"The Iraq War is a recruiting sergeant for al-Qu'eda"

That "the Iraq War is a recruiting sergeant for al-Qu'eda" is the all but unchallenged orthodoxy. The leader article in the current edition of The Spectator answers this rather well: "It is now an all-but-unchallenged orthodoxy that the Iraq war was a recruiting sergeant for al-Qa’eda and its affiliates in this country. That may be true, but only in the sense that everything is a recruiting sergeant for this cause: the existence of the state of Israel, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the end of the Muslim Caliphate in 1924, the removal of the Taleban, the way women dress in the West. Last June, a bomb was found outside a popular West End nightspot in Haymarket. How much did the planting of the device really have to do with the removal of Saddam Hussein? Murderous theocrats do not need Iraq to justify slaughter."