Mother Jones has released an article today that is the first statistical demonstration I've seen of how much the Iraq war has helped fight the war on terror. Apparently this business of "fighting them over there" hasn't worked out very well.
Our study
yields one resounding finding: The rate of terrorist attacks around the
world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased
dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent
rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year
before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality
rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred
in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist
terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq,
the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting
fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent
respectively.