-By Warner Todd Huston
A new independent study shows that deaths from terrorism have actually declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. This flies in the face of the constant Democrat mantra that states the opposite, that terrorism has increased since Bush initiated the War on Terror. It is a mantra that the media have helpfully spread for their friends at the DNC.
We’ve heard it again and again from the left in this country; deaths by terror have increased under George W. Bush and his War on Terror has failed. Along with so many on the left side of the aisle in the U.S., Barack Obama has said this several times in the past, too. At the Democratic debate at Saint Anselm College on Jun 3, 2007, for instance, Obama said that Bush’s war has failed. “We live in a more dangerous world,” Obama said on that stage, “partly as a consequence of Bush’s actions…”
Of course, this talking point ignores one small bit of common sense. When a battle is joined, casualties are sure to rise until an end is declared. After all, when both sides are joined in battle (as opposed to but one), deaths are sure to rise before they fall, it being always darkest before the dawn, and all.
But that bit of common sense aside, the Democrats have been fond of using a study by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, to prove that terrorism is worse under Bush. In fact, this study appears right on Obama’s own website in an entry by one of his bloggers, Deb Henry.
Bergen and Cruickshank claimed to have found a 607 percent increase in terrorism since 2003. They defined terrorism as an act of violence, or the threat of violence, calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm. They didn’t just count actual deaths and attacks, but added threats to their statistics. Who cannot see that such a method would wildly inflate the numbers?
But the new study by Simon Fraser University in Canada tells a far different tale than the favorite lefty study.
First of all, they found a major flaw in past studies.
The reason that the NCTC, MIPT, and START global fatality tolls rise so dramatically after 2003 is because all three datasets are counting a large percentage of all civilian fatalities from intentional violence in Iraq’s civil war as deaths from“terrorism.” For example, NCTC’s estimate for fatalities from terrorism in Iraq in 2006 is 13,343. This is nearly 80 percent of the total Iraqi civilian fatality toll of 16,657 for that year as estimated by the independent US organization, icasualties.org.
…But they are unusual because counting the intentional killing of civilians in civil wars as terrorism,” as all three datasets do, is a sharp departure from customary practice. As Ohio State University’s John Mueller has noted: “When terrorism becomes really extensive in an area we generally no longer call it terrorism, but rather war or insurgency.” Moreover, as a July 2007 US Congressional Research Service report noted, NCTC’s Iraq data are “largely the product of sectarian violence, rampant criminal activity, and home-grown insurgency–[and therefore] grossly distort the global terrorism picture.”
As reported by the Moblie Press-Register, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote in praise of the study that “it ‘makes no sense’ to count civilian casualties in a war zone as deaths caused by terrorism, Mr. Zakaria wrote. Since the mid-1990s, thousands of civilians have been killed in war zones in other countries around the world, and those victims weren’t counted as casualties related to terrorism.”
Other polls also support the claim that the world is not “more dangerous” since the war on terror began.
A 2002 Pew Research Center poll of Muslim countries found alarming levels of support for al-Qaida and its tactics. In Lebanon, for instance, 74 percent of the respondents said they believed suicide bombing was justified.
Four years later, Pew polled again in Muslim nations and discovered very different attitudes. The percentage of people in Lebanon who said they thought suicide bombing was justified had fallen to 34 percent. In Jordan, support for suicide bombing plummeted 20 points between 2002 and 2007.
Such polls show a sharp decline for support of terrorism in the Muslim world since the invasion of Iraq. “Obviously, the war didn’t fuel extremist views in Muslim countries,” as the Press-Register notes.
Even more amazingly, this new study finds a 65 percent decline in terrorist attacks since 2004.
Also…
There has been an “extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change” in the sub-Saharan African security landscape, with the number of conflicts being waged reduced by more than half between 1999 and 2006, and the combat toll dropping by 98 per cent.
A decline in the total number of armed conflicts and combat deaths around the world also continues.
All this seems to explode that old the-world-is-more-dangerous myth that the Democrats have promulgated for the last six or seven years. Chances are the media will not talk much about this study, the Democrats will continue on as if it never happened, and Bush Derangement Syndrome will continue unabated.
(Photo credit: abcnews.com)
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
Simon Fraser University in Canada???? Couldn’t you find an AMERICAN “independent study” to forward your delusional vision?
Nice try, but do you have any REAL reason to doubt the report? Or are you just bad mouthing and hoping that your complete lack of substance or knowledge will be hidden by the shrillness of your bald-faced claims?
The link to the study by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in this very article quotes the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, (in my opinion more reliable than a Canadian University),stating… “there was a 29 percent increase in terrorism worldwide in 2006 from 2005; terrorist attacks on nonmilitary targets rose globally to 14,338 in 2006 from 11,153 in 2005, with an increase in deaths to 20,498 from 14,618. This increase was due to a doubling (91 percent increase) of terrorist attacks against noncombatants in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, and a 53 percent increase in terrorist attacks in Afghanistan.”
From an op/ed by John Little titled “What Cost This War on Terror http://www.opednews.com
According to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the number of terrorist incidents worldwide in 1999 amounted to a total of 25. The following year, 2000, it rose to 48, but in 2001 the number was reduced back to a total of 25. Therefore, that was no significant change in the overall terrorist levels between 1999 and 2001. Furthermore, most of the increase in 2000 occurred in Asia and the Middle East, but had subsided by the end of the year 2001. In fact, most of these terrorist incidents occurred over protests by people either for or against abortion. Even the following year, 2002, did not show a significant change in the number of terrorist incidents. Only 23 recorded incidents occurred that year, even though the US had already entered into the first of its two major Middle Eastern conflicts. But by the end of 2003, according to the Washington Post article dated April 27, 2005, terrorist incidents had increased to 175. That’s more than a 760% increase over the previous year. Thus, while the Bush administration claimed it had entered Iraq to ultimately reduce terrorism around the world, we can see that after less than one year in Iraq, and two years in Afghanistan, worldwide terrorism had risen by over 700%. By the end of 2004 that figure had more than tripled to 655. Again we see that Bush’s so-called War on Terrorism was producing the exact opposite effect. With a 374% increase from the previous year, Bush’s oft-touted war was sending the world farther and farther into the chasm of guerilla warfare and underground, subversive interventions. This horrific trend would continue to worsen. By the end of 2005, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide rose to a mind-numbing figure of 11,111 according to a Washington Post article dated April 29, 2006. This represents an overall increase of 1,700% over 2004. Clearly the great majority of these attacks were occurring in Afghanistan and Iraq, the two countries the US invaded illegally and without agreement from the UN or any other major international institution. According to official sources, the year 2006 ended with nearly 15,000 terrorist attacks worldwide, an increase of over 25% from the year before. To recap then in 1999 there were 25 terrorist incidents worldwide. By the end of 2006 the number had risen to nearly 15,000. Bush’s supposed war on terror was and is having the exact opposite effect from the stated goals he has been touting for the past six years. Clearly Bush’s war on terrorism has benefited terrorists more than any other singular group. Without Bush’s illegal intervention into Afghanistan and Iraq, the number of terrorist incidents would have more than likely hovered around the 25 or so, the number of incidents that occurred in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002. In conclusion, Bush’s War on Terror has increased terrorism around the world by 60,000% since the year 2002.
The bottom line of Bush’s war on terror has been to promote the very thing he claims to be against. Terrorist attacks have increased over a thousand fold since his declaration. His war has altered US priorities tremendously. The monies normally given to education, welfare, infrastructure and social services such as health care, disaster relief and aid to minorities, are now going directly to fund the illegal interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, bush’s fantasy has caused the deaths of over 700,000 people in both countries with no end in site. If these trends continue, Bush’s war on terror will top one million dead by the end of 2009. Even if one combines all of the terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968, they would still not approach one seventh of the total dead since 9/11.
Clearly Bush’s war has done nothing to stop terrorism around the world. In fact, it has increased it. His war has resulted in the greatest US deficit ever with the potential ramification of a total collapse of the dollar. His war has killed more people since its inception than all those killed by terrorists since 1968. In other words, Bush has done exactly the opposite of what his stated plans had promised. His war on terror is not just a miserable failure, but a costly and deadly one, one that someday may in fact bring down the entire US economy. All this in the name of War on Terror.