Al Qaeda looks at its loss in Iraq

Strategy Page:

Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about "why we lost in Iraq." Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several of these Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. According to their stats, in late 2006, al Qaeda was responsible for 60 percent of the terrorist attacks, and nearly all the ones that involved killing a lot of civilians. The rest of the violence was carried out by Iraqi Sunni Arab groups, who were trying in vain to scare the Americans out of the country.

Today, al Qaeda has been shattered, with most of its leadership and foot soldiers dead, captured or moved from Iraq. As a result, al Qaeda attacks have declined more than 90 percent. Worse, most of their Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have turned on them, or simply quit. This "betrayal" is handled carefully on the terrorist web sites, for it is seen as both shameful, and perhaps recoverable.

This defeat was not as sudden as it appeared to be, and some Islamic terrorist web sites have been discussing the problem for several years. The primary cause has been Moslems killed as a side effect of attacks on infidel troops, Iraqi security forces and non-Sunnis....

...

I do not agree that the killings were a side effect. There strategy was to deliberately target non combatants in hopes of coercing their support against the US and the government. It had the opposite effect with the people that it had with the media. These were media PR events and too often the media followed the al Qaeda script using their own "violence" meme. The attacks were militarily insignificant and political poison in Iraq, but they did have their effect through the media on voters in the US. They came close to winning the war for them with Democrats ready to quit and turn Iraq over to the terrorist.

The question is, that with even al Qaeda acknowledging their defeat will Democrats accept it, or will they continue their own desperation for defeat. I think they will continue trying to ignore the fact they were dead wrong about Iraq policy for the last 18 months.