The spread of al Qaeda

A smart article from Paul Cruickshank about the recruiting effect our war has had on al Qaeda. A hint: It didn't just bring al Qaeda to Iraq:

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which was previously known as the GSPC, an Algerian terrorist outfit that grew out of the country's civil war, has grown in strength and lethality over the past year. It has developed a network of cells throughout Europe, committed itself to al-Qaida's agenda of attacking the United States and her allies and, as the scenes of carnage in Algiers illustrate, is now demonstrating a capability to put together sophisticated operations....

[I]n Europe it is France that has been particularly singled out by AQIM for future attacks, despite its opposition to the Iraq war, a function of its colonial heritage and the perception by the jihadists that, along with the United States, it helps to prop up the authoritarian Algerian government. Yesterday's claim of responsibility for the Algiers attack stated that it had been carried out to "defend the wounded Islamic nation [in] defiance to the Crusaders and its agents, the slaves of America and the sons of France".

Many--particularly supporters of the Iraq war--will no doubt use this as evidence that our policies in the Muslim world have been the correct ones and should be expanded. Look! It's the enemy! But that sort of thinking is, in essence, equivalent in many ways to just whining about the fact that the people we antagonize don't behave exactly as we'd like them to but not doing anything to change their behavior. It's completely divorced, in other words, from grappling with the problem as it exists in reality--from asking whether or not our strategic objectives in Iraq are achievable (no) and, if they are, if they're worth the tremendous ancillary problems that pursuing them cause.