Just a month ago I posted "The War On Terror".  The U.S. State Department had just released an annual report on world terrorism and the news was bleak.  Al-Qaeda was reconstituting in Pakistan and Afghanistan and asserting more and more influence throughout the Middle East.  Hezbollah was, likewise, gaining strength in Lebanon and Hamas had full control of Gaza. 

The upcoming Newsweek edition contains an editorial by Fareed Zakaria that shakes up the conventional thinking on the progression of terrorism. 

Want the good news or the bad news first?

OK, here's the good news first.  The extent of world terrorism is not as bad as it seems.  In fact, it's quite a bit better than we thought.  Based on the findings of Canada's Simon Fraser University study, the statistics included in U.S. generated reports include data from Iraq and Afghanistan and, thus, bias the data by including the number of terrorist attacks and civilian victims of terrorism in those war zones.  Previous terrorism studies hadn't included this kind of data and now including it suggested a significant spike in the number of attacks and casualties.

And most importantly,

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008.

With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."

Pretty great news, right?  What's the bad news?  This Simon Fraser study, despite being conducted by highly respected scholars, released at the United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world is, largely, unknown in the United States. 

A persuasive narrative has been built that we must be fearful of an impending Muslim terrorist effort to destroy western culture, to transform the Middle East into Sharia-based autocracies.  That narrative justifies the Bush  Administration's Middle East foreign policy objectives and domestic strategies and tactics. 

Heaven forbid we discover information that suggests the threat may not be what we've been led to believe.