Terrorism Myths Debunked

From Common Sense and Wonder

Independent research debunks one of the Democratic Party's favorite talking points about the global consequences of the war in Iraq.

Armed with government statistics showing a big increase in terrorist attacks since 2002, Democrats routinely assert that President Bush ignited a firestorm of terrorism throughout the Muslim world when he sent troops into Iraq. The claim and the statistics are used to illustrate what Democrats see as the foolishness of the president's belief that toppling Saddam Hussein's regime would reduce instability in the Middle East and eliminate a major potential source of terrorism.

A survey released in May by a Canadian university proves that the statistics paint a distorted picture of terrorism outside the borders of Iraq.

Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for Newsweek, praised Simon Fraser University for producing "a well-researched, independent analysis of the data relating to terrorism." The analysis shows that, excluding civilian casualties in Iraq, deaths caused by terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001.

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.

Perhaps the most telling statistic is the 65 percent decline in terrorist attacks since 2004. Al-Qaida-initiated attacks peaked in 2004, but Osama bin Laden and his followers haven't been able to sustain the carnage.

The Simon Fraser study attributes the sharp decrease in terrorist attacks to effective counterterrorism operations, discord among the jihadists and an "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." Read the rest...

You can read Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek column here.
The Simon Fraser University press release is here.

What surprises me is that this press release is dated May 21, 2008 and I haven't heard anything about it until now. The Democratic party's Department of Propeganda (the American news media) is doing a fine job.