MI-5's director-general assesses war on terror

In keeping with my recent emphasis on the enduring importance of the war on terror (and with a big hat tip to Hugh Hewitt):

We now know that the first Al-Qaida-related plot against the UK was the one we discovered and disrupted in November 2000 in Birmingham. A British citizen is currently serving a long prison sentence for plotting to detonate a large bomb in the UK. Let there be no doubt about this: the international terrorist threat to this country is not new. It began before Iraq, before Afghanistan, and before 9/11.

It could still be Bush's fault, of course, since he was running for election around that time. Sorry for interrupting.

[M]y officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas. The extremists are motivated by a sense of grievance and injustice driven by their interpretation of the history between the West and the Muslim world. This view is shared, in some degree, by a far wider constituency. If the opinion polls conducted in the UK since July 2005 are only broadly accurate, over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were justified. What we see at the extreme end of the spectrum are resilient networks, some directed from Al-Qaida in Pakistan, some more loosely inspired by it, planning attacks including mass casualty suicide attacks in the UK. Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow’s threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the Internet.
(The Times[UK])

We'd all better hope the new Democrat-led congress will be up to the challenge.

I polled some people a couple of weeks ago--the sample ended up too small to count for much in terms of statistics--and one of the questions concerned whether terrorists would be encouraged by a U.S. pullout from Iraq. The vast majority of the small sample had no idea (a smaller number were confident that it wouldn't matter to terrorists).

It seems to me certain that abandoning Iraq to its internal conflicts will certainly embolden terrorists. Their framework for success against the West will have been tested and found successful: Engage the enemy with terrorist tactics, prolong the tactics until public sentiment runs against sustaining Western engagement, then spread culturally on the basis of the success.

This strategy is brilliantly appropriate for use against democracies. The strategy worked in Vietnam since North Vietnam was not attacked militarily as it could have been. Terrorist networks unaffiliated with governments have that advantage built-in, and so much the better if the government clandestinely turns a blind eye to their activities--indeed, in today's climate regimes who openly encourage terrorism (Iran) are safer from confrontation with the ascendancy of liberals in the legislative branch of the U.S.--and nobody else in the West is stepping boldly up to the plate to take our place.

The terrorists will be situated brilliantly to effectively attack Westerners at home, especially in Europe where EU nations have large Muslim populations whose sympathies may be brought in line with those of extremist groups.

Muslims in the U.S. are apparently a bit less sympathetic to the extremists by percentage, but it really doesn't take many to accomplish tremendous damage through the techniques that will increasingly become available to terrorists.

Without an attitude adjustment, the hour of the West may be nearing its end.