First, a bit of context...
In his speech yesterday marking the 5-year anniversary of his glorious war, President Bush made the following claim:
"With such chaos in Iraq, the terrorist movement could emerge emboldened with new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to dominate the region and harm America, and embolden al Qaeda with access to Iraq's oil resources, could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction and to attack America and other free nations."
As Steve Benen points out, White House press secretary Dana Perino was asked about this nonsense yesterday, and she had quite the time trying to defend it:
PERINO: The purpose of what the President said is that al Qaeda should not be allowed to have safe haven in Iraq and take over --
Q: How can they take over Iraq's oil reserves --PERINO: Well, if we were to leave we would certainly ensue chaos and not be able to -- if we were to leave too soon, it would certainly be chaos and it would be terrible for not only the innocent Iraqis, but the entire region and, in fact, our own national security. That's what the President --
Q: But the Iraqis would let a foreign terrorist organization take over their oil?
PERINO: You're missing the point, and I think that you should go back and read --
Q: No, I --
PERINO: Yes, actually, I think you are missing the point. And I call on you because I see what you write about how you come here and you really want to have questions asked. And I'm calling on you and I'm providing it to you, but I suggest that you read the President's speech and read it in context, because that's -- what you're suggesting is not what the President said.
Leaving aside the very real logistical questions this reporter quite rightly raises, the idea that Iraq's Shi'ite majority would allow a small Sunni minority to "take over" its oil fields flies in the face of everything we have seen happen over the past 5 years. Even the Sunnis in Iraq don't like al Qaeda - that's the entire premise behind the Anbar Awakening that so many of this war's supporters tout as one of Gen. Petraeus' greatest successes. The only way - and I mean that quite literally - you could possibly think this makes sense is if you haven't been carefully following events in Iraq. Average citizens can make this mistake. But the President of the United States? Still? To this day?
All of this is a very long way of introducing Oliver Roy's excellent op-ed from a few weeks back in the IHT. Again via Steve Benen...
One of the key questions in the U.S. presidential race is what will happen if U.S. troops leave Iraq.
Of course nobody knows for sure. But I can say this: Al Qaeda will not take power and establish an Islamic state.Too many in the West persist in seeing Al Qaeda as a territorialized Middle East organization bent on expelling the Christians and Jews from the region in order to create a "Dar al-Islam" (land of Islam) under the umbrella of a caliphate.
Al Qaeda is not a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or Hezbollah. It is a non-territorial global entity which has never tried to implement an Islamic state, even in Afghanistan, where it found sanctuary in the 1990s.
It is pointless thinking of Al Qaeda as a political organization seeking to conquer and rule a territory. Al Qaeda recruits among disenfranchised youth, most of them without direct connections with the embattled countries of the Middle East.
Second-generation Western Muslims, converts, Saudis, Egyptians and Moroccans make up the bulk of the Al Qaeda traveling jihadists - not Afghans, Palestinians or Iraqis. Al Qaeda does not have the necessary local rooting for taking power.
Al Qaeda's strategy is first to to confront the big boys - or rather the big boy, the United States - directly, relying not on the actual damage inflicted (financial cost, number of dead) but on image, media impact and the terror effect.
The mirror effect of those who claim a clash of civilizations, of course, intensifies the impact. In fact, Al Qaeda needs those who demonize it, because it makes it what it is not: the vanguard of the "Muslim wrath."
Al Qaeda goes where the Americans are while the U.S. Army goes where Washington thinks Qaeda might be . . . one day.
Secondly, Al Qaeda seeks to hijack existing conflicts and make them part of the global jihad against the West.
However, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and now Iraq, the Islamist internationalist groups have been unsuccessful in diverting local and national conflicts, playing only the role of auxiliaries. The key actors of the local conflicts are the local actors: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the different Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups are not under the leadership of Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda has managed only to implant foreign volunteers into these struggles, volunteers who usually do not understand local politics and find support among the local population only as long as they fight a common enemy, such as American troops in Iraq.
But their respective agenda is totally different: Local actors, Islamist or not, want a political solution on their own terms. They do not want chaos or global jihad. As soon as there is a discrepancy between "the policy of the worst" waged by Al Qaeda and a possible local political settlement, the local actors choose the local settlement.
The Bosnians got rid of the radical foreign fighters once they achieved their independence; the Taliban rank-and-file refused to die for Al Qaeda when the Western forces landed in Afghanistan after 9/11.
In Iraq, many among the Sunnis, including the Salafists, resent not only Al Qaeda's tactics of indiscriminate suicide bombings, but also the strategy of confronting the Shiites...
In short, there may be good reasons for the United States to remain in Iraq, but they have nothing to do with Al Qaeda; they have more to do with a damage-control operation. If the U.S. troops leave, there might be a civil war, there might be a growing Iranian influence, Iraq might be turned into a battlefield by proxies between Saudi Arabia and Iran. There could be a Sunni-controlled area, a Shiite state and an independent Kurdistan, but no Qaedistan.
It would have been better to concentrate the Western forces on Afghanistan, which has been the real cradle of Al Qaeda. If only part of the brains and armor devoted to the "surge" in Iraq had been devoted to Afghanistan, instead of the incessant turnover of disparaged NATO troops with little knowledge of the country, things would have been better.
But in Afghanistan, as anywhere else in the greater Middle East, there is no military solution, only a political solution by dealing with the local actors, and dropping the senseless idea of a "global war on terror."
Subscribe to this blog's feed
