The US Military has been working to profile suicide bombers in Iraq, to understand where they come from, what motivates them, how they end up on such a murderous and self-negating path. Today, at TAP, Spencer Ackerman reports the results of their research, and draws a picture of the man he calls Mr AQI -- a man who America, in essence, created.Counterfactual conditionals are always problematic, but in all likelihood, according to MNF-I's own profile, if the United States. were not in Iraq, Mr. AQI would be back in his taxi in Algiers or Jedda. Were it not for Abu Ghraib -- which, of course, never would have happened had we not invaded -- Mr. AQI would never have felt that it was his religious duty to kill Americans. And were it not for the war, thousands of Americans and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive, right now, and all without a propaganda windfall that spikes terrorist recruitment for the extremist lurking around the mosque trying to generate new Mr. AQIs. And what is true of our foreign-born Mr. AQI is all the more true of the perhaps 95 percent of AQI that's Iraqi Sunni. Not one of them would have any reason to be a member of AQI if George Bush did not give him one.This was always the problem with the flypaper strategy -- it assumed a static population of violent extremists, of which a disproportionate number would be drawn to Iraq to be cut down by our forces. But the jihadist population isn't static, it's dynamic. It swells and ebbs in response to events. It was swelled by the invasion of Iraq. By Abu Ghraib. By every time we called for air strikes and missed. By every time we busted into the wrong house at 2 in the morning and dragged out fathers in front of their sons, humiliated uncles in front of their nephews. By every day we've occupied in Iraq, every day in which even our benign and merited efforts to protect our forces and root out extremists still meant overpowering ordinary Iraqis and driving home our control over their society. We're not catching the flies. We're breeding them.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user PingNews.)
