Getting inside al Qaeda's OODA loop

Bret Stephens:

It will be months, perhaps longer, before we'll be able to gauge the precise impact of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death on the nature, effectiveness and direction of the insurgency in Iraq. But the most significant fact here isn't that Zarqawi was killed--he could have met his end in any number of ways. It's that he was found.

Pause a minute to consider what this means. Plenty has been written about the shortcomings of U.S. war-fighting, political and counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq, and some of it is true. Comparably little has been written about the insurgents' shortcomings. Yet Zarqawi was located because he and his spiritual adviser, Abdul Rahman, were betrayed by someone in their own camp, someone close enough to track their movements exactly. Therein must lie a tale.

"Zarqawi had become a liability to al Qaeda in Iraq," says Matti Steinberg, an Israeli terrorism expert. He recalls last year's intercepted letter from Ayman Zawahiri, in which the al Qaeda No. 2 begged Zarqawi to tone down his tactics, stop killing Shiites, and strive to broaden his base of public support. "I repeat the warning against separating from the masses, whatever the danger," Zawahiri wrote.

Zarqawi did not pay heed. In September, he formally declared open season on Shiites. In November, he ordered the bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing 63 Muslims, most if not all Sunnis, and enraging Arab public opinion that had been previously sympathetic to the insurgents. By December, he was being described by an Iraqi insurgent as "an American, Israeli and Iranian agent who is trying to keep our country unstable so the Sunnis will keep facing occupation."

In January, Zarqawi submerged his organization in the Mujahadeen Shura [consultative] Council--the insurgents' umbrella group--and apparently agreed to relinquish his public role to focus on military operations. Within a few months, however, he released his clumsy home video, and the self-publicity probably didn't go down well with the rest of the council. Zarqawi was cut loose.

There's an irony here, since by killing him the U.S. was, in effect, doing the bidding of Zarqawi's enemies within the insurgency. No doubt they have better uses for him as a martyr in Paradise than as a terror on Earth, and this may help them reclaim some lost luster. But it also suggests that the nature of the insurgency will change, perhaps radically, and likely to America's advantage.

First, the insurgency's sponsorship of terrorism outside of Iraq may end. The bombings in Amman reflected Zarqawi's personal loathing of King Abdullah's Hashemite rule: Their only effect, other than grief, was to provoke the Jordanian mukhabarat into waging its own dedicated campaign against the insurgency. Iraq's neighbors would generally be happy to see the U.S. project in Iraq fail, but not at the price Zarqawi was proposing.

...

There is more. As this post and this one point out the US has apparently penetrated al Qaeda in the Cave too. While Stephen's suggest that al Qaeda may have helped in fingering Zarqawi, the fallout from the nearly 500 subsequent raids suggest the damage to the orgainzation from evidence gathered at the site of Zarqawi's demise and at subsequent raid sites has been much more significant than an internal dispute would have generated. It would have been simpler and easier to just have a sniper shoot him anonomously. Also the internal hunt within the organization looking for the mole suggest that this was not something al Qaeda wanted. If teh US had help on the inside, it was not from an al Qaeda purist.