonscientific poll by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research group headed by John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration.

Of the experts queried, 45 identified themselves as liberals, 40 said they were moderates and 31 called themselves conservatives. The pollsters then weighted the responses so that the percentage results reflected one-third participation by each group.

Asked whether the United States is “winning the war on terror,” 84 percent said no and 13 percent answered yes. Asked whether the war in Iraq is helping or hurting the global antiterrorism campaign, 87 percent answered that it was undermining those efforts.

The public gives Bush higher marks in the anti-terrorism effort than the policy experts.

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken this past Thursday through Sunday, 57 percent of respondents said America’s efforts to fight terrorism are going well; 41 percent said it is not going well. In the same poll, 59 percent said the country is safer from terrorism today than it was before the Sept. 11 attack, while just 33 percent said the country is less safe.

The poll was taken in March and April, before two significant milestones in Iraq: the formation of a new government and the killing by U.S. bombs of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was the top al-Qaida agent in Iraq. It surveyed 1,000 adults nationwide and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The Iraq war was last year’s deadliest, according to Yearbook 2006, the annual evaluation of the world’s conflicts by Sweden’s Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

The peace researchers said the number of wars has hit a new low, but that conflict is changing and free-for-all violence in places such as the Congo defies their definitions.

“To say conflict as a whole is in decline, I could not draw that conclusion,” said Caroline Holmqvist of the institute.

The newly released Yearbook 2006 draws from data maintained by Sweden’s Uppsala University. It reports the number of active major armed conflicts worldwide stood at 17 in 2005, the lowest point in a steep slide from a high of 31 in 1991.

Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.