Iraq War was a gift to al-Qaeda

Professor Paul Rogers, a security expert, told delegates at a conference on politics and terrorism that the Iraq war is a training ground that al Qaeda can use to hone expertise in urban warfare and train terrorists who will threaten the West for the next three decades.

Prof Rogers, from the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, added: "The real gift to al-Qaeda is a long-term urban combat training zone, not a rural one as previously.

"That is going to come back and haunt us over the next 20 to 30 years."

Had Cheney, Rumsfeld or Bush bothered to ask the CIA for an analysis of what would happen in post-invasion Iraq, this is what the CIA would have told them. But they didn't never ask for that analysis until a year after the actual invasion when the insurgency that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush had not anticipated was really beginning to hurt.