A classified report prepared by the nation’s intelligence agencies said that the war in Iraq has become the means by which Islamic extremists recruit the next generation of terrorists, and that the threat is increasing, not decreasing.

The National Intelligence Estimate, titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States” and completed in April, asserts that Islamic extremism is not on the decline, but has been expanding, and that the Iraq war played a central role in the expansion of terrorist networks.

That’s right: The war in Iraq, far from shutting down terrorism, is helping Islamic extremists to manufacture it at a fairly rapid pace.

“It’s a very candid assessment,” said one intelligence official of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the 2003 invasion. “It’s stating the obvious.” — Washington Post

The bad news is known, it seems, to everyone except President Bush. Perhaps Homeland Stupidity should be incorporated into his daily news briefs more often.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official. . . .

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said that its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes. — New York Times

This is certainly not the first time we’ve heard this. In 2004, a Pentagon report said that the U.S. had failed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq, and that “American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies.”

You can’t kill an idea with military force; ideas are bulletproof. And bad ideas will resist almost everything. We aren’t going to make real progress in the so-called “war” on terrorism until we reframe it as something else appropriate to fighting what is at its root: a very bad idea.