Mad Melanie Phillips takes exception to the pretty obvious conclusion drawn by a leaked US intelligence report that the invasion of Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism:
“if [it] wasn’t Iraq something else would have acted as a recruiting sergeant for the jihad. Indeed, something else did: Afghanistan, and before that Bosnia, and always Israel. There is always a ‘something else’ – because these grievances are the outcome of the phenomenon we are up against, and not its cause. And that phenomenon is jihad, a concept that the west just cannot seem to get its head round at all. As it rolls on and on across the world, one cause follows another in a steady stream…. The bottom line is that this jihad against the west started long before even the first Iraq war. And any defence against it mounted by the free world is used to boost recruitment to the jihad. There is only one sure way for the west to prevent such recruitment: total surrender.”