The anti-War movement in a paragraph

One of the frequent themes I see from the anti-War crowd (including a theme in my own Comments sections) is the belief that Iraq has created terrorism. This view conveniently ignores the fact that the single greatest act of terrorism against Americans happened before the Iraq War, as well as the fact that (thank God) there hasn’t been another act of terrorism on American soil since then — Iraqi war notwithstanding. Instead, Jihadist terrorism has been directed all over the world, often with no nexus to the war (Beslan, Bali, France, Germany, etc).

The NIE document has reignited this whole lunatic debate. That report notes that the war brought the Jihadists out of the woodwork with speed, although anyone who has been watching has known that they’ve been creeping out anyway at an exponential rate since 1979. (And I’ll repeat again that the climax to this slow growth was 9/11, which preceded Iraq.) No one on the anti-War Left wants to recognize the NIE’s other conclusion which is that, now that the War has forced the Jihadists had from under cover, they’re easier to see and destroy. Further, to cut-and-run now would be to hand them the ultimate victory and, like Al Jolson, we’d all be hollering “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

In any event, Alan Nathan gets it, and he’s a good writer, to boot:

Completed in April but recently cited in the New York Times, the NIE reportedly assesses that we’re creating more terrorists by fighting them. Apparently, the alternative strategy is hoping that the enemy will surrender to the relentless blows of our acquiescence. (Emphasis mine.)

You can read the rest here.

UPDATE:  Fouad Adjami, in an article about the banal middle class lives the new jihadist terrorists lead (that is, the key killers are not products of abject poverty and despair), has this to say:

There is a strand of liberal thinking that aims to explain the terror and succeeds only in explaining it away. Terror is justified if we drown it in the search for “root causes” or if we insist that the terror sprang from “legitimate” grievances. In this vein, nowadays it is maintained that Islamist terror was fed by the rage over the American invasion of Iraq. This argument is off the mark, the product of naivete or of a determined opposition to the war. We should know better. The trail of radical terror, emanating from Islamic lands and Islamic movements, predates the Iraq war. We have three decades of this kind of terror behind us. Our consolation perhaps lies in the fate that awaited the original cult of assassins [the 11th Century killers, high on hashish, who gave us the term assassin]. In their time, they had fame, and their potential victims feared them. But the world of organized states in the end triumphed, and the fury of the zealots was no match for the determination of mainstream society to shake off the assassins and to defend the normal order of things.

To which I would add, why is it that the liberals and the Left cannot recognize that religion itself is a root cause?  This is the perversion of Marxism, which  sees people as being motivated only by class and economic concerns, and that is incapable of acknowledging other driving forces.