The real terror threat.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Forget the manipulated intelligence, the pragmatists argue. And never mind about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the phony link to Sept. 11 and the trumped-up connection to al-Qaeda.

Get over it, they say. We're in Iraq up to our eyeballs now, and regardless of the staggering miscalculation and criminal incompetence that got us there, Iraq has become - all together now - "the central front in the war on terror."

But it isn't now, and it never was. The only terrorists American troops are fighting in Iraq emerged after President Bush made the disastrous decision to invade.

Prior to the U.S. occupation, there was no significant terrorist presence in Iraq. Even more than four years into the war, U.S. intelligence puts the number of foreign fighters - the people most likely to commit terrorist acts outside of Iraq - at 4 percent to 10 percent of the total. The rest of the 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents who are fighting the U.S. occupation are native Iraqis.

Whatever place Iraq may occupy along the shifting, stateless front of the fight against terrorism, there is a place that's much more important, and much closer to home.

In fact, the greatest and most immediate threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists doesn't emanate from the back streets of Baghdad or the remote mountains of Pakistan, but from the alienation and frustration of unremarkable people with no criminal histories right here in the United States.

A 90-page report issued Wednesday by the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division offers a reasoned assessment of the risks the nation faces from unassimilated Muslims who are vulnerable to the extremist ideologies that form the foundation of terrorism. "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat" analyzed 11 terrorism cases that have happened around the world since Sept. 11 and concluded, "Direct command and control by al-Qaeda has been the exception, rather than the rule."

Instead, in Britain, Spain, Australia and elsewhere, the plots were hatched and carried out by locals, typically ordinary young Muslim men with middle-class backgrounds. More often than not, they had no criminal records, making them virtually invisible to law enforcement agencies.

A small number of alienated young men seem particularly susceptible to the jihadist message. The NYPD report found striking consistency in the path many of these people followed to radicalization. It identified four steps in the process: pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination and jihadization.

In most cases, as police in London and Madrid quickly learned, the Internet plays a significant role as a catalyst and enabler. That's important for two reasons.

First, because terrorists-in-training don't need to go to Iraq to be indoctrinated or to hone their skills. Everything from the hate-filled ideology of jihad to the strategy of target selection can be obtained over the Internet in the privacy and anonymity of any American home.

Second, even if the United States achieved complete military victory in Iraq - a dubious proposition in the absence of a competent Iraqi government - the NYPD report underscores the point that terrorism isn't something that can be physically contained or defeated on a battlefield.

Profiling homegrown terrorists entails obvious risks that need to be rigorously and openly addressed. Arab and Muslim organizations criticized the report for making "sweeping generalizations" that cast suspicion over the entire American Muslim population. Those are legitimate fears at any time, but they carry more weight given the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.

But law enforcement and intelligence experts recognize that their success in preventing terrorist attacks depends to a large degree on cooperation from the American Muslim community. Not only would that cooperation swiftly evaporate if Muslims are harassed and persecuted, but such repression dramatically increases the likelihood of homegrown terrorism.