‘War on terror’ still not lost: Bush

UNITED STATES: President George W. Bush insisted the “war on terror” is not lost despite new warnings from US intelligence that Al-Qaeda is resurgent and Iraq is breeding global extremism.

Nearly six years after the offensive sparked by the September 11 attacks of 2001, Bush is accused by anti-war Democrats of making the United States more vulnerable by invading Iraq.

But the president took issue with media coverage of a classified new intelligence assessment that suggested Al-Qaeda is as strong today as prior to 9/11.

“That’s just simply not the case,” he told a White House news conference, arguing that because of US offensive action, “Al-Qaeda is weaker today than they would have been.”

But Bush added: “They are still a threat. They are still dangerous. And that is why it is important that we succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq and anywhere else we find them.”

Speaking on Fox News, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded that “yes, I think it’s true that in the frontier areas of Pakistan, this has been a period in which we’ve been concerned about their gaining strength.”

“But I don’t think that one can argue that Al-Qaeda is the same organization, effective in the ways that they were effective before 9/11,” she stressed.

Even if Al-Qaeda figurehead Osama bin Laden himself is confined to the anarchic borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, experts say, his group has spawned any number of offshoots that are only loosely affiliated.

“It’s a paradox: we have succeeded in degrading the operational capabilities of the jihadist enterprise and yet almost every assessment indicates that we are not succeeding,” RAND Corp. terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins said.

“In nearly six years, we have blunted Al-Qaeda’s ability to launch large-scale attacks from the center but we now confront many little Al-Qaedas, continuing radicalization, and escalating insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that exhaust our military forces and drain domestic support,” he told AFP.

Democrats seized on the classified new study by the US government’s National Counterterrorism Center, reportedly entitled “Al-Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West.”

Bin Laden’s network is sheltering in lawless tribal areas of northwest Pakistan to train and to plot attacks, the report said, according to The Washington Post.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said the intelligence shows that “Al-Qaeda is growing stronger.”

If the United States has escaped a repeat of the shocking strikes that felled New York’s World Trade Center, other nations such as Britain, Indonesia and Spain have not been so fortunate.

Insurgents in places like Algeria, Somalia and the Philippines have recast themselves as “Al-Qaeda” branches, as extremists cash in on what John Kringen, the CIA’s director of intelligence, calls the “trademark” of global militancy.

Earlier President Bush put off changing course in Iraq for at least two months but the U.S. House of Representatives signaled its frustration by calling for combat troops to leave by April.

An interim White House report released just before Bush spoke gave the Iraqi government a mixed review in meeting political and security goals providing more ammunition for war opponents demanding that Bush start ending U.S. military involvement.

In a symbolic move, the Democratic-controlled House voted 223-201 to approve legislation to bring combat troops out of Iraq by April 1, 2008.

Defying a veto threat from Bush, House Democrats hope the vote will put pressure on the Senate to attach a similar troop withdrawal timetable to a military policy bill it is debating.

Two previous efforts either died in the Senate or were vetoed by Bush.

Trying to buy time in the face of a growing revolt among fellow Republicans over his Iraq strategy, Bush urged lawmakers to withhold judgment until he receives a broader assessment in September from Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

“We’ll also have a clearer picture of how the new strategy is unfolding, and be in a better position to judge where we need to make any adjustments,” Bush told a news conference.

Bush conceded that “war fatigue” had set in among the American public and Congress but that it was premature to talk about bringing U.S. forces home, less than a month after all of an additional 28,000 troops had arrived as part of a new attempt to boost security.

Signaling the next report could be pivotal, Bush said he would consider “making another decision, if need be” at that time.

Washington, Friday, AFP, Reuters