That is hardly a political statement but a reasonable conclusion drawn from the circumstances.
My suggestion is that if terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, the wider ME, in Europe up into Russia and the former Soviet-Asia, in Nth. Africa (Egypt, Morocco etc) and own into SE Asia, were not fighting either military or police forces or being harrassed by anti-terrorist forces, is it not highly likely that many more 911s, Madrids and Londons would have occurred? A reasonable assumption is that there is only a finite number of jihadists to cover all bases.
Do those figures, you refer to, include every terrorist attack inside Iraq? That by itself would make the number of attacks greater but is a meaningless figure in terms of pre-war attacks. It rather justifies the claim that terrorists are now being confronted in their own backyard. (eg 1000 plus(?) taken out in Falluja alone or how many of the 10,000 al Qaeda operatives that were in Afghanistan escaped to meet their end in Iraq?).
The point is not are there more attacks now than pre-war but rather how many more, even bigger and more spectacular attacks, on Western targets, may have occurred, than the few that have, if the finite number of terrorists were not desperately fighting in other theaters against the various forces arrayed against them.
