aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, May 28, 2007

Al Qaeda’s Enabler: snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Andrew Sullivan called George Bush Al Qaeda’s Enabler yesterday:

[E]very road ahead in Iraq - staying or leaving, surging or redeploying - is full of death, terror and chaos. The light at the end of this tunnel is hard to glimpse. But Bush is still proudly digging the tunnel.

What can one say? Well: we can say this at least. The president is right that al Qaeda remains a terrible threat to Americans. He is right to insist on this. But one core reason he is right is because he has been in the White House for the last six years. Al Qaeda surely never had a more helpful man in such a powerful place.

I read that shortly after listening to Robert Wright, a New Yorker staff writer and author of “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” in a talk entitled Al Qaeda: Past, Present and Future. Wright neatly synopsizes how Bush snatched defeat from the jaws of victory:

[bin Laden] envisioned Afghanistan as a great bear trap for us and so he was provoking us in order to get us to attack in Afghanistan. Well, of course, he miscalculated. In just a very short space of time, six weeks, American coalition forces swept aside the Taliban. Pummeled Al Qaeda. If you read the accounts of Al Qaeda insiders they admit that 80% of their membership was captured or killed.

Yes, the leaders got away. But they were scattered, they were destitute, they were unable to communicate and they were repudiated all over the world, even in the Muslim world. The war on terror was essentially dead. It was Iraq that breathed that monster back to life. Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan. It offers Al Qaeda a whole new country to train in.

So what if a Democrat had done that? Again I think Sully gets it right:

If a Democrat had been responsible for endangering America in this fashion, the Republicans would have impeached him by now. If a Democrat had bungled a war as obviously as this president - a war, moreover, that he has described as an existential struggle for our survival - the Republicans would long ago have Carterized him. Look how the Israelis have held Olmert accountable for his feckless war in Lebanon. Compared to Bush, Olmert is Churchill. If Bush’s record in this war is “offense,” then the only sane response is: so was the charge of the light brigade.

Just to anger up the blood some more, it’s now clear, thanks to the latest Congressional report, that this president was warned starkly about the dangers of "a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups" as a result of an invasion of Iraq. He was told that Iraq was "largely bereft of the social underpinnings" for democracy. He was explicitly informed that there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so." And yet he still sent a pathetically insufficient occupation force in 2003 - and refused to increase it for three years of growing chaos and mayhem. Even if you excuse the original recklessness, the persistence in it - until our current point of no return - is and was criminal negligence - a callous disregard for your security and mine.

In his talk, Robert Wright outlined the twenty year plan of Al-Qaeda as articulated in Fuad Hussein’s biography of Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi. The plan begins with 9/11 and has so far been remarkably prescient.

We’re losing.

Wright doesn’t believe we will loose, though he does believe that “the failure of the American project in Iraq is bound to embolden Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists everywhere.” Things will get worse before they get better.

Here’s some of what Wright believes must be done to turn this around:

1.) Fix our intelligence. There are fewer Arabic speakers in the FBI now than on 9/11. “If you don’t know the first thing about your enemy, you’re bound to have a failure of imagination, an inability to connect the dots.” He notes that we’ve added new Directorate of Intelligence and Homeland Security offices which add nothing but bureaucracy to our intelligence, while our 1,000 person embassy in Baghdad has 6 fluent Arabic speakers. “How are we going to succeed...if we don’t have people that understand the culture?”

2.) Bring our allies back on board. After 9/11 the whole world was with us; now “we’re so radioactive that every good thing we try to do causes people to draw away...There are a lot of reasons why people should be helping us in Iraq and we haven’t been able to marshall them in an effective manner.”

3.) Help bring about a viable, prosperous, unified Palestine. “If you create a failed state on Israel’s border what have you done?” We should declare that we don’t support the settlements. “They are illegal and they are not in the interest of peace… we need to succeed in Israel and Palestine right now.” He sees a moment of opportunity now. He knows this won’t solve the problem, but “it will reduce the inflammation that is so much at the cause of Muslim anger.”

He says Al Qaeda will lose for 3 reasons: too many enemies, they kill Muslims recklessly, and they offer nothing to the people who follow them. They have no belief in politics, they offer only death through martyrdom and that’s no recipe for success.

I’m as anti-war as the next guy, but Bush has gotten us into this pickle and we’ve got to start thinking of how we’re going to get out of it. Everything Wright said in his talk makes good sense to me.