Bush Says 10 Plots by Al Qaeda Were Foiled

The seven foreign plots said to be disrupted by the United States and its partners included plans to strike London's Heathrow Airport using hijacked planes, to hit ships in the Persian Gulf region and the Straits of Hormuz, to attack Westerners in Karachi, Pakistan, and to set off multi-target explosions in Britain.

The five "casings and infiltrations" in the United States involve better-known cases, such as the capture of Iyman Faris, who was accused of exploring the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and ultimately pleaded guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda. Another involved a man sent to scout gas stations in the United States, an apparent reference to Majid Khan, who was reportedly assigned by Mohammed to explore simultaneous bombings of gas stations.

Many of the thwarted attacks on the White House list seem tied to Mohammed. "Disruption of these plots in particular demonstrates how even a single arrest involving a lone individual can have a seismic effect on a terrorist group's capabilities," said Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism analyst.

In his speech, originally scheduled to mark the four-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks but postponed after Hurricane Katrina, Bush had many terms for his enemy, calling it variously "Islamic radicalism," "militant Jihadism" and even "Islamofascism." He did not declare an end to his "global war on terror," a phrase that some advisers had pushed to abandon in favor of "strategy against violent extremism."

But he did offer what Hoffman called a "far more nuanced" portrait of his enemies, essentially adopting the view of experts that al Qaeda has morphed into a global enemy -- as Bush said, "more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command," with operatives united by ideology but not "centrally directed."

Bush, however, rejected the idea that "extremism" had been "strengthened" by the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq, taking strong issue with analysts who believe that Iraq has become a "melting pot for jihadists from around the world, a training group and an indoctrination center" for a new generation of terrorists, as the State Department's annual report on terrorism put it this year.

"To say Iraq has not contributed to the rise of global Sunni extremism movement is delusional," said Roger W. Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism adviser under Bush and President Bill Clinton. "We should have an honest discussion about what these unintended consequences of the Iraq war are and what do we do to counter them."

Some experts have been pushing for Bush to characterize the enemy as an ideology with specific political objectives, such as re-creating an Islamic caliphate to unite all Muslim countries. They argue that in the past Bush handed foes in the Middle East an easy weapon by not making such a distinction, leaving him open to the charge that the United States is waging war on Islam.

"The explanation of who we're facing should have been done in the first year after the 9/11 attacks," said Walid Phares, a scholar at the conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Bush has finally "moved from a war on terror to a war with an evil ideology."

Staff writer Sara Kehaulani Goo, research editor Lucy Shackelford and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.