Little-Acorn
05-27-2008, 04:57 PM
We've heard a lot of leftists screaming that the war in Iraq has made us less safe. But apparently it takes a lot of imaginitive "reporting" to reach that conclusion, and some twisting of statistics that rival the work of a pretzel factory.
All in a day's work for the leftists running their parts of the media, however.
--------------------------------------------
http://opinionjournal.com
from "Best of the Web"
by James Taranto
Terror on the Decline
Did the liberation of Iraq make America less safe? Conventional wisdom says yes, but Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria begs to differ. He notes that U.S. government figures show big increases in terrorism:
The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.
But Zakaria notes that a Canadian think tank, the Simon Fraser Institute, argues that that attacks in Iraq, a war zone, should not be included:
Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.
The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent.
In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years.
With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes [study director Andrew] Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."
Power Line's John Hinderaker has a list of attacks on the U.S. and U.S. interests overseas starting in 1988 and, per Zakaria and Mack's advice, omitting those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The list has no new entries since October 2003. One may debate how decisive the liberation of Iraq was in diminishing terrorism, but anyone who argues that it's made us less safe ought to be laughed off stage.
All in a day's work for the leftists running their parts of the media, however.
--------------------------------------------
http://opinionjournal.com
from "Best of the Web"
by James Taranto
Terror on the Decline
Did the liberation of Iraq make America less safe? Conventional wisdom says yes, but Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria begs to differ. He notes that U.S. government figures show big increases in terrorism:
The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.
But Zakaria notes that a Canadian think tank, the Simon Fraser Institute, argues that that attacks in Iraq, a war zone, should not be included:
Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.
The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent.
In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years.
With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes [study director Andrew] Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."
Power Line's John Hinderaker has a list of attacks on the U.S. and U.S. interests overseas starting in 1988 and, per Zakaria and Mack's advice, omitting those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The list has no new entries since October 2003. One may debate how decisive the liberation of Iraq was in diminishing terrorism, but anyone who argues that it's made us less safe ought to be laughed off stage.