Libertarian Leanings

Al Qaeda's dim prospects

It's the conclusion from Strategy Page.

For many Moslems, al Qaeda is down, but not out. But for most Moslems, al Qaeda is finished, and openly despised. In most areas where al Qaeda still has some fighters in action, the terrorists are feared and hated. As a result of that, and the recent spread of cell phone service throughout the Islamic world, al Qaeda is fighting hard to survive in any form at all.

It's all about what happened in Iraq.  Osama bin Laden was once considered the "strong horse."  Enough so that he believed it himself.  Believed he was strong enough to take on the Great Satan.  Hasn't worked out that way.  Of course, we were supposed to think Iraq was a distraction from the War on Terror.  Hasn't worked out that way.

On to the next

In the Wall Street Journal's assessment, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's gamble to take on the Shiite militias has paid off in spades.

The early setbacks might easily have emboldened Mr. Sadr, caused the Iraqi army to crumble and led to the end of Mr. Maliki's government.

Instead, Mr. Maliki and Iraqi forces persevered. And two months later, hundreds of Mahdi Army fighters have been arrested and weapons caches found. Following the model of the U.S. surge in Baghdad, Basra's streets are far safer thanks to the visible presence of 33,000 Iraqi troops. The Mahdi vice squads that terrorized the city's population are gone. The U.S. and Britain provided air support during the early stages of the operation, and continue to provide advisory support. But the Basra operation has clearly been an Iraqi success.

Something similar also seems to be happening in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, long a stronghold for the Mahdi Army. Initial press reports have suggested the battle has mostly come out a draw. But a 14-point "truce" between the government and the Mahdists (brokered last week by Iran) suggests otherwise.

Similarly optimistic news has made its way to the pages of the New York Times in an account by Amman Karim, who paid a visit to Basra, against the wishes of family, friends, and fiancée, to see the situation for himself.

My family, my close friends and my fiancée told me not to go to Basra, saying, “We don’t want to hear about your death from a media report.” They begged me to give up the idea.

Mr. Karim found that spirits in Basra were as high as in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow.

People feel new freedoms and compare it to the fall of the regime in 2003 when the coalition forces kicked Saddam out of power. Now they can speak freely, they can go to the market at night. Especially women, who were staying home to avoid being killed or kidnapped.

No government cars with tinted windows drive in the street like before, when most assassinations were carried out by officials in uniform. An Iraq soldier assured me that all cars used by criminals have been seized and they are not free any more to use them.

Night life in Basra is totally different from the old days. Fear is gone because of the number of security checkpoints in the street, restaurant and shops are open by night.

...

I talked to a restaurant owner who reopened recently. He was very happy to tell us about how good his business is now.

I asked him for a soft drink. He laughed and said, “You should take beer.” I said, “Do you have beer in the shop?”

He smiled and said, “Soon we will drink beer, maybe in two weeks.”

People have great hope that things will change

When I asked someone how he felt about the operation Charge of the Knights he said it was like being reborn.

It has been a startling turn for the better for al Maliki, who had been widely criticized for attempting to take on Moqtada al Sadr even though al Sadr is out of town -- presumably in Iran somewhere.  But after engaging the Mahdi Army in Basra, al Maliki went after them in Sadr City.  Last Friday al Sadr's Mahdi Army, for all intents and purposes, surrendered.

BAGHDAD — Followers of rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr agreed late Friday to allow Iraqi security forces to enter all of Baghdad's Sadr City and to arrest anyone found with heavy weapons in a surprising capitulation that seemed likely to be hailed as a major victory for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

In return, Sadr's Mahdi Army supporters won the Iraqi government's agreement not to arrest Mahdi Army members without warrants, unless they were in possession of "medium and heavy weaponry."

The mere attempt to crack down on the Shiite militias has won him crucial support from Sunni political blocks, who recently rejoined the Iraqi government after boycotting it for nearly a year.  That and the successes in Basra and Sadr City have emboldened the Prime Minister to continue efforts to wrest control of Iraq's cities from terrorists of all stripe.  Nouri al Maliki is now in Mosul, al Qaeda's last bastion in Iraq, to supervise the Iraqi Army assault on al Qaeda. 

BAGHDAD (AP) — Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday to supervise a military offensive against al-Qaida in Iraq in its last major stronghold, regional Gov. Duraid Kashmola said.

Maliki's flight to northern Iraq mirrors a similar trip he took almost two months ago to the southern city of Basra, where government troops fought radical Shiite militias. That fighting spread to the Shiite slum of Sadr City in Baghdad, where a cease-fire to end those clashes was only reached on Monday.

The offensive, called Lion's Roar, is the latest effort by Iraqi and U.S. troops to clear al-Qaida fighters from Mosul, the nation's third largest city. Troops began sweeping though the city's neighborhoods last week.

This has apparently not been entirely unanticipated in Mosul.  In hindsight, this somewhat mysterious post by the Iraqi bloggress A Star from Mosul offerered hints that something was up.

For the last two weeks we've been receiving lots of visitors, some come in the morning when I'm in college and some come in the afternoon. Mom can't do all the work herself since she has to sit with the visitors and so one of us (me and HNK) has to be there to help, and sometimes the two of us. From 4:30 till 7 and sometimes 8 PM the house is never empty of guests. I come back from college at around 3, take a nap and wakeup to get dressed again and help. When it's all over I just can't study.. I try but can't manage more than an hour of reading.

...

On Friday night they announced a curfew until further notice. I finally had time to study. 

Al Maliki also has the support of Iraqi Kurds in his crackdown on al Qaeda in Mosul.

The KRG gives full approval to the massive manhunt for al-Qaeda elements in Mosul province, the last stronghold of the terrorist group in Iraq.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officially announced its support for the military operation in Mosul to crack down on Al-Qaeda members, but asserted that Peshmarga forces would not take part.

The commander of military operations in Mosul province, Gen. Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq, announced the start of the operation, codenamed "Lion's Roar in Rightful Assault," last Saturday. It came after the arrival of a large number of military reinforcements from Baghdad. Execution of the operation, originally announced earlier this year, was delayed because of instability in Baghdad and in the southern part of the country.

"We, the KRG, support any plan or attempt by the central government and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki aimed at the stabilization of security and enhancement of the sovereignty of the State," said KRG's spokesman Jamal Abdullah in an interview with Radio Sawa. "The Peshmarga forces have not taken part in this operation because there was no official demand from the central government to the KRG."

I believe we are well past the tipping point in Iraq.  The beginning of the end for al Qaeda in Iraq came with the Anbar Awakening which blossomed into all out war on al Qaeda during the surge and the Baghdad beltway operations.  Those were great victories but they were largely U.S. victories that relied on Iraqi support, which was often in the form of intelligence.  The crackdown against the Shiite militias was an Iraqi initiative.  The lion's share of the fighting done be the Iraqi Army with U.S. air support. 

Because this has come about at Nouri al Maliki's initiative, I believe that Iraq and the Iraqi democracy will hold, even if a Democrat wins the White House and makes good on campaign promises to pull U.S. troops back from the battle.  It would appear that Nouri al Maliki will carry the day.

Iran replaces al Qaeda as top threat in Iraq

Today the Washington Post makes a front page observation that the recent congressional testimonies of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker made little mention of al Qaeda in Iraq.

During their Washington visit, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker barely mentioned al-Qaeda in Iraq but spoke extensively of Iran.

With "al-Qaeda in retreat and disarray" in Iraq, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, "we see other obstacles that were under the waterline more clearly. . . . The Iranian-armed militias are now the biggest threat to internal order."

Partly in response to advice from Petraeus and Crocker, the administration has initiated an interagency assessment of what is known about Iranian activities and intentions, how to combat them and how to capitalize on them. The review stems from an internal conclusion, following last week's fighting, that the administration lacked a comprehensive understanding and a sophisticated approach.

Anonymous U.S. officials say Maliki's offensive against Sadr's militia revealed both threat and opportunity.  They say weaponry used in Basra and in the recent rocket attacks against the Green Zone in Baghdad came from Iran.  They also say, according to Post, that an improvement in the performance of Sadr's militia indicates stepped-up Iranian training.

Interrogations of four leaders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force captured in Iraq in December 2006 and January 2007 have also bolstered U.S. conclusions that portions of Sadr's militia are directed from Tehran.

Despite earlier indications that Iranian backing for Iraqi armed groups and the flow of Iranian arms have waned, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that "this action in Basra was very convincing that indeed they haven't." Basra "gave us much more insight into their involvement in many activities."

The opportunity that arises from this is on the diplomatic front.  When Maliki went after Sadr's Shiite militia he gained gained some support from Sunni and Kurd political groups in Iraq, who had been suspicious that the Shiite al Maliki would dominate the Iraqi al Maliki in policy matters.  Added support on the home front could begin to translate into credibility among Arab governments in the region that have thus far shunned the Maliki government.

The administration has long tried in vain to build Arab diplomatic and economic support for the Iraqi government. But the Arabs, led by Saudi Arabia, consider Shiite Iran a competitor for regional dominance and have rejected Maliki as "a stooge for Tehran," as one U.S. official called him...

...After consultations with Crocker and Petraeus this week, Bush cut short their Washington visit and dispatched them to Riyadh. During a luncheon at The Washington Post, Crocker said that at a White House meeting Thursday morning, they "reviewed where we are in Iraq."

The message to the Saudis, he said, "is going to be . . . it is time, more than time, for the Arab states to step forward and engage constructively with Iraq. Get their embassies open, get ambassadors on the ground, consider visits, implement debt relief, treat Iraq like the country it is, which is a central part of the Arab world."

We shall wait and see if Arab religious distrust overwhelms political opportunity.  The decline of al Qaeda may possibly provide a little breathing room for Arab despots who use the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the words of Fouad Ajami, "in the hope of tranquilizing their own domains and buying off the embittered in their midst." 

What will the establishment of a stable and democratic Iraq mean for the Middle East?  If, as Michael Doran said in Foreign Affairs in 2003, the road to a calmer situation in Palestine runs through Baghdad, it may mean there are finally real chances for peace in the Middle East.  Before the the Sunni dominated Arab governments in the region bring themselves to recognize Israel, they will first be urged to recognize the Shiite led government in Iraq.

Teeth in their jugular

General Petraeus has been accused of being too cautious in his testimony.  You'd never guess it from what Pete Wehner says about the General's testimony yesterday.

In response to questions from Senator Lugar, General Petraeus said this about al-Qaeda in Iraq: “We have our teeth in their jugular — and we need to keep them there.” That’s a very nice phrase, which reflects a very encouraging reality.

Parental consent

A Bret Stephens column on Opinion Journal explores the expanding debate on the topic of parental consent.

Do minors require their parents' consent to become suicide bombers? Believe it or not, this is the subject of an illuminating and bitter debate among the leading theoreticians of global jihad, with consequences that could be far-reaching.

On March 6, Al-Sahab, the media arm of al Qaeda, released a 46-minute video statement titled "They Lied: Now Is the Time to Fight." The speaker is Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu-al-Yazid, 52, an Egyptian who runs al Qaeda's operations in Afghanistan, and the speech is in most respects the usual mix of earthly grievances, heavenly promises and militant exhortations. It's also an urgent call for recruits.

"We call on the fathers and mothers not to become a barrier between their children and paradise," says Abu-Al-Yazid. "If they disagree who should first join the jihad to go to paradise, let them compete, meaning the fathers and the children. . . . Also, we say to the Muslim wives, do not be a barrier between your husbands and paradise." Elsewhere in the message, he makes a "special call to the scholars and students seeking knowledge. . . . The jihad arenas are in dire need of your knowledge and the doors are open before you to bring about the virtue of teaching and jihad."

According to Stephens, al Qaeda's recruiting problem arises as a result of "Revisions", a book by Sayyed Imam al-Sherif, mentor to al Qaeda second in command Ayman al Zawahiri.  "Revisions" is a recanting of his earlier work, "Foundations (Mainstays) of Preparation for Holy War", which is considered the theological cornerstone of modern-day jihadist operations.  It has apparently had an impact.

There really is a broad rethink sweeping the Muslim world about the practical utility -- and moral defensibility -- of terrorism, particularly since al Qaeda began targeting fellow Sunni Muslims, as it did with the 2005 suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Al Qaeda knows this. Osama bin Laden is no longer quite the folk hero he was in 2001. Reports of al Qaeda's torture chambers in Iraq have also percolated through Arab consciousness, replacing, to some extent, the images of Abu Ghraib. Even among Saudis, a recent survey by Terror Free Tomorrow finds that "less than one in ten Saudis have a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda, and 88 percent approve the Saudi military and police pursuing Al Qaeda fighters."

To the question, "Is parental consent required?"  In conservative Arab circles the answer can hardly be, "No."  There, parents are in charge of their children.

Saddam and terrorism

The recently released Pentagon-funded study that failed to find a direct, operational link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda, found among other things that Saddam had established support for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.  The Egyptian Islamic Jihad was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri who later merged his group with al Qaeda.  So says the Washington Times this morning. 

Perhaps the IDA report's most significant new disclosure is that the Iraqi Intelligence Service, known as the Mukhabarat, established an alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). A captured 1993 memo from the IIS to Saddam said that Iraq had aided the group previously and was restarting contacts to help with attacks on the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally.

EIJ was founded by Zawahri, an Egyptian surgeon who, along with other members, sought to overthrow the secular Egyptian government. After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was arrested but served jail time only for illegal arms possession. He met bin Laden in Afghanistan while with the mujahedeen resistance fighting the Soviets. He returned to Egypt in 1990 and, in 1998, merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad with al Qaeda.

The connection to al Qaeda is not direct, but through the Egyptian Islamic Jihad it is a connection nonetheless.  For a direct, operational connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and a terrorist organization the study identifies Hamas.

Before the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration made an issue of Saddam's offer to provide money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as proof of Baghdad's support for international terrorism. The IDA report reveals that Saddam provided much more significant aid to groups such as Hamas, a terror group backed by Iran and now in control of the Gaza Strip.

A 2002 annual report by the IIS' M8 division told of providing millions of dollars and arms to Palestinian terror groups and training Palestinians in Iraqi camps. The IIS maintained representatives in the Palestinian territories who met with Hamas leaders, such as founder Ahmad Yassin, who conveyed their needs to Baghdad.

In 2002, Baghdad hosted 13 conferences of various Islamic groups, according to the M8 report, which also told of scores of messages from these groups seeking money and arms.

Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front, found safe haven in Iraq in the late 1980s. He became a wanted man after he engineered the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro during which American Leon Klinghoffer was shot and pushed overboard in his wheelchair.

According to the Times the report, including copies of the captured IIS documents, is being mailed by U.S. Joint Forces Command to journalists and media outlets in an effort to provide them with a detailed picture of Iraq's support of terrorism. 

So far it doesn't look as if many of them got the memo if the Washington Post is representative.  One Jennifer Loven renews and repackages the argument that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, implying that there was no connection between Iraq and terrorism.

Administration efforts to link Iraq and al-Qaida and Iraq and Sept. 11 have waxed and waned ever since the 2001 attacks.

But as the editors of the New York Sun point out, arguing over an al Qaeda connection is a red herring.

The hardliners were right, after all. Saddam Hussein was a terror master, and he worked with international Jihad, including Al Qaeda affiliates, throughout the 1990s. The question of direct operational ties to Al Qaeda is a red herring that obscures the more significant point. Our Eli Lake reported on Friday on an Iraqi Intelligence Service memo to Saddam from March 18, 1993, on the terrorist organizations it was then assisting. The memo says, "In a meeting in Sudan, we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." That group, better known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was founded in 1979 by Ayman al Zawahiri, the man who is currently Osama bin Laden's deputy.

It turns out that Saddam ordered that financial support be given to this group that formally merged in 1998 with Al Qaeda. The trove the Pentagon analyzed also contains an order, drafted in 1993, in which Saddam Hussein instructs the sending of fighters to Somalia. That same year Osama bin Laden had sent his own fighters to that country to kill Americans. The Pentagon study goes on to say, "Captured Iraqi archives reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior to OPERATION DESERT STORM (1991)." The analysis of the Iraqi documents does not find that Saddam Hussein controlled Al Qaeda, but that he was willing to align with Islamic terrorists.

Maybe the message is getting through.

A certain doctor

AJ Strata suspects that the "doctor of Arab origin" mentioned in this report was none other than Ayman al-Zawahiri, second in command to Osama bin Laden.  Says Mr. Strata:

It seems someone very high up in AQ may have been in that compound in Pakistan that was recently bombed - maybe a certain Arab doctor...

...As I noted in my previous post above the amount of fire power brought to bear indicated a very high valued target. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two leader, is a doctor. I also noted recently that Gen Hayden (CIA) mentioned casually Zawahiri was an easier target given his penchant for the media. I thought at the time that was a near blatant admission we had him in our sights. Reporting from this part of the world is always dodgy. I’m keeping my fingers crossed...

More on the "non-connection"

Stephen Hayes lists some of the more interesting revelations in that Pentagon study which, according to the mainstream press, found no ties between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.

Among the study's other notable findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.

For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."

In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

There is much, much more. Documents reveal that the regime stockpiled bombmaking materials in Iraqi embassies around the world and targeted Western journalists for assassination. In July 2001, an Iraqi Intelligence agent described an al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain, the Army of Muhammad, as "under the wings of bin Laden." Although the organization "is an offshoot of bin Laden," the fact that it has a different name "can be a way of camouflaging the organization." The agent is told to deal with the al Qaeda group according to "priorities previously established."

William Kristol wonders why the administration is not more aggressively promoting the report and its real conclusions.

If you talk to people in the Bush administration, they know the truth about the report. They know that it makes the case convincingly for Saddam's terror connections. But they'll tell you (off the record) it's too hard to try to set the record straight...

...It's not too late. Bush can still override his cautious aides and tell the American people the whole truth about the situation we faced in 2003 and would face today if Saddam were still in power. This is more than a matter of political advantage. It is a requirement of war leadership.

What a sad commentary.  It's an election year and so we can expect our partisan media to continue to ignore facts and report their own fantasies in their place.  The media goal of putting a Democrat in the White House takes precedence over national security and even takes precedence over the truth.

Iraq and al Qaeda

According to CNN's reading of the recent Pentagon report on the subject, there was no connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. military's first and only study looking into ties between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda showed no connection between the two, according to a military report released by the Pentagon.

The report released by the Joint Forces Command five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq said it found no "smoking gun" after reviewing about 600,000 Iraqi documents captured in the invasion and looking at interviews of key Iraqi leadership held by the United States, Pentagon officials said.

However, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air came to a different conclusion.

So we have Saddam supporting at least two AQ subsidiaries, one of which had open aspirations to attack American interests, and evidence from these captured materials that Saddam planned to use his terrorist capabilities to conduct war on the United States. Perhaps in the world of the mainstream media the big news from this would be “no smoking gun” connection to an actual attack, but for the rest of us, it shows that Saddam needed to go — and the sooner, the better.

Rather than take either's word for it, go to the report report itself and read the conclusion on page 45.

In the years between the two Gulf Wars, UN sanctions reduced Saddam's ability to shape regional and world events, steadily draining his military, economic, and military powers. The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's "coercion" toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power. Saddam nurtured this capability with an infrastructure supporting (1) his own particular brand of state terrorism against internal and external threats, (2) the state sponsorship of suicide operations, and (3) organizational relationships and "outreach programs" for terrorist groups. Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces.

Let me repeat a key part of the Pentagon report's conclusion.  "The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's "coercion" toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power. Saddam nurtured this capability..."

Pelosi insists

Nancy Pelosi insists that Iraq is a failure.  She has no choice, really. With the presidential election jackpot less than a year away Democrats have too little time to hedge their political bet on a U.S. defeat in Iraq.  They're sticking to their story.

Pelosi’s harsh verdict is a reminder of the dilemma for Democrats as they head into this fall’s presidential and congressional elections:

They need to make the case that the country needs to depart from the direction set by Bush. Yet they don’t want to look like naysayers at a time when Iraq has become more stable, albeit still violent.

Democrats insist that they will do a more effective job of fighting al Qaeda by pulling out of Iraq, presumably to fight them somewhere else.  However, documents captured from al Qaeda in Iraq contradict them.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group's security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda's enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group's stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

Via Drudge.