Terrorism on the Rise Since Iraq War?

It seems like the points argued in this NYT article are pretty much a no-brainer, to me. Of course terrorism is on the rise. The number and location of attacks can probably be statistically manipulated to support either side of the argument, but the reality is that terrorism is most frequently a direct response of resistance to an overwhelming political or national force that leaves a group of people feeling left out of the decision-making process that is defining their lives. They then resort to guerilla or terror tactics in an attempt to influence that overwhelming power, or at least gain a voice. With our invasion of Iraq, we were taking a huge gamble, and since our handling of said invasion and the subsequent "nation-building" have gone poorly we are faced with a huge increase of insurgents, or localized terrorists. Iraq was never really about terrorism, anyway. The war was undertaken simply to try and close the loop on an embarassing situation begun back when we supplied Iraq with weapons years ago, and propped up Saddam Hussein to counter the newly independent and heavily Islamic Iran. Of course the oil aspect was the other major factor. The concept of terrorism was a convenient and I suspect fanciful link. Bush sometimes says that we will either be fighting the war abroad or at home, so it's better to fight it abroad. In the most simple and isolated sense, he is absolutely correct; the focus has been shifted to Iraq as a battleground, instead of the continental United States. But in the process, we are alienating most of our middle-of-the-road allies, as well as whole populations in the critical areas that produce these terrorists. It's one thing for a propaganda machine to tell young kids that America is bad. It's entirely another for those same kids to grow up watching their neighborhoods become warzones as a direct result of American intervention. We are sacrificing our long-term defenses for a short-term sense of security. If we hope to maintain our country in any recognizable form of power into the next century, we are going to need to shift our priorities; we as voters and citizens need to demand national leaders that will offer long-term planning instead of approval-point punditry.