Iraq War intensifies terrorism threat according to Intelligence Reports

According to the New York Times September 23rd US intelligence has spawned reports saying that the war in Iraq intensifies terrorism rather than alleviate it:

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

This probably does not come as a surprise to most people. What is surprising is that this chain of causation has not reached the upper echelons of the White House yet. President Bush continues being involved in a great civilizational battle of the good forces against the evil forces, thus engaging the whold world in a kind of John Waine stage set that is getting more and more absurd.

The Danish secret service has also produced a report saying that the Iraq war - and Danish involvement in it - increases the threat of terrrorism in Denmark, rather than diminishing it. This has been denied by the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Yesterday a Danish soldier was killed by a wayside bomb. Fogh Rasmussen expressed great regret at this, and this is probably also how the Danish people feel. - But who is responsible for these meaningless deaths. Fogh Rasmussen called it an act of terrorism that ended the young soldier's life. It might also be called an act of national resistance against a foreign occupying force. In World War II Denmark was occupied by German forces. There was a resistance movement. They were called freedom fighters, not terrorists. Fogh Rasmussen has turned these historical events upside down, claiming that the Anglo-American-Danish forces in Iraq are freedom fighters, who fight against the post-fascism of the Baath party survivors. He is a kind of echo of his master, President Bush.

This perverse logic may be an act of stupidity. It is also possible that it is deliberate. If that is the case, it reveals a growing discrepancy between the stated ideals of the American nation, freedom and democracy, and reality. Bush claims to fight for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. What is meant is the freedom of American economic interests. What he is doing is trying to impose his own version of "freedom" on foreign peoples in these lands. We've heard this song before from men in power. It was the same thing the soviet rulers did, when they imposed the state-controlled centralised "people's democracies" on the countries in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1940s. They were not "democracies" in any reasonable sense of the word. Likewise, the "democracies" of Iraq and Afghanistan are not that in a reasonable sense of the word.