U.S. losing terror war because of Iraq, poll says

http://www.columbusdispatch.com/national-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/06/29/20060629-A3-00.html

U.S. losing terror war because of Iraq, poll says

WASHINGTON — The United States is losing its fight against terrorism and the Iraq war is the biggest reason why, more than eight of ten American terrorism and national security experts concluded in a poll released yesterday.

One participant in the survey, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beachhead at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey, the traditional land bridge linking the Middle East to Europe.

"The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror," said the former official, Michael Scheuer, the author of Imperial Hubris, a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. "It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential."

Scheuer, a former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, is one of more than 100 national security and terrorism analysts who were surveyed this spring for the nonscientific poll by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research group headed by John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration.