War critics are wrong about al Qaeda in Iraq

Robert Caldwell:

To no one's surprise, all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agree that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network poses the main threat of terrorist attack on the United States. That's the message of the National Intelligence Estimate released last week. The same conspiracy of murderous fanatics that inflicted a terrorist Pearl Harbor on us Sept. 11, 2001 is still dedicated to hitting America again, if possible with the chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass murder.

That much, most Americans already knew or assumed. What they might not know is that al-Qaeda's franchise operation in Iraq, formally known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, is also currently the chief threat to U.S. and coalition forces there and to the democratically elected Iraqi government.

That contradicts a constant refrain of Iraq war critics – that fighting in Iraq distracts from the war we should be waging, against al-Qaeda. Well, guess who we're fighting in Iraq.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker calls al-Qaeda in Iraq the main fomenter of sectarian violence. “I have seen attacks from al-Qaeda that have been aimed at virtually every community in Iraq,” Crocker says. In testimony July 19 by satellite from Baghdad, Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that al-Qaeda in Iraq attacks have targeted Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds, all in an effort to provoke ethnic or tribal retaliations.

A Pentagon report to Congress in June – “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” – identifies al-Qaeda in Iraq as responsible for most of the “high profile” terrorist attacks in the country. “High profile attacks, usually conducted by AQI, are now causing more casualties in Baghdad than do murders by (sectarian) militia, criminals or other armed groups,” the report said.

The same carefully worded Pentagon report tags al-Qaeda in Iraq as “the primary threat to the security environment in Anbar Province.” Sprawling Anbar, which encompasses a third of Iraq and stretches from Baghdad's western suburbs to Iraq's borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is the Sunni heartland and a strategic and geographical key to stabilizing the country.

Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a spokesman for Multinational Force Iraq in Baghdad, declared July 11 that al-Qaeda in Iraq is the “principal near-term threat.”

A defector from al-Qaeda in Iraq told U.S. and coalition authorities recently that “between 80 and 90 percent of the suicide attacks in Iraq are being carried out by foreign-born al-Qaeda terrorists.” The defector estimated the toll of such attacks in the last six months at “some 4,000 Iraqis killed or injured by the al-Qaeda suicide attacks.”

AQI's nihilistic, indiscriminate slaughter of Iraqis of all ethnic and sectarian descriptions is consistent with its history of terrorism in Iraq. It was al-Qaeda in Iraq that bombed the Shiite's sacred Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, precisely to provoke the Sunni versus Shiite bloodshed that then ensued. Al-Qaeda's supremely cynical calculation was that inciting civil war was the most effective way of defeating the U.S. mission to create a stable, secure democracy in Iraq.

...

What critics do not realize is how badly al Qaeda has alienated all Iraqis of both factions. The Democrats desire to abandon Iraq to al Qaeda would be a terrible tragedy for Iraq and for the US.

Democrat critics also misread al Qaeda's strategy in Iraq because they do not understand the parasitic nature of the enemy. While Victor Davis Hanson has noted the parasitic nature of the enemy's logistics in the war, no one has really focused on the parasitic nature of its strategy too. It is a strategy based on creating chaos which can be exploited by local friendly forces to al Qaeda to take control of a country and use Islamist tactics to "suppress" the chaos. They learned the strategy from the success of the Taliban in Afghanistan which took over and "restored order" after pushing out the war lords.

Al Qaeda followed a similar strategy in Somalia where the Islamic Courts played the part of the Taliban in "restoring order" through the enforcement "Islamic" rule. It is what the "sectarian civil war" strategy in Iraq has been all about and the Democrats have fallen for it completely. Iraq's best hope for surviving this strategy is for the US and its allies to expose it . Al Qaeda has so alienated most Iraqis that it has had to create imaginary friends with which ato ally. Right now al Qaeda's best friends are in the Democrat Party in the US and they are its best hope for survival of its strategy in Iraq.