Me, August 27, 2002, six months before the Iraq War began:

Cheney argued that “extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.” Is he truly so utterly naive? An unsupported attack by America on an Arab nation would generate such fear and hostility in so many people that extremists would be swamped with volunteers willing to die for their cause. It would fire the call for a greater jihad, not frighten the extremists into impotency. Conflict is the friend of the terrorist.

The National Intelligence Estimate (“the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue”) today, three and a half years after the war began:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. … Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

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.

So, Negroponte could’ve saved a lot of time and money just by hiring me four years ago. Or, to be honest, just about any one of the thousands of voices crying out the same thing at the time. I’d like to say that I was ahead of the curve, that I was a keen predictor of future events, but frankly, this prediction was so goddamned freakin’ obvious that even a ten-year-old could’ve seen it. This is not a matter of Bush and Cheney being proved wrong, it’s a matter of the issue being so clear that they must have known it was wrong.

I think this demonstrates the fact that Bush and Cheney are simply not concerned about terrorism. This is also blindingly clear. Invading Afghanistan was nothing to them but a pretext for invading Iraq, their real goal. They gave up on hunting down bin Laden the first chance they got. They farmed out that goal to people they knew wouldn’t do as good a job as our people would. Once public attention turned to Iraq, they abandoned Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to return. They have completely failed to secure our country against terrorism domestically, failing to guard ports, cities, and major facilities like chemical plants. They play with terror alerts as if they meant nothing, so they can get poll bounces at election time. They have spent literally hundreds of times more money on giving tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations than they have spent directly on terrorism. They have made only the most token efforts to do these things, only just enough so they can say they’re doing something, but not even a fraction as much as they would be if they truly were concerned about terrorist threats.

This administration has shown without any doubt that terror is nothing but a prop to allow them to focus on a neocon geopolitical agenda. Period.