In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld directed the Defense Science Board Task Force to review the impact which the administration’s policies — specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — were having on Terrorism and Islamic radicalism.   They issued a report in September, 2004 (.pdf) and it vigorously condemned the Bush/Cheney approach as entirely counter-productive, i.e., as worsening the Terrorist threat those policies purportedly sought to reduce.  It’s well worth reviewing their analysis, as it has as much resonance now as it did then (h/t sysprog).

The Task Force began by noting what are the “underlying sources of threats to America’s national security“:  namely, the “negative attitudes” towards the U.S. in the Muslim world and “the conditions that create them”

And what most exacerbates anti-American sentiment, and therefore the threat of Terrorism?  “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” — through our “one sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan“: