Flypaper Folderol

Dana Priest reports: the CIA has discovered that Iraq Is A New Terror Breeding Ground. Gee, who could have foreseen that?

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."

The "flypaper theory," which was always ludicrous, seemed to be based on the assumption that there was a fixed number of terrorists and we just have to kill that number.

Well, it appears we've made more terrorists, and they're getting training and networking now in Iraq which they were (at least largely) denied after the fall of the Taliban.

Since we can't even kill all the insurgents (estimated now in the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands), we can be fairly sure we won't do such a great job of killing these budding terrorists. And, as Mr. Low says above, they'll probably leave Iraq with that know-how at some point. So even the sticky aspect of the flypaper theory probably won't pan out. We've just made more terrorists.

"The al-Qa'ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq," the report says.

The Vietnam war sucked, but at least it didn't create thousands of jihadis hell bent on killing Americans on our soil

This will be a long war against terror. Too bad George W. Bush made it so much more difficult.