Maintaining US combat troops in Iraq "helps Al-Qaeda" and Washington should pull them from the ravaged country if it wants to see progress in the war on terror, former US anti-terror czar Richard Clarke said. "I think the best thing that we could do to hit Al-Qaeda's attractiveness to the Muslim world was in fact to get out of Iraq in an orderly way over the course of the next two or three years," Clarke said. "Our being in Iraq helps Al-Qaeda," he added. "We have to beat them in the ideological struggle. Getting out of Iraq will help that."