"Taking Stock of the Forever War" (NYT)

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Taking Stock of the Forever War

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11OSAMA.html?pagewanted=all

By MARK DANNER
Published: September 11, 2005

I. Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man's mightiest structures collapses into an immense white blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven. The demise of the World Trade Center gave us an image as newborn to the world of sight as the mushroom cloud must have appeared to those who first cast eyes on it. I recall vividly the seconds flowing by as I sat gaping at the screen, uncomprehending and unbelieving, while Peter Jennings's urbane, perfectly modulated voice murmured calmly on about flights being grounded, leaving unacknowledged and unexplained - unconfirmed - the incomprehensible scene unfolding in real time before our eyes. "Hang on there a second," the famously unflappable Jennings finally stammered - the South Tower had by now vanished into a boiling caldron of white smoke - "I just want to check one thing. . .because. . .we now have.. . .What do we have? We don't. . .?" Marveling later that "the most powerful image was the one I actually didn't notice while it was occurring," Jennings would say simply that "it was beyond our imagination."

Looking back from this moment, precisely four years later, it still seems almost inconceivable that 10 men could have done that - could have brought those towers down. Could have imagined doing what was "beyond our imagination." When a few days later, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen remarked that this was "the greatest work of art in the history of the cosmos," I shared the anger his words called forth but couldn't help sensing their bit of truth: "What happened there - spiritually - this jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life, that happens sometimes poco a poco in art." No "little by little" here: however profoundly evil the art, the sheer immensity and inconceivability of the attack had forced Americans instantaneously to "jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life" and had thrust them through a portal into a strange and terrifying new world, where the inconceivable, the unimaginable, had become brutally possible.

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In the face of the unimaginable, small wonder that leaders would revert to the language of apocalypse, of crusade, of "moral clarity." Speaking at the National Cathedral just three days after the attacks, President Bush declared that while "Americans do not yet have the distance of history. . .our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Astonishing words - imaginable, perhaps, only from an American president, leading a people given naturally in times of crisis to enlisting national power in the cause of universal redemption. "The enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology," declared the National Security Strategy of the United States of America for 2002. "The enemy is terrorism - premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents." Not Islamic terrorism or Middle Eastern terrorism or even terrorism directed against the United States: terrorism itself. "Declaring war on 'terror,"' as one military strategist later remarked to me, "is like declaring war on air power." It didn't matter; apocalypse, retribution, redemption were in the air, and the grandeur of the goal must be commensurate with the enormity of the crime. Within days of the attacks, President Bush had launched a "global war on terror."

Today marks four years of war. Four years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. troops ruled unchallenged in Japan and Germany. During those 48 months, Americans created an unmatched machine of war and decisively defeated two great enemies.

How are we to judge the global war on terror four years on? In this war, the president had warned, "Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign." We could expect no "surrender ceremony on a deck of a battleship," and indeed, apart from the president's abortive attempt on the U.S.S. Lincoln to declare victory in Iraq, there has been none. Failing such rituals of capitulation, by what "metric" - as the generals say - can we measure the progress of the global war on terror?

Four years after the collapse of the towers, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. Terrorists have staged spectacular attacks, killing thousands, in Tunisia, Bali, Mombasa, Riyadh, Istanbul, Casablanca, Jakarta, Madrid, Sharm el Sheik and London, to name only the best known. Last year, they mounted 651 "significant terrorist attacks," triple the year before and the highest since the State Department started gathering figures two decades ago. One hundred ninety-eight of these came in Iraq, Bush's "central front of the war on terror" - nine times the year before. And this does not include the hundreds of attacks on U.S. troops. It is in Iraq, which was to serve as the first step in the "democratization of the Middle East," that insurgents have taken terrorism to a new level, killing well over 4,000 people since April in Baghdad alone; in May, Iraq suffered 90 suicide-bombings. Perhaps the "shining example of democracy" that the administration promised will someday come, but for now Iraq has become a grotesque advertisement for the power and efficacy of terror.

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As for the "terrorist groups of global reach," Al Qaeda, according to the president, has been severely wounded. "We've captured or killed two-thirds of their known leaders," he said last year. And yet however degraded Al Qaeda's operational capacity, nearly every other month, it seems, Osama bin Laden or one of his henchmen appears on the world's television screens to expatiate on the ideology and strategy of global jihad and to urge followers on to more audacious and more lethal efforts. This, and the sheer number and breadth of terrorist attacks, suggest strongly that Al Qaeda has now become Al Qaedaism - that under the American and allied assault, what had been a relatively small, conspiratorial organization has mutated into a worldwide political movement, with thousands of followers eager to adopt its methods and advance its aims. Call it viral Al Qaeda, carried by strongly motivated next-generation followers who download from the Internet's virtual training camp a perfectly adequate trade-craft in terror. Nearly two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a confidential memorandum, posed the central question about the war on terror: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" The answer is clearly no. "We have taken a ball of quicksilver," says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, "and hit it with a hammer."

What has helped those little bits of quicksilver grow and flourish is, above all, the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, which has left the United States bogged down in a brutal, highly visible counterinsurgency war in the heart of the Arab world. Iraq has become a training ground that will temper and prepare the next generation of jihadist terrorists and a televised stage from which the struggle of radical Islam against the "crusader forces" can be broadcast throughout the Islamic world. "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," Porter J. Goss, director of the C.I.A., told the Senate in February. "These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in, and focused on, acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

As the Iraq war grows increasingly unpopular in the United States - scarcely a third of Americans now approve of the president's handling of the war, and 4 in 10 think it was worth fighting - and as more and more American leaders demand that the administration "start figuring out how we get out of there" (in the words of Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican), Americans confront a stark choice: whether to go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on terror's "central front."

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in "ridding the world of evil." We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished - as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show - by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight.

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II. Facing what is beyond imagination, you find sense in the familiar. Standing before Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, George W. Bush told Americans why they had been attacked. "They hate our freedoms," the president declared. "Our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." As for Al Qaeda's fundamentalist religious mission: "We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

Stirring words, and effective, for they domesticated the unthinkable in the categories of the accustomed. The terrorists are only the latest in a long line of "evildoers." Like the Nazis and the Communists before them, they are Americans' evil twins: tyrants to our free men, totalitarians to our democrats. The world, after a confusing decade, had once again split in two. However disorienting the horror of the attacks, the "war on terror" was simply a reprise of the cold war. As Harry S. Truman christened the cold war by explaining to Americans how, "at the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life," George W. Bush declared his global war on terror by insisting that "every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." The echo, as much administration rhetoric since has shown, was not coincidental. Terrorists, like Communists, despised America not because of what our country did but because of who we are. Hating "our values" and "our freedoms," the evildoers were depicted as deeply irrational and committed to a nihilistic philosophy of obliteration, reawakening for Americans the sleeping image of the mushroom cloud. "This is not aimed at our policies," Henry Kissinger intoned. "This is aimed at our existence."

Such rhetoric not only fell easily on American ears. It provided a familiar context for a disoriented national-security bureaucracy that had been created to fight the cold war and was left, at its ending, without clear purpose. "Washington policy and defense cultures still seek out cold-war models," as members of the Defense Science Board, a Defense Department task force commissioned to examine the war on terror, observed in a report last year. "With the surprise announcement of a new struggle, the U.S. government reflexively inclined toward cold-war-style responses to the new threat, without a thought or a care as to whether these were the best responses to a very different strategic situation."

Al Qaeda was not the Nazis or the Soviet Communists. Al Qaeda controlled no state, fielded no regular army. It was a small, conspiratorial organization, dedicated to achieving its aims through guerrilla tactics, notably a kind of spectacular terrorism carried to a level of apocalyptic brutality the world had not before seen. Mass killing was the necessary but not the primary aim, for the point of such terror was to mobilize recruits for a political cause - to move sympathizers to act - and to tempt the enemy into reacting in such a way as to make that mobilization easier. And however extreme and repugnant Al Qaeda's methods, its revolutionary goals were by no means unusual within Islamist opposition groups throughout the Muslim world. "If there is one overarching goal they share," wrote the authors of the Defense Science Board report, "it is the overthrow of what Islamists call the 'apostate' regimes: the tyrannies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan and the gulf states.. . .The United States finds itself in the strategically awkward - and potentially dangerous - situation of being the longstanding prop and alliance partner of these authoritarian regimes. Without the U.S., these regimes could not survive. Thus the U.S. has strongly taken sides in a desperate struggle that is both broadly cast for all Muslims and country-specific."

The broad aim of the many-stranded Salafi movement, which includes the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and of which Al Qaeda is one extreme version, is to return Muslims to the ancient ways of pure Islam - of Islam as it was practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and his early followers in the seventh century. Standing between the more radical Salafi groups and their goal of a conservative Islamic revolution are the "apostate regimes," the "idolators" now ruling in Riyadh, Cairo, Amman, Islamabad and other Muslim capitals. All these authoritarian regimes oppress their people: on this point Al Qaeda and those in the Bush administration who promote "democratization in the Arab world" agree. Many of the Salafists, however, see behind the "near enemies" ruling over them a "far enemy" in Washington, a superpower without whose financial and military support the Mubarak regime, the Saudi royal family and the other conservative autocracies of the Arab world would fall before their attacks. When the United States sent hundreds of thousands of American troops to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Al Qaeda seized on the perfect issue: the "far enemy" had actually come and occupied the Land of the Two Holy Places and done so at the shameful invitation of the "near enemy" - the corrupt Saudi dynasty. As bin Laden observed of the Saudis in his 1996 "Declaration of Jihad": "This situation is a curse put on them by Allah for not objecting to the oppressive and illegitimate behavior and measures of the ruling regime: ignoring the divine Shariah law; depriving people of their legitimate rights; allowing the Americans to occupy the Land of the Two Holy Places."

But how to "re-establish the greatness of this Ummah" - the Muslim people - "and to liberate its occupied sanctities"? On this bin Laden is practical and frank: because of "the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces, a suitable means of fighting must be adopted, i.e., using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy. In other words, to initiate a guerrilla warfare." Such warfare, depending on increasingly spectacular acts of terrorism, would be used to "prepare and instigate the Ummah. . .against the enemy." The notion of "instigation," indeed, is critical, for the purpose of terror is not to destroy your enemy directly but rather to spur on your sleeping allies to enlightenment, to courage and to action. It is a kind of horrible advertisement, meant to show those millions of Muslims who sympathize with Al Qaeda's view of American policy that something can be done to change it.


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III. Fundamentalist Islamic thought took aim at America's policies, not at its existence. Americans tend to be little interested in these policies or their history and thus see the various Middle East cataclysms of the last decades as sudden, unrelated explosions lighting up a murky and threatening landscape, reinforcing the sense that the 9/11 attacks were not only deadly and appalling but also irrational, incomprehensible: that they embodied pure evil. The central strand of American policy - unflinching support for the conservative Sunni regimes of the Persian Gulf - extends back 60 years, to a legendary meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Saud aboard an American cruiser in the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt. The American president and the Saudi king agreed there on a simple bond of interest: the Saudis, rulers over a sparsely populated but incalculably wealthy land, would see their power guaranteed against all threats, internal and external. In return, the United States could count on a stable supply of oil, developed and pumped by American companies. This policy stood virtually unthreatened for more than three decades.

The eruption of Iran's Islamic revolution in 1978 dealt a blow to this compact of interests and cast in relief its central contradictions. The shah, who owed his throne to a covert C.I.A. intervention that returned him to power in 1953, had been a key American ally in the gulf, and the Islamic revolution that swept him from power showed at work what was to become a familiar dynamic: "friendly" autocrats ruling over increasingly impatient and angry peoples who evidence resentment if not outright hostility toward the superpower ally, in whom they see the ultimate source of their own repression.

Iran's Islamic revolution delivered a body blow to the Middle East status quo not unlike that landed by the French Revolution on the European autocratic order two centuries before; it was ideologically aggressive, inherently expansionist and deeply threatening to its neighbors - in this case, to the United States' Sunni allies, many of whom had substantial Shia minorities, and to Iraq, which, though long ruled by Sunnis, had a substantial Shia majority. Ayatollah Khomeini's virulent and persistent calls for Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and the turmoil that had apparently weakened the Iranian armed forces, tempted Saddam Hussein to send his army to attack Iran in 1980. American policy makers looked on this with favor, seeing in the bloody Iran-Iraq war the force that would blunt the revolutionary threat to America's allies. Thus President Reagan sent his special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983 to parlay with Hussein, and thus the administration supported the dictator with billions of dollars of agricultural credits, supplied the Iraqis with hundreds of millions of dollars in advanced weaponry through Egypt and Saudi Arabia and provided Hussein's army with satellite intelligence that may have been used to direct chemical weapons against the massed infantry charges of Iranian suicide brigades.

The Iraqis fought the Iranians to a standstill but not before ripples from Iran's revolution threatened to overwhelm American allies, notably the Saudi dynasty, whose rule was challenged by radicals seizing control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979, and the Egyptian autocracy, whose ruler, Anwar el-Sadat, was assassinated by Islamists as he presided over a military parade in October 1981. The Saudis managed to put down the revolt, killing hundreds. The Egyptians, under Hosni Mubarak, moved with ruthless efficiency to suppress the Islamists, jailing and torturing thousands, among them Osama bin Laden's current deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Merciless repression by both autocracies' effective security services led thousands to flee abroad.

Many went to Afghanistan, which the Soviet Red Army occupied in 1979 to prop up its own tottering client, then under threat from Islamic insurgents - mujahedeen, or "holy warriors," who were being armed by the United States. "It was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, recalled in 1998. "And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." It was a strategy of provocation, for the gambit had the effect of "drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.. . .The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam War."

If, to the Americans, supporting the Afghan mujahedeen seemed an excellent way to bleed the Soviet Union, to the Saudis and other Muslim regimes, supporting a "defensive jihad" to free occupied Muslim lands was a means to burnish their tarnished Islamic credentials while exporting a growing and dangerous resource (frustrated, radical young men) so they would indulge their taste for pious revolution far from home. Among the thousands of holy warriors making this journey was the wealthy young Saudi Osama bin Laden, who would set up the Afghan Services Bureau, a "helping organization" for Arab fighters that gathered names and contact information in a large database - or "qaeda" - which would eventually lend its name to an entirely new organization. Though the Afghan operation was wildly successful, as judged by its American creators - "What is most important to the history of the world?" Brzezinski said in 1998, "some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" - it had at least one unexpected result: it created a global jihad movement, led by veteran fighters who were convinced that they had defeated one superpower and could defeat another.

The present jihad took shape in the backwash of forgotten wars. After the Soviet Army withdrew in defeat, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, leaving the mujahedeen forces to battle for the ruined country in an eight-year blood bath from which the Taliban finally emerged victorious. In the gulf, after eight years of fantastically bloody combat, Saddam Hussein forced the Iranians to sign a cease-fire, a "victory" that left his regime heavily armed, bloodied and bankrupt. To pay for his war, Hussein had borrowed tens of billions of dollars from the Saudis, Kuwaitis and other neighbors, and he now demanded that these debts be forgiven - he had incurred them, as he saw it, defending the lenders from Khomeini - and that oil prices be raised. The Kuwaitis' particularly aggressive refusal to do either led Hussein, apparently believing that the Americans would accept a fait accompli, to invade and annex the country.

The Iraqi Army flooding into Kuwait represented, to bin Laden, the classic opportunity. He rushed to see the Saudi leaders, proposing that he defend the kingdom with his battle-tested corps of veteran holy warriors. The Saudis listened patiently to the pious young man - his father, after all, had been one of the kingdom's richest men - but did not take him seriously. Within a week, King Fahd had agreed to the American proposal, carried by Richard Cheney, then the secretary of defense, to station American soldiers - "infidel armies" - in the Land of the Two Holy Places. This momentous decision led to bin Laden's final break with the Saudi dynasty.

The American presence, and the fatal decision to leave American forces stationed in Saudi Arabia as a trip wire or deterrent even after Hussein had been defeated, provided bin Laden with a critical propaganda point, for it gave to his worldview, of a Muslim world under relentless attack, and its central argument, that the "unjust and renegade ruling regimes" of the Islamic world were in fact "enslaved by the United States," a concrete and vivid reality. The "near enemies" and their ruthless security services had proved resistant to direct assault, and the time had come to confront directly the one antagonist able to bring together all the jihadists in a single great battle: the "far enemy" across the sea.


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IV. The deaths of nearly 3,000 people, the thousands left behind to mourn them, the great plume hanging over Lower Manhattan carrying the stench of the vaporized buildings and their buried dead: mass murder of the most abominable, cowardly kind appears to be so at the heart of what happened on this day four years ago that it seems beyond grotesque to remind ourselves that for the attackers those thousands of dead were only a means to an end. Not the least disgusting thing about terrorism is that it makes objects of human beings, makes use of them, exploits their deaths as a means to accomplish something else: to send a message, to force a concession, to advertise a cause. Though such cold instrumentality is not unknown in war - large-scale bombing of civilians, "terror bombing," as it used to be known, does much the same thing - terrorism's ruthless and intimate randomness seems especially appalling.

Terror is a way of talking. Those who employed it so unprecedentedly on 9/11 were seeking not just the large-scale killing of Americans but to achieve something by means of the large-scale killing of Americans. Not just large-scale, it should be added: spectacular.

The asymmetric weapons that the 19 terrorists used on 9/11 were not only the knives and box cutters they brandished or the fuel-laden airliners they managed to commandeer but, above all, that most American of technological creations: the television set. On 9/11, the jihadists used this weapon with great determination and ruthlessness to attack the most powerful nation in the history of the world at its point of greatest vulnerability: at the level of spectacle. They did it by creating an image, to repeat Peter Jennings's words, "beyond our imagination."

The goal, first and foremost, was to diminish American prestige - showing that the superpower could be bloodied, that for all its power, its defeat was indeed conceivable. All the major attacks preceding 9/11 attributed at least in part to Al Qaeda - the shooting down of U.S. Army helicopters in Mogadishu in 1993, the truck-bombing of American military housing at Khobar in 1996, the car-bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, the suicide-bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden in 2000 - were aimed at the same goal: to destroy the aura of American power. Power, particularly imperial power, rests not on its use but on its credibility; U.S. power in the Middle East depends not on ships and missiles but on the certainty that the United States is invincible and stands behind its friends. The jihadis used terrorism to create a spectacle that would remove this certainty. They were by no means the first guerrilla group to adopt such a strategy. "History and our observation persuaded us," recalled Menachem Begin, the future Israeli prime minister who used terror with great success to drive the British out of Palestine during the mid-1940's, "that if we could succeed in destroying the government's prestige in Eretz Israel, the removal of its rule would follow automatically. Thenceforward, we gave no peace to this weak spot. Throughout all the years of our uprising, we hit at the British government's prestige, deliberately, tirelessly, unceasingly." In its most spectacular act, in July 1946, the Irgun guerrilla forces led by Begin bombed the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, most of them civilians.

The 9/11 attacks were a call to persuade Muslims who might share bin Laden's broad view of American power to sympathize with, support or even join the jihad he had declared against the "far enemy." "Those young men," bin Laden said of the terrorists two months after the attacks, "said in deeds, in New York and Washington, speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world. The speeches are understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs - even by Chinese.. . .[I]n Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than the people who accepted Islam in the last 11 years." To this, a sheik in a wheelchair shown in the videotape replies: "Hundreds of people used to doubt you, and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming out to join you." Grotesque as it is to say, the spectacle of 9/11 was meant to serve, among other things, as an enormous recruiting poster.

But recruitment to what? We should return here to the lessons of Afghanistan, not only the obvious one of the defeat of a powerful Soviet Army by guerrilla forces but the more subtle one taught by the Americans, who by clever use of covert aid to the Afghan resistance tempted the Soviets to invade the country and thereby drew "the Russians into an Afghan trap." Bin Laden seems to have hoped to set in motion a similar strategy. According to a text attributed to Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Army colonel now generally identified as bin Laden's military chief, "the ultimate objective was to prompt" the United States "to come out of its hole" and take direct military action in an Islamic country. "What we had wished for actually happened. It was crowned by the announcement of Bush Jr. of his crusade against Islam and Muslims everywhere." ("This is a new kind of evil," the president said five days after the attacks, "and we understand. . .this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.")

The 9/11 attacks seem to have been intended at least in part to provoke an overwhelming American response: most likely an invasion of Afghanistan, which would lead the United States, like the Soviet Union before it, into an endless, costly and politically fatal quagmire. Thus, two days before the attacks, Qaeda agents posing as television journalists taping an interview murdered Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, with a bomb concealed in a video camera - apparently a pre-emptive strike intended to throw into confusion the United States' obvious ally in the coming invasion of Afghanistan.

For the jihadists, luring the Americans into Afghanistan would accomplish at least two things: by drawing the United States into a protracted guerrilla war in which the superpower would occupy a Muslim country and kill Muslim civilians - with the world media, including independent Arab networks like Al Jazeera, broadcasting the carnage - it would leave increasingly isolated those autocratic Muslim regimes that depended for their survival on American support. And by forcing the United States to prosecute a long, costly and inconclusive guerrilla war, it would severely test, and ultimately break, American will, leading to a collapse of American prestige and an eventual withdrawal - first, physically, from Afghanistan and then, politically, from the "apostate regimes" in Riyadh, Cairo and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

In his "Declaration of Jihad" in 1996, bin Laden focused on American political will as the United States' prime vulnerability, the enemy's "center of gravity" that his guerrilla war must target and destroy. "The defense secretary of the crusading Americans had said that 'the explosions at Riyadh and Al-Khobar had taught him one lesson: that is, not to withdraw when attacked by cowardly terrorists.' We say to the defense secretary, Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place in 1983?

"But your most disgraceful case was in Somalia.. . .When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you.. . .The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear."

In Afghanistan, bin Laden would be disappointed. The U.S. military initially sent in no heavy armor but instead restricted the American effort to aerial bombardment in support of several hundred Special Operations soldiers on the ground who helped lead the Northern Alliance forces in a rapid advance. Kabul and other cities quickly fell. America was caught in no Afghan quagmire, or at least not in the sort of protracted, highly televisual bloody mess bin Laden had envisioned. But bin Laden and his senior leadership, holed up in the mountain complex of Tora Bora, managed to survive the bombing and elude the Afghan forces that the Americans commissioned to capture them. During the next months and years, as the United States and its allies did great damage to Al Qaeda's operational cadre, arresting or killing thousands of its veterans, its major leadership symbols survived intact, and those symbols, and their power to lead and to inspire, became Al Qaeda's most important asset.

After Tora Bora, the Qaeda fighters who survived regrouped in neighboring countries. "We began to converge on Iran one after the other," Saif al-Adel recalled in a recent book by an Egyptian journalist. "We began to form some groups of fighters to return to Afghanistan to carry out well-prepared missions there." It is these men, along with the reconstituted Taliban, that 16,000 American soldiers are still fighting today.

Not all the fighters would return to Afghanistan. Other targets of opportunity loomed on the horizon of the possible. "Abu Mus'ab and his Jordanian and Palestinian comrades opted to go to Iraq," al-Adel recalled, for, he said, an "examination of the situation indicated that the Americans would inevitably make a mistake and invade Iraq sooner or later. Such an invasion would aim at overthrowing the regime. Therefore, we should play an important role in the confrontation and resistance."

Abu Mus'ab is Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi - or A.M.Z. to the American troops who are pursuing him and his Qaeda in Mesopotamia forces all over the shattered landscape of occupied Iraq. The United States, as Al Qaeda had hoped, had indeed come out of its hole.


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V. It was strangely beautiful, the aftermath of the explosion in Baghdad: two enormous fires, bright orange columns of flame rising perhaps 20 feet into the air, and clearly discernible in the midst of each a cage of glowing metal: what remained of two four-wheel-drive vehicles. Before the flames, two bodies lay amid a scattering of glass and sand; the car bomb had toppled the sandbags piled high to protect the building, collapsing the facade and crushing a dozen people. It was Oct. 27, 2003, and I stood before what remained of the Baghdad office of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In the distance, I heard a second huge explosion, saw rising the great plume of oily smoke; within the next 45 minutes, insurgents attacked four more times, bombing police stations throughout the capital, killing at least 35. Simultaneity and spectacle: Qaeda trademarks. I was gazing at Zarqawi's handiwork.

Behind me, the press had gathered, a jostling crowd of aggressive, mostly young people bristling with lenses short and long, pushing against the line of young American soldiers, who, assault rifles leveled, were screaming at them to stay back. The scores of glittering lenses were a necessary part of the equation, transforming what in military terms would have been a minor engagement into a major defeat.

"There is no war here," an American colonel told me a couple of days before in frustration and disgust. "There's no division-on-division engagements, nothing really resembling a war. Not a real war anyway."

It was not a war the Americans had been trained or equipped to fight. With fewer than 150,000 troops - and many fewer combat soldiers - they were trying to contain a full-blown insurgency in a country the size of California. The elusive enemy - an evolving, loose coalition of a score or so groups, some of them ex-Baathists from Saddam Hussein's dozen or so security agencies, some former Iraqi military personnel, some professional Islamic insurgents like Zarqawi, some foreign volunteers from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Syria come to take the jihad to the Americans - attacked not with tanks or artillery or infantry assaults but with roadside bombs and suicide car bombers and kidnappings. Iraq, bin Laden declared, had become a "golden opportunity" to start a "third world war" against "the crusader-Zionist coalition."

Amid the barbed wire and blast walls and bomb debris of post-occupation Iraq, you could discern a clear strategy behind the insurgent violence. The insurgents had identified the Americans' points of vulnerability: their international isolation; their forced distance, as a foreign occupier, from Iraqis; and their increasing disorientation as they struggled to keep their footing on the fragile, shifting, roiling political ground of post-Hussein Iraq. And the insurgents hit at each of these vulnerabilities, as Begin had urged his followers to do, "deliberately, tirelessly, unceasingly."

When, during the summer of 2003, the Bush administration seemed to be reaching out to the United Nations for political help in Iraq, insurgents struck at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing the talented envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others and driving the United Nations from the country. When the Americans seemed to be trying to attract Arab forces to come to Iraq to help, the insurgents struck at the Jordanian Embassy, killing 17. When the Turks offered to send troops, the insurgents bombed the Turkish Embassy. When nongovernmental organizations seemed the only outsiders still working to ease the situation in Iraq, insurgents struck at the Red Cross, driving it and most other nongovernmental organizations from the country.

Insurgents in Iraq and jihadists abroad struck America's remaining allies. First they hit the Italians, car-bombing their base in Nasiriyah in November 2003, killing 28. Then they struck the Spanish, bombing commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004, killing 191. Finally they struck the British, bombing three London Underground trains and a double-decker bus this July, killing 56. It is as if the insurgents, with cold and patient precision, were severing one by one the fragile lines that connected the American effort in Iraq to the rest of the world.

With car bombs and assassinations and commando attacks, insurgents have methodically set out to kill any Iraqi who might think of cooperating with the Americans, widening the crevasse between occupiers and occupied. They have struck at water lines and electricity substations and oil pipelines, interrupting the services that Iraqis depended on, particularly during the unbearably hot summers, keeping electrical service in Baghdad far below what it was under Saddam Hussein - often only a few hours a day this summer - and oil exports 300,000 barrels a day below their prewar peak (helping to double world oil prices). Building on the chaotic unbridled looting of the first weeks of American rule, the insurgents have worked to destroy any notion of security and to make clear that the landscape of apocalyptic destruction that is Baghdad, with its omnipresent concrete blast walls and rolls of concertina wire and explosions and gunshots, should be laid at the feet of the American occupier, that unseen foreign power that purports to rule the country from behind concrete blast walls in the so-called Green Zone but dares to venture out only in tanks and armored cars.

"With. . .officials attempting to administrate from behind masses of barbed wire, in heavily defended buildings, and. . .living in pathetic seclusion in 'security zones,' one cannot escape the conclusion that the government. . .is a hunted organization with little hope of ever being able to cope with conditions in this country as they exist today." However vividly these words fit contemporary Baghdad, they are in fact drawn from the report of the American consul general in Jerusalem in 1947, describing what Begin's guerrilla forces achieved in their war against the British. "The very existence of an underground," as Begin remarked in his memoirs, "must, in the end, undermine the prestige of a colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence. Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow to its standing."

In Iraq, the insurgents have presided over a catastrophic collapse in confidence in the Americans and a concomitant fall in their power. It is difficult to think of a place in which terror has been deployed on such a scale: there have been suicide truck bombs, suicide tanker bombs, suicide police cars, suicide bombers on foot, suicide bombers posing as police officers, suicide bombers posing as soldiers, even suicide bombers on bicycles. While the American death toll climbs steadily toward 2,000, the number of Iraqi dead probably stands at 10 times that and perhaps many more; no one knows. Conservative unofficial counts put the number of Iraqi dead in the war at somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000, in a country a tenth the size of the United States.

Civil wars, of course, are especially bloody, and a civil war is now being fought in Iraq. The country is slowly splitting apart along the lines where French and British negotiators stitched it together early in the last century out of three Ottoman provinces - Mosul, Baghdad and Basra - and it is doing so with the enthusiastic help of the Islamists, who are doing all they can to provoke a Shia-Sunni regionwide war.

The Kurds in the north, possessed of their own army and legislature, want to secure what they believe are their historic rights to the disputed city of Kirkuk, including its oil fields, and be quit of Iraq. The Shia in the south, now largely ruled by Islamic party militias trained by the Iranians and coming under the increasingly strict sway of the clerics on social matters, are evolving their oil-rich mini-state into a paler version of the Islamic republic next door. And in the center, the Baathist elite of Saddam Hussein's security services and army - tens of thousands of well-armed professional intelligence operatives and soldiers - have formed an alliance of convenience with Sunni Islamists, domestic and foreign, in order to assert their rights in a unitary Iraq. They are in effective control of many cities and towns, and they have the burdensome and humiliating presence of the foreign occupier to thank for the continuing success of their recruitment efforts. In a letter to bin Laden that was intercepted by American forces in January 2004, Zarqawi asked: "When the Americans disappear. . .what will become of our situation?"


(continued)

[magician]

As Zarqawi described in his letter and in subsequent broadcasts, his strategy in Iraq is to strike at the Shia - and thereby provoke a civil war. "A nation of heretics," the Shia "are the key element of change," he wrote. "If we manage to draw them onto the terrain of partisan war, it will be possible to tear the Sunnis away from their heedlessness, for they will feel the weight of the imminence of danger." Again a strategy of provocation - which plays on an underlying reality: that Iraq sits on the critical sectarian fault line of the Middle East and that a conflict there gains powerful momentum from the involvement of neighboring states, with Iran strongly supporting the Shia and with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria strongly sympathetic to the Sunnis. More and more, you can discern this outline in the chaos of the current war, with the Iranian-trained militias of the Shia Islamist parties that now control the Iraqi government battling Sunni Islamists, both Iraqi and foreign-born, and former Baathists.

In the midst of it all, increasingly irrelevant, are the Americans, who have the fanciest weapons but have never had sufficient troops, or political will, to assert effective control over the country. If political authority comes from achieving a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans, from those early days when they sat in their tanks and watched over the wholesale looting of public institutions, never did achieve political authority in Iraq. They fussed over liberalizing the economy and writing constitutions and achieving democracy in the Middle East when in fact there was really only one question in Iraq, emerging again and again in each successive political struggle, most recently in the disastrously managed writing of the constitution: how to shape a new political dispensation in which the age-old majority Shia can take control from the minority Sunni and do it in a way that minimized violence and insecurity - do it in a way, that is, that the Sunnis would be willing to accept, however reluctantly, without resorting to armed resistance. This might have been accomplished with hundreds of thousands of troops, iron control and a clear sense of purpose. The Americans had none of these. Instead they relied first on a policy of faith and then on one of improvisation, driven in part by the advice of Iraqi exile "friends" who used the Americans for their own purposes. Some of the most strikingly ideological decisions, like abruptly firing and humiliating the entire Iraqi Army and purging from their jobs many hundreds of thousands of Baath Party members, seemed designed to alienate and antagonize a Sunni population already terrified of its security in the new Iraq. "You Americans," one Sunni businessman said to me in Baghdad last February, shaking his head in wonder, "you have created your own enemies here."

The United States never used what authority it had to do more than pretend to control the gathering chaos, never managed to look clearly at the country and confront Iraq's underlying political dysfunction, of which the tyranny of Saddam Hussein was the product, not the cause. "The illusionists," Ambassador John Negroponte's people called their predecessors, the officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer III. Now, day by day, the illusion is slipping away, and with it what authority the Americans had in Iraq. What is coming to take its place looks increasingly like a failed state.

VI. It is an oft-heard witticism in Washington that the Iraq war is over and that the Iranians won. And yet the irony seems misplaced. A truly democratic Iraq was always likely to be an Iraq led not only by Shia, who are the majority of Iraqis, but by those Shia parties that are the largest and best organized - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Islamic Party - which happen to be those blessed by the religious authorities and nurtured in Iran. Nor would it be a surprise if a democratic Saudi Arabia turned out to be a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia and one much less friendly to the United States. Osama bin Laden knows this, and so do American officials. This is why the United States is "friendly" with "apostate regimes." Democratic outcomes do not always ensure friendly governments. Often the contrary is true. On this simple fact depends much of the history of American policy not only in the Middle East but also in Latin America and other parts of the world throughout the cold war. Bush administration officials, for all their ideological fervor, did the country no favor by ignoring it.

In launching his new cold war, George W. Bush chose a peculiarly ideological version of cold-war history. He opted not for containment, the cautious, status quo grand strategy usually attributed to the late George F. Kennan, but for rollback. Containment, by which the United States determinedly resisted Soviet attempts to expand its influence, would have meant a patient, methodical search for terrorists, discriminating between those groups that threaten the United States and those that do not, pursuing the former with determined, practical policies that would have drawn much from the military and law-enforcement cooperation of our allies and that would have included an effective program of nonproliferation to keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands. Rollback, on the other hand, meant something quite different; those advocating it during the 1950's considered containment immoral, for it recognized the status quo: Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. They wanted instead to destroy Communism entirely by "rolling back" Communists from territory they had gained, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur did briefly and, it turned out, catastrophically, in North Korea, and as President Eisenhower refused to do when he declined to support the Hungarian revolutionaries against the Soviet invasion in 1956.

The original advocates of rollback lost that struggle. In this new cold war, the rollback advocates triumphed and adopted as the heart of their policy a high-stakes, metaphysical gamble to "democratize the Middle East" and thus put an end, once and for all, to terrorism. They relied on a "domino theory" in which the successful implantation of democracy in Iraq would lead to a "democratic revolution" across the region. The ambition of this idea is breathtaking; it depends on a conception of American power as virtually limitless and on an entirely fanciful vision of Iraqi politics, a kind of dogged political wish-fulfillment that no sober analysis could penetrate. Replacing any real willingness to consider whether a clear course existed between here and there, between an invasion and occupation of Iraq and a democratic Middle East, was, at bottom, the simple conviction that since the United States enjoyed a "preponderance of power" unseen in the world since the Roman Empire, and since its cause of democratic revolution was so incontrovertibly just, defeat was inconceivable. One detects here an echo of Vietnam: the inability to imagine that the all-powerful United States might lose.

(continued)

[magician]

American power, however, is not limitless. Armies can destroy and occupy, but it takes much more to build a lasting order, especially on the shifting sands of a violent political struggle: another Vietnam echo. Learning the lesson this time around may prove more costly, for dominoes can fall both ways. "Political engineering on this scale could easily go awry," Stephen D. Biddle, a U.S. Army War College analyst, wrote this past April in a shrewd analysis. "If a democratic Iraq can catalyze reform elsewhere, so a failed Iraq could presumably export chaos to its neighbors. A regionwide Lebanon might well prove beyond our capacity to police, regardless of effort expended. And if so, then we will have replaced a region of police states with a region of warlords and chronic instability. This could easily prove to be an easier operating environment for terrorism than the police states it replaces."


The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic. But the dynamic has already been set in place. The United States is running out of troops. By the spring of 2006, nearly every active-duty combat unit is likely to have been deployed twice. The National Guard and Reserves, meanwhile, make up an unprecedented 40 percent of the force, and the Guard is in the "stage of meltdown," as Gen. Barry McCaffrey, retired, recently told Congress. Within 24 months, "the wheels are coming off." For all the apocalyptic importance President Bush and his administration ascribed to the Iraq war, they made virtually no move to expand the military, no decision to restore the draft. In the end, the president judged his tax cuts more important than his vision of a "democratic Middle East." The administration's relentless political style, integral to both its strength and its weakness, left it wholly unable to change course and to add more troops when they might have made a difference. That moment is long past; the widespread unpopularity of the occupation in Iraq and in the Islamic world is now critical to insurgent recruitment and makes it possible for a growing insurgent force numbering in the tens of thousands to conceal itself within the broader population.

Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative.

Of the many reasons that American leaders chose to invade and occupy Iraq - to democratize the Middle East; to remove an unpredictable dictator from a region vital to America's oil supply; to remove a threat from Israel, America's ally; to restore the prestige sullied on 9/11 with a tank-led procession of triumph down the avenues of a conquered capital; to seize the chance to overthrow a regime capable of building an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons - of all of these, it is remarkable that the Bush administration chose to persuade Americans and the world by offering the one reason that could be proved to be false. The failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, and the collapse of the rationale for the war, left terribly exposed precisely what bin Laden had targeted as the critical American vulnerability: the will to fight.

How that collapse, reflected in poll numbers, will be translated into policy is a more complicated question. One of 9/11's more obvious consequences was to restore to the Republicans the advantage in national security they surrendered with the cold war's end; their ruthless exploitation of this advantage and the Democrats' compromising embrace of the Iraq war has in effect left the country, on this issue, without an opposition party. Republicans, who fear to face the voters shackled to a leader whose approval ratings have slid into the low 40's, are the ones demanding answers on the war. The falling poll numbers, the approaching midterm elections and the desperate manpower straits of the military have set in motion a dynamic that could see gradual American withdrawals beginning in 2006, as Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander in Iraq, acknowledged publicly in July. Unless Iraq's political process, which has turned another downward spiral with Sunni negotiators' rejection of the constitution, can somehow be retrieved, American power in Iraq will go on deteriorating.

Two and a half years into the invasion, for U.S. policy in Iraq, the time of "the illusionists" has finally passed. Since the January elections, which Sunnis largely boycotted, American officials have worked hard to persuade Sunni leaders to take part in the constitutional referendum and elections, hoping thereby to isolate the Baathist and Islamist extremists and drain strength from the insurgency. This effort comes very late, however, when Iraqi politics, and the forces pulling the country apart, have taken on a momentum that waning American power no longer seems able to stop. Even as the constitutional drama came to a climax last month, the president telephoned Abdul Aziz Hakim, the Shia cleric who leads the Sciri Party, appealing for concessions that might have tempted the Sunnis to agree to the draft; the Shia politician, faced with the American president's personal plea, did not hesitate to turn him down flat. Perhaps the best hope now for a gradual American withdrawal that would not worsen the war is to negotiate a regional solution, which might seek an end to Sunni infiltration from U.S. allies in exchange for Shia guarantees of the Sunni position in Iraq and a phased American departure.

For all the newfound realism in the second-term administration's foreign policy, in which we have seen a willingness finally to negotiate seriously with North Korea and Iran, the president seems nowhere close to considering such an idea in Iraq, insisting that there the choice is simple: the United States can either "stay the course" or "cut and run." "An immediate withdrawal of our troops in Iraq, or the broader Middle East, as some have called for," the president declared last month, "would only embolden the terrorists and create a staging ground to launch more attacks against America and free nations." These words, familiar and tired, offering no solution beyond staying a course that seems to be leading nowhere, have ceased to move Americans weary of the rhetoric of terror. That does not mean, however, that they may not be entirely true.

(continued)

[magician]

VII. We cannot know what future Osama bin Laden imagined when he sent off his 19 suicide terrorists on their mission four years ago. He got much wrong; the U.S. military, light years ahead of the Red Army, would send no tank divisions to Afghanistan, and there has been no uprising in the Islamic world. One suspects, though, that if bin Laden had been told on that day that in a mere 48 months he would behold a world in which the United States, "the idol of the age," was bogged down in an endless guerrilla war fighting in a major Muslim country; a world in which its all-powerful army, with few allies and little sympathy, found itself overstretched and exhausted; in which its dispirited people were starting to demand from their increasingly unpopular leader a withdrawal without victory - one suspects that such a prophecy would have pleased him. He had struck at the American will, and his strategy, which relied in effect on the persistent reluctance of American leaders to speak frankly to their people about the costs and burdens of war and to expend the political capital that such frank talk would require, had proved largely correct.

He has suffered damage as well. Many of his closest collaborators have been killed or captured, his training camps destroyed, his sanctuary occupied. "What Al Qaeda has lost," a senior Defense Department official said five months after the attacks, "again, it's lost its center of gravity.. . .The benefits of Afghanistan cannot be overestimated. Again, it was the one state sponsor they had." This analysis seems now a vision of the past. Al Qaeda was always a flexible, ghostly organization, a complex worldwide network made up of shifting alliances and marriages of convenience with other shadowy groups. Now Al Qaeda's "center of gravity," such as it is, has gone elsewhere.

In December 2003, a remarkable document, "Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers," appeared on the Internet, setting out a fascinating vision of how to isolate the United States and pick off its allies one by one. The truly ripe fruit, concludes the author, is Spain: "In order to force the Spanish government to withdraw from Iraq the resistance should deal painful blows to its forces. . .[and] make utmost use of the upcoming general election.. . .We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three blows, after which it will have to withdraw.. . ."

Three months later, on March 11, 2004 - 3/11, as it has come to be known - a cell of North African terrorists struck at the Atocha Train Station in Madrid. One hundred ninety-one people died - a horrific toll but nowhere near what it could have been had all of the bombs actually detonated, simultaneously, and in the station itself. Had the terrorists succeeded in bringing the roof of the station down, the casualties could have surpassed those of 9/11.

In the event, they were quite sufficient to lead to the defeat of the Spanish government and the decision of its successor to withdraw its troops from Iraq. What seems most notable about the Madrid attack, however - and the attack on Jewish and foreign sites in Casablanca on May 17, 2003, among others - is that the perpetrators were "home-grown" and not, strictly speaking, Al Qaeda. "After 2001, when the U.S. destroyed the camps and housing and turned off the funding, bin Laden was left with little control," Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. case officer who has studied the structure of the network, has written. "The movement has now degenerated into something like the Internet. Spontaneous groups of friends, as in Madrid and Casablanca, who have few links to any central leadership, are generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent errors and poor training."

Under this view, Al Qaeda, in the form we knew it, has been subsumed into the broader, more diffuse political world of radical Salafi politics. "The network is now self-organized from the bottom up and is very decentralized," Sageman wrote. "With local initiative and flexibility, it's very robust."

We have entered the era of the amateurs. Those who attacked the London Underground - whether or not they had any contact with Al Qaeda - manufactured their crude bombs from common chemicals (including hydrogen peroxide, bleach and drain cleaner), making them in plastic food containers, toting them to Luton Station in coolers and detonating them with cellphone alarms. One click on the Internet and you can pull up a Web site offering a recipe - or, for that matter, one showing you how to make a suicide vest from commonly found items, including a video download demonstrating how to use the device: "There is a possibility that the two seats on his right and his left might not be hit with the shrapnel," the unseen narrator tells the viewer. Not to worry, however: "The explosion will surely kill the passengers in those seats."

During the four years since the attacks of 9/11, while terrorism worldwide has flourished, we have seen no second attack on the United States. This may be owed to the damage done Al Qaeda. Or perhaps planning and preparation for such an attack is going on now. When it comes to the United States itself, the terrorists have their own "second-novel problem" - how do you top the first production? More likely, though, the next attack, when it comes, will originate not in the minds of veteran Qaeda planners but from this new wave of amateurs: viral Al Qaeda, political sympathizers who nourish themselves on Salafi rhetoric and bin Laden speeches and draw what training they require from their computer screens. Very little investment and preparation can bring huge rewards. The possibilities are endless, and terrifyingly simple: rucksacks containing crude homemade bombs placed in McDonald's - one, say, in Times Square and one on Wilshire Boulevard, 3,000 miles away, exploded simultaneously by cellphone. The effort is small, the potential impact overwhelming.

Attacks staged by amateurs with little or no connection to terrorist networks, and thus no visible trail to follow, are nearly impossible to prevent, even for the United States, with all of its power. Indeed, perhaps what is most astonishing about these hard four years is that we have managed to show the world the limits of our power. In launching a war on Iraq that we have been unable to win, we have done the one thing a leader is supposed never to do: issue a command that is not followed. A withdrawal from Iraq, rapid or slow, with the Islamists still holding the field, will signal, as bin Laden anticipated, a failure of American will. Those who will view such a withdrawal as the critical first step in a broader retreat from the Middle East will surely be encouraged to go on the attack. That is, after all, what you do when your enemy retreats. In this new world, where what is necessary to go on the attack is not armies or training or even technology but desire and political will, we have ensured, by the way we have fought this forever war, that it is precisely these qualities our enemies have in large and growing supply.


Mark Danner is a professor of journalism and politics at the University of California at Berkeley and Bard College and the author, most recently, of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror."


END

[magician]

Sorry for the length of that article, but the NYT requires registration, and has the damnable practice of archiving old articles and then requiring purchase to read them.

I think that this long article presents a great deal of decent analysis. I do not agree with every point, but I fundamentally agree with the heart of the article: As was long ago identified as a truism of the discipline, terrorism is theater.

Without global media coverage, most incidents diminish to the level of the tactical.

[ghuinness]

Interesting read, thanks for posting.

Think this months FA's "Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?" is also worth reviewing.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050901faessay84506/f-gregory-gause-iii/can-democracy-stop-terrorism.html

While all these articles are informative, I always come away with the same question: "What should we do now?". May I ask which parts of the NYT you disagree with?

thanks.

[Bill Harsey]

Magician,
Thanks for posting this. I know about the NYT archive fee charge.

This is gonna take some work to get through.

[magician]

Certainly.

"...Americans confront a stark choice: whether to go on indefinitely fighting a politically self-destructive counterinsurgency war that keeps the jihadists increasingly well supplied with volunteers or to withdraw from a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that remains chaotic and unstable and beset with civil strife and thereby hand Al Qaeda and its allies a major victory in the war on terror's "central front."

I do not think that we are constrained to just these two choices.

I do not believe that the counterinsurgency in Iraq will be indefinite, and I certainly do not believe that reducing American involvement in Iraq, even if we leave behind a broken country "beset by chaos and civil strife," as the author phrases it, will be tantamount to handing Al Qaeda a major victory.

I have long been an advocate of a Salvador strategy writ large, and I think that we are lurching towards that model incrementally.

The Reader's Digest version of that strategy includes:

1. Small US forces, focused primarily on advisory efforts, modernization, training, and parallel command, control, intelligence, and logistics networks.

2. Political measures, such as the current roadmap, including a new constitution, elections, and Iraqi forms of representative democracy. A viable judiciary which does not release captured terrorists is vital.

3. Economic measures, to include nurturing current free market flourishing in Iraq, despite the vulnerable road and rail networks in the country. Inherent in this concept is a national energy policy for the country which ensures that Iraqis perceive that Americans are not "stealing their oil." We also need to do what is feasible to ensure that endemic corruption does not generate a new mafia class.

The author touches on the likelihood that Iraq will fission into a Shia south, a Kurdish north, with a Sunni middle. This is not necessarily a grave danger to US goals in the region, nor to US policies. We have good allies in the Kurds, and I hope that we can keep them, despite our abuse of their nationalism in the past. This will obviously cause friction with Turkey, a NATO ally, and will heighten our differences with Syria, which I believe to be inevitable, anyway.

I agree that it is likely that the Shia south will increasingly fuse to Iran, but Iran itself is neither monolithic nor invulnerable. I believe that regime change in Iran is also inevitable, given time. The demographics alone are on our side. The problem is, it is impossible to assign a timetable to regime change in Iran, and this complicates our ability to plan and to carefully influence it in our favor.

I believe that a dissident and rebellious Sunni center will be caught between the Kurds and the Shia, and it very well may end up resembling the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. It is, perhaps, more possible to contain a Sunni heartland than an entire country, and if nothing else, it can continue to serve as a magnet for Jihadis, who should be encouraged to go there to be killed.

Such a Sunni center can serve as a safety valve for both Jordan and Saudi Arabia, until political change can take place in those countries, and as a causus belli for transitioning American focus onto Syria. Yes, this is a diabolical concept. I shudder to write it. The alternative, of course, is for the Sunni to accept that their time in power has passed, and to make acommodations to the new modalities of power in a federal Iraq. The choice is theirs. America can assist Kurds and Shia in containing and kililng Jihadis far more readily than America can continue to fight as we fight now.

I doubt that the Sunni in Iraq will make such pragmatic decisions. It is more likely that they will cleave to their dreams of a resurgent Caliphate, and doom themselves to generations of poverty and bitterness.

The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic.

I disagree with this statement.

Rather than "withdrawal," I would say "draw down."

I have long bemoaned the conventional mindset of Big Army, and the approach to warfare still held dear by our generals. Afghanistan illustrated a new way of waging war, and it is one that needs to be fostered. Unfortunately, sending in small, specialized units backed by money, logistics and air power is not as expensive as waging conventional warfare, which has favorable economic consequences here in the US. Yes, I am cynical, and I am more prone to what others dismiss as conspiracy theories than I would like.

But the dynamic has already been set in place. The United States is running out of troops.

This is only true if we persist in fighting as we have been fighting. If we transition to a different model, we could conceivably sustain advisory efforts in Iraq much longer. Such a model would be heavily dependent on our ability to train and prepare enough specialists to handle the job. That means thousands of Arabic speakers graduating from DLI, yes, but what it also means is exploiting the historic quality of our current forces, who have never been better trained, nor more experienced. What a resource to be tapped!

Unfortunately, it is not possible to mass produce such specialists, given our current hidebound and hoary conventional military leadership. It is too significant a shift, I fear. Some acculteration is inevitable. Where the sweet spot resides...is the real question, from a doctrinal and practical standpoint.

For all the apocalyptic importance President Bush and his administration ascribed to the Iraq war, they made virtually no move to expand the military, no decision to restore the draft.

I believe that the author displays his ignorance with this statement, as any professional soldier knows that an all volunteer force, such as we have now, is vastly preferable to one incorporating involuntary draftees.

It is the quality of US forces more than our technology, even, which makes our military such a formidable force. And our technology requires specialized forces, who are retained wilingly.

We cannot revert to a "meat grinder" approach. That would be doomed to failure. We do not require infinite numbers of sacrificial infantrymen. We require smart, professional, excessively trained and competent specialists in counterinsurgency. If such men start out as conventional soldiers, so much the better. It is an excellent foundation. Those who cannot make the transition can remain in the conventional forces. Those who can adapt are those that we need to refine and retain.

...the widespread unpopularity of the occupation in Iraq and in the Islamic world is now critical to insurgent recruitment and makes it possible for a growing insurgent force numbering in the tens of thousands to conceal itself within the broader population.

I do agree with this statement. It is one of the primary reasons why we need to shift to a more deft way of waging war. There is another historical example, which itself influenced the evolution of counterinsurgency in El Salvador: the Phoenix Program.

We need a Phoenix Program for a new era, one which respects no national boundaries, and which never relents. We need to focus on those who post Al Qaeda screeds and terrorist cookbooks on the internet, we need to focus on their financing, we need to focus on killing their bombmakers and technicians, and we also need to focus on their madrasas, and their clerics.

Even more, however, we need an information strategy for the age of the internet.

Nothing makes terror more feasible than mass media. Without the media, terrorism is tactical -- weapons of mass destruction aside.

But the issue of WMDs....is a whole other conversation.

-

[The Reaper]

I thank God that the current media was not around during the Revolutionary War.

Given the length of the struggle and the setbacks our forefathers encountered, I am sure that the cause would have been deemed lost and without merit.

This history should be taught in our schools (without my edits of American successes). How many failures, before at last, success?

TR

January 3, 1777 - During the harsh winter, Washington's army shrinks to about a thousand men as enlistments expire and deserters flee the hardships. By spring, with the arrival of recruits, Washington will have 9000 men.

June 17, 1777 - A British force of 7700 men under Gen. John Burgoyne invades from Canada, sailing down Lake Champlain toward Albany, planning to link up with Gen. Howe who will come north from New York City, thus cutting off New England from the rest of the colonies.

July 6, 1777 - Gen. Burgoyne's troops stun the Americans with the capture of Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. Its military supplies are greatly needed by Washington's forces. The loss of the fort is a tremendous blow to American morale.

July 23, 1777 - British Gen. Howe, with 15,000 men, sets sail from New York for Chesapeake Bay to capture Philadelphia, instead of sailing north to meet up with Gen. Burgoyne.

August 25, 1777 - British Gen. Howe disembarks at Chesapeake Bay with his troops.

September 9-11, 1777 - In the Battle of Brandywine Creek, Gen. Washington and the main American Army of 10,500 men are driven back toward Philadelphia by Gen. Howe's British troops. Both sides suffer heavy losses. Congress then leaves Philadelphia and resettles in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

September 26, 1777 - British forces under Gen. Howe occupy Philadelphia. Congress then relocates to York, Pennsylvania.

February 23, 1778 - Baron von Steuben of Prussia arrives at Valley Forge to join the Continental Army. He then begins much needed training and drilling of Washington's troops, now suffering from poor morale resulting from cold, hunger, disease, low supplies and desertions over the long, harsh winter.

March 16, 1778 - A Peace Commission is created by the British Parliament to negotiate with the Americans. The commission then travels to Philadelphia where its offers granting all of the American demands, except independence, are rejected by Congress.

May 30, 1778 - A campaign of terror against American frontier settlements, instigated by the British, begins as 300 Iroquois Indians burn Cobleskill, New York.

June 27/28, 1778 - The Battle of Monmouth occurs in New Jersey as Washington's troops and Gen. Clinton's troops fight to a standoff. On hearing that American Gen. Charles Lee had ordered a retreat, Gen. Washington becomes furious. Gen. Clinton then continues on toward New York.

July 3, 1778 - British Loyalists and Indians massacre American settlers in the Wyoming Valley of northern Pennsylvania.

August 8, 1778 - American land forces and French ships attempt to conduct a combined siege against Newport, Rhode Island. But bad weather and delays of the land troops result in failure. The weather-damaged French fleet then sails to Boston for repairs.

November 11, 1778 - At Cherry Valley, New York, Loyalists and Indians massacre over 40 American settlers.

December 29, 1778 - The British begin a major southern campaign with the capture of Savannah, Georgia, followed a month later with the capture of Augusta.

April 1-30, 1779 - In retaliation for Indian raids on colonial settlements, American troops from North Carolina and Virginia attack Chickamauga Indian villages in Tennessee.

May 10, 1779 - British troops burn Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia.

June 1, 1779 - British Gen. Clinton takes 6000 men up the Hudson toward West Point.

July 5-11, 1779 - Loyalists raid coastal towns in Connecticut, burning Fairfield, Norwalk and ships in New Haven harbor.

July 10, 1779 - Naval ships from Massachusetts are destroyed by the British while attempting to take the Loyalist stronghold of Castine, Maine.

August 29, 1779 - American forces defeat the combined Indian and Loyalist forces at Elmira, New York. Following the victory, American troops head northwest and destroy nearly 40 Cayuga and Seneca Indian villages in retaliation for the campaign of terror against American settlers.

Sept. 3 - Oct. 28 - Americans suffer a major defeat while attacking the British at Savannah, Georgia. Among the 800 American and Allied casualties is Count Casimir Pulaski of Poland. British losses are only 140.

October 17, 1779 - Washington sets up winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, where his troops will suffer another harsh winter without desperately needed supplies, resulting in low morale, desertions and attempts at mutiny.

December 26, 1779 - British Gen. Clinton sets sail from New York with 8000 men and heads for Charleston, South Carolina, arriving there on Feb. 1.

April 8, 1780 - The British attack begins against Charleston as warships sail past the cannons of Fort Moultrie and enter Charleston harbor. Washington sends reinforcements.

May 6, 1780 - The British capture Fort Moultrie at Charleston, South Carolina.

May 12, 1780 - The worst American defeat of the Revolutionary War occurs as the British capture Charleston and its 5400-man garrison (the entire southern American Army) along with four ships and a military arsenal. British losses are only 225.

May 25, 1780 - After a severe winter, Gen. Washington faces a serious threat of mutiny at his winter camp in Morristown, New Jersey. Two Continental regiments conduct an armed march through the camp and demand immediate payment of salary (overdue by 5 months) and full rations. Troops from Pennsylvania put down the rebellion. Two leaders of the protest are then hanged.

July 11, 1780 - 6000 French soldiers under Count de Rochambeau arrive at Newport, Rhode Island. They will remain there for nearly a year, blockaded by the British fleet.

August 3, 1780 - Benedict Arnold is appointed commander of West Point. Unknown to the Americans, he has been secretly collaborating with British Gen. Clinton since May of 1779 by supplying information on Gen. Washington's tactics.

August 16, 1780 - A big defeat for the Americans in South Carolina as forces under Gen. Gates are defeated by troops of Gen. Charles Cornwallis, resulting in 900 Americans killed and 1000 captured.

August 18, 1780 - An American defeat at Fishing Creek, South Carolina, opens a route for Gen Cornwallis to invade North Carolina.

September 23, 1780 - A British major in civilian clothing is captured near Tarrytown, New York. He is found to be carrying plans indicating Benedict Arnold intends to turn traitor and surrender West Point. Two days later, Arnold hears of the spy's capture and flees West Point to the British ship Vulture on the Hudson. He is later named a brigadier general in the British Army and will fight the Americans.

October 14, 1780 - Gen. Nathanael Greene, Washington's most able and trusted General, is named as the new commander of the Southern Army, replacing Gen. Gates. Greene then begins a strategy of rallying popular support and wearing down the British by leading Gen. Cornwallis on a six month chase through the back woods of South Carolina into North Carolina into Virginia then back into North Carolina. The British, low on supplies, are forced to steal from any Americans they encounter, thus enraging them.

January 3, 1781 - Mutiny among Americans in New Jersey as troops from Pennsylvania set up camp near Princeton and choose their own representatives to negotiate with state officials back in Pennsylvania. The crisis is eventually resolved through negotiations, but over half of the mutineers abandon the army.

January 20, 1781 - Mutiny among American troops at Pompton, New Jersey. The rebellion is put down seven days later by a 600-man force sent by Gen. Washington. Two of the leaders are then hanged.

June 4, 1781 - Thomas Jefferson narrowly escapes capture by the British at Charlottesville, Virginia.

July 20, 1781 - Slaves in Williamsburg, Virginia, rebel and burn several buildings.

September 6, 1781 - Benedict Arnold's troops loot and burn the port of New London, Connecticut.

October 19, 1781 - As their band plays the tune, "The world turned upside down," the British army marches out in formation and surrenders at Yorktown. Hopes for a British victory in the war against America are dashed. In the English Parliament, there will soon be calls to bring this long costly war to an end.

October 24, 1781 - 7000 British reinforcements under Gen. Clinton arrive at Chesapeake Bay but turn back on hearing of the surrender at Yorktown.

January 1, 1782 - Loyalists begin leaving America, heading north to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

February 27, 1782 - In England, the House of Commons votes against further war in America.

March 7, 1782 - American militiamen massacre 96 Delaware Indians in Ohio in retaliation for Indian raids conducted by other tribes.

August 19, 1782 - Loyalist and Indian forces attack and defeat American settlers near Lexington, Kentucky.

August 25, 1782 - Mohawk Indian Chief Joseph Brant conducts raids on settlements in Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

August 27, 1782 - The last fighting of the Revolutionary War between Americans and British occurs with a skirmish in South Carolina along the Combahee River.

November 10, 1782 - The final battle of the Revolutionary War occurs as Americans retaliate against Loyalist and Indian forces by attacking a Shawnee Indian village in the Ohio territory.

February 4, 1783 - England officially declares an end to hostilities in America.

[The Reaper]

March 10, 1783 - An anonymous letter circulates among Washington's senior officers camped at Newburgh, New York. The letter calls for an unauthorized meeting and urges the officers to defy the authority of the new U.S. national government (Congress) for its failure to honor past promises to the Continental Army. The next day, Gen. Washington forbids the unauthorized meeting and instead suggests a regular meeting to be held on March 15. A second anonymous letter then appears and is circulated. This letter falsely claims Washington himself sympathizes with the rebellious officers.

March 15, 1783 - General Washington gathers his officers and talks them out of a rebellion against the authority of Congress, and in effect preserves the American democracy.

April 11, 1783 - Congress officially declares an end to the Revolutionary War.

April 26, 1783 - 7000 Loyalists set sail from New York for Canada, bringing a total of 100,000 Loyalists who have now fled America.

June 13, 1783 - The main part of the Continental Army disbands.

June 24, 1783 - To avoid protests from angry and unpaid war veterans, Congress leaves Philadelphia and relocates to Princeton, New Jersey.

September 3, 1783 - The Treaty of Paris is signed by the United States and Great Britain. Congress will ratify the treaty on January 14, 1784.

October 7, 1783 - In Virginia, the House of Burgesses grants freedom to slaves who served in the Continental Army.

November 2, 1783 - George Washington delivers his farewell address to his army. The next day, remaining troops are discharged.

November 25, 1783 - Washington enters Manhattan as the last British troops leave.

November 26, 1783 - Congress meets in Annapolis, Maryland.

December 23, 1783 - Following a triumphant journey from New York to Annapolis, George Washington, victorious commander in chief of the American Revolutionary Army, appears before Congress and voluntarily resigns his commission, an event unprecedented in history.

[ghuinness]

Certainly.

I do not think that we are constrained to just these two choices.

I do not believe that the counterinsurgency in Iraq will be indefinite, and I certainly do not believe that reducing American involvement in Iraq, even if we leave behind a broken country "beset by chaos and civil strife," as the author phrases it, will be tantamount to handing Al Qaeda a major victory.

....

-
What I thought, but wasn't sure.

Thank You for the detailed response; Thanks TR.

[Solid]

Magician,
I think that the U.S. has become overly concentrated on technological solutions to war. I think that by 'owning the night' etc, we have a decided advantage- but as in Vietnam, this advantage can be largely nullified by a driven enemy using guerrilla tactics which leverage our democracy (and media) against our war effort.
As such, I reached the same conclusion as you- to win this war, and future guerrilla/anti-terror wars, we must concentrate on using the right PEOPLE to achieve the goal.

However, I am of the opinion that the U.S. military does not necessarily have enough of the "right people" to properly fight these wars. We may have had enough to win in El Sal, which has a 6.7 millian person population, but Iraq has 26 million people and over double the area of land. Even if all this land isn't used by the terrorists, and all these people aren't terrorists, unless they can be convinced to work against the terrorists (and doing so can be difficult), the U.S. will have to field a considerably larger force than in El Sal. I don't think we have enough people to field this force: just look at the 'personnel drain' in SF. Over at SOCNET they claim that this is a product of poor management within the military. If this is the case, it is pretty hard to reform.

A caveat: I am NOT attacking the U.S. or her military. I am simply saying that the tool is not yet properly shaped for the war I think we need to be fighting in Iraq, and that it will take time and money before we have the right tool.

Thank you,

Solid

[CoLawman]

Drawing a limited parallel to Viet Nam might be appropriate fodder for this discussion.

Syria and Iran roles in this war mirror Laos and Cambodia's during the Viet Nam war.

The discovery of escape tunnels in Tal Afar seems to buttress the parallel. Manpower and supplies come across the borders and then slither back as we approach.

Is it not time for the government to re-examine the difficulties this presented in Viet Nam and apply the lessons learned so as not to hamstring the military as we did in Viet Nam? Syria and Iran are part and parcel to the terrorists continued operations.

IN local and state law the pursuer (law enforcement) is allowed to cross borders under the "Fresh Pursuit" doctrine. I understand this is not a good analogy, but the same should hold true in Iraq. The message being, (to Iran and Syria) intervene or we will pursue regardless of the border.

President Bush clearly spelled out that our pursuit would not be restricted by borders if the offending nation was offering safe haven to the terrorists. It is time to show that his words were not rhetoric.

[The Reaper]

Drawing a limited parallel to Viet Nam might be appropriate fodder for this discussion.

Syria and Iran roles in this war mirror Laos and Cambodia's during the Viet Nam war.

The discovery of escape tunnels in Tal Afar seems to buttress the parallel. Manpower and supplies come across the borders and then slither back as we approach.

Is it not time for the government to re-examine the difficulties this presented in Viet Nam and apply the lessons learned so as not to hamstring the military as we did in Viet Nam? Syria and Iran are part and parcel to the terrorists continued operations.

IN local and state law the pursuer (law enforcement) is allowed to cross borders under the "Fresh Pursuit" doctrine. I understand this is not a good analogy, but the same should hold true in Iraq. The message being, (to Iran and Syria) intervene or we will pursue regardless of the border.

President Bush clearly spelled out that our pursuit would not be restricted by borders if the offending nation was offering safe haven to the terrorists. It is time to show that his words were not rhetoric.


I disagree with your analogy.

Who is North Vietnam, in this case?

TR

[CoLawman]

I disagree with your analogy.

Who is North Vietnam, in this case?

TR

I intentionally stated that this was a limited parallel to the Vietnam War. However, your question is an excellent one, not considered in my original post.

In my analogy there is no North Vietnam per se, but there is the requisite combatants . The Terrorists assume the role of the NVA without defined geographical consideration. I might add that North Vietnam, geographically, was not of extreme importance in the prosecution of the Vietnam war. During that war we were fighting in a "friendly" country with an allied government. All the more illustrative in drawing the similarities between Cambodia and Laos to Iran and Syria.

Before I responded to your question I was reminded of Kennedy's questioning of Judge Roberts today. Unfortunately, I am no Judge Roberts and your considered question was not a softball from the likes of a Kennedy.

By your leave!

[The Reaper]

North Vietnam, geographically, was not of extreme importance in the prosecution of the Vietnam war.

Who were we bombing in the VN War? What third country are we bombing now?

Who did we negotiate a treaty with in the VN War? Who would we negotiate with now?

Whose troops and tanks took over Saigon in 1975? Who will invade Baghdad and take over?

External support for an insurgency does not equal the power required to win a war militarily. Read Mao and study the phases and requirements of a true insurgency to succeed.

TR

[CoLawman]

Who were we bombing in the VN War? What third country are we bombing now?

Who did we negotiate a treaty with in the VN War? Who would we negotiate with now?

Whose troops and tanks took over Saigon in 1975? Who will invade Baghdad and take over?

External support for an insurgency does not equal the power required to win a war militarily. Read Mao and study the phases and requirements of a true insurgency to succeed.

TR

With all do respect, you are still missing or refusing to acknowledge that my analogy was "limited".

Obviously our bombing campaign was against North Vietnam. Most notably the bombings in Hanoi were to force the NVA to the table for peace talks. The "Breakfast bombings" were carried out in Cambodia, but against the NVA.

Mao's tenets of Insurgency are well known and used by Al Queda, Chechnians, and the Taliban. In fact his tenets were used successfully against the French and the Americans in Vietnam. We, the Americans, won all the battles in Vietnam, but did not "win" the war.

Mao did not invent Insurgency warfare but did transform it into a modern effective means to overcome a superior military force. Not a Mao scholar but understand the principles of his style of warfare.

1. Mao believed that political, military, economic and social attrition rather than outright force results in the defeat of a superior military force.

2. Mao's tenants of warfare are meant to convince the enemy's decision-makers that victory was too costly.

Mao also believed in retreat...........so as to fight another day! So pardon me while I employ that tactic. :D

Since I don't know the answer, whose works should I read that best details how to defeat Mao's game plan.

[Solid]

CoLawMan:
Mao advocated 'attacking on the external line'. By this he meant that it was best to attack the enemy as he advanced OUTSIDE of the city into the countryside (usually through an ambush).
In Iraq, the majority of attacks reported in the media suggest that the insurgents are targetting people WITHIN the cities. As such, this is drastically different than Mao's concept of guerrilla warfare.

In otherwords, learning how to defeat Mao is not necessarily a good way of learning how to beat the insurgents in Iraq.

JMO,

Solid

[magician]

AKA "talk talk, fight fight, talk talk."

Two steps forward, one step back.

Repeat.

As a method of warfare, for the weak confronting the strong, I do not believe that the approach has ever been solved.

As a method of governing....well, let's just say that communists can get subversive better than anyone else. They cannot actually govern successfully.

There are few genuine Maoist movements at work at this time. One which is enjoying much success is in Nepal.

I think that comparing the current global Al Qaeda campaign with the principles of Maoist people's war is not so useful. Looking only at the campaign being fought by the insurgency in Iraq, it is clear that only some tactics are comparable. In terms of ideology, which is all-important, there are few points of comparison.

I do not think that such a distributed, decentralized form of warfare, magnified by modern mass media, has ever been mounted before on a global basis.

In that respect....what we are living right now is historically unprecedented, and likely to become even more so.

I do not think that it can be effectively countered unless we are able to harness our technological advantages to win the intelligence war, and then effectively and surgically target the infrastructure of terror.

We also have to wage a war of ideology, and in this way innoculate broad populations, indeed, entire cultures, which now breed Jihadis. It goes without saying that media outlets like Al Jazeera, (and perhaps, CNN), must either be coopted or eliminated. In this way, we need to practice a brand of social prevention that interdicts dissidents before they make the leap to undertaking independent operations inspired by Qaeda theological cant, rather than centrally directed by Qaeda operatives.

It is also imperative that we effectively monitor and exploit the internet. Everytime a Jihadi posts to a bulletin board, or sends an email, the next thing that he experiences should be a rude home invasion by masked men with cattle prods. He should next awake in the belly of the beast, tied to a chair, with a bright light in his face.

Broad political measures like fostering democractic evolution and the emergence of free enterprise among the regimes of the Middle East creates a context. Within this context, a new type of Phoenix Program, with a global ambit, driven by an ability to discern targets across multiple cultures and societies, and precisely negate them, is the next logical step.

This will require horrifying advances in terms of intelligence collection and analysis. Surveillance societies, in short. It may also require a virtual suspension of our most cherished judicial processes and political freedoms.

I see no other way. And even this....can be vulnerable to those who are able to live and operate off the grid, so to speak.

If Al Qaeda never uses a satellite phone, or a cell phone, or a radio....or the internet....if it moves funds through alternative mechanisms and its money never hits the global financial system....then how will we ever track and target them?

Worse, if we are never able to isolate their communications from the infinite bits and bytes streaming unceasingly through the interconnected networks of the internet....we may be doomed to an unending struggle that will distort our societies, and still be vulnerable to failure, in the long run. Al Qaeda just needs one or two nukes....or a couple of biological epidemic agents....and armageddon truly could be the result.

I doubt that we have the capability to penetrate them with human assets.

And exactly what, would we seek to penetrate?

When we cannot prevent multiple simultaneous bombings in Spain and the UK, mounted, particularly in the case of the UK, by previously unidentified homegrown terrorists who craft their bombs from household ingredients and ubiquitous cellphone components....the enormity of the problem becomes clear.

We very well may have to create technological police states, utterly inimical to the ideals of the democratic tradition.

Would this, in the end analysis, be "victory?"

[The Reaper]

Magician:

I like the way you think, Brother.

TR

[magician]

Thank you, brother.

:)

[Solid]

Magician,
I completely agree with your argument, but shy away from this constant emphasis on technological advances saving the day. While technology should be exploited to the maximum degree to yield opportunities and advantages by the U.S. and her allies, learning how to improve our personnel is equally, if not more, important.
I feel that the U.S. soldier, while still by far the best in the world, could benefit from a lot more attention than he/she recieves. I also feel that to do so, the U.S. will have to counter some strongly implanted 'instincts', or at least fiscal incentives.

As a quick example: what does a congressperson prefer in his/her district- an annex to a training facility specializing in Psy Ops, cultural training, or whatever... or a factory producing multimillion dollar munitions?

Again, I want to point out that I am not ragging on the brave men and women who defend my freedom to breath at every second.

Thank you,

Solid

[magician]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1781036,00.html

September 15, 2005

Terrorists unite to plot Iraqi civil war
From Anthony Loyd in Baghdad

A TERRORIST mastermind has united insurgent groups in Baghdad to target the Iraqi Shia Muslim community with the aim of bringing civil war to Iraq, The Times has learnt.
According to US military intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the bloodiest acts of terror in Iraq over the past two years, now commands thousands of fighters from various rival groups and is set to order further waves of bombings.

Yesterday the self-styled “emir” of Iraq was blamed for a dozen co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed 152 people, the single worst death toll in the city since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Most of the dead were poor Shia labourers killed by a huge car bomb in a busy square.

“The al-Qaeda organisation in Mesopotamia is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha [a pejorative term for Shias], wherever they are in Iraq,” said the 38-year-old in an audio message released on an Islamic website. He urged Sunni Muslims to “wake up from your slumber” and joint the fight.

Last night the threat was being taken seriously by US and Iraqi officials, who have offered a $25 million reward for his capture. “We have got reason to believe that al-Zarqawi has now been given tactical command in the city over groups that have had to merge under him for the sake of survival,” an American intelligence officer in Baghdad told The Times yesterday.

An intelligence summary, citing the conglomeration of insurgent groups under the al-Qaeda banner to be the result of rebel turf wars, money, weaponry and fear, concluded that of the estimated 16,000 Sunni Muslim insurgents, 6,700 were hardcore Islamic fundamentalists who were now supplemented by a possible further 4,000 members after an amalgamation with Jaysh Muhammad, previously an insurgent group loyal to the former Baathist regime.

Al-Zarqawi’s rise to supremacy will cast a long shadow in the run up to the October 15 referendum on Iraq’s new constitution and general elections due in December.

His organisation is believed already to have gained domination of smaller resistance groups in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq and a centre of gravity for the Sunni insurgency. An Iraqi resistance insider there last week told The Times that al-Zarqawi’s men had already caused thousands of Shia to flee the city over the past six weeks.

“His men announced through leaflets that all Shia should leave Ramadi or face ‘the iron fist’,” the Ramadi resident said. “At first local Sunnis didn’t want anything to do with it. But they know how powerful Zarqawi’s group is, that it doesn’t hesitate to kill and is not afraid to die.”

“They control Ramadi now. They have the best weapons and the most money, and more and more men. They walk openly on the streets when the Americans aren’t around. So the Shias left, by their thousands.”

The man, himself a supporter of the insurgency, claimed that public executions of coalition informers were a regular occurrence, and happened during daylight in the street. Such is the breakdown of any official authority in Ramadi that it was impossible to stop.

Coalition intelligence sources said that a culmination of signal, image and human intelligence had alerted the coalition to a huge al-Qaeda attack planned for Baghdad in August, which had been aborted at the last minute.

They said the yesterday’s attack was likely a rescheduling of the original operation, and broadcast for propaganda purposes as retaliation for recent government successes in Tal Afar, northern Iraq.

In Tal Afar itself yesterday, where some 10,000 US and Iraqi troops have been engaged in a massive offensive to recapture the ethnically divided town from Sunni insurgents, commanders spoke of the “horrible” abuses they had uncovered. The details were prophetic reminder of what al-Qaeda’s supremacy may bode.

“The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child’s body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents,” said Colonel H R McMaster, a senior American commander in the town.

Yesterday commanders said they were in full control of the town after the insurgents melted away, but their victory appears quickly overshadowed by al-Zarqawi’s subsequent gore-splattered stamp acoss the very centre of Baghdad.

[magician]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article312735.ece

Baghdad: The bloodiest day
Al-Qa'ida in new offensive. More than a dozen Baghdad attacks. 150 are killed and 540 injured. Iraq plunges towards civil war

By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Published: 15 September 2005
A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad's worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them.

On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon - claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 - al-Qa'ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation directed at the insurgents' northern stronghold of Tal Afar. And as the hours passed with car and roadside bombs shattering the relative calm of the past few days, fears of civil war intensified.

A posting on the internet by al-Qa'ida in Iraq said: "To the nation of Islam, we give you the good news that the battles of revenge for the Sunni people of Tal Afar began yesterday."

In Aruba Square, in the Shia district of Qadimiyah, the crowd cried: "Why? Why? Why," as the dead and dying were carried out. Severed heads and limbs were stacked beside burnt bodies inside the gates of the local hospital, its floor slippery with blood.

"We gathered and suddenly a car blew up and turned the area into fire and dust and darkness," said Hadi, a worker who survived the blast. Along with some 1,500 others he had gone at dawn to the square where labourers traditionally wait to be hired. Most of those who died were impoverished Shia workers from Iraq's deep south who have come to Baghdad for jobs and sleep rough or in squalid hotels around Aruba.

Oily black smoke rose into the blue sky over Baghdad as more than a dozen bombs exploded across the city throughout the morning. Terror mounted as we heard the detonations. People stayed at home to avoid being caught by the blasts.

Fearing another suicide bomb, police and soldiers stopped vehicles entering Qadimiyah, at the centre of which are the golden domes of a much venerated Shia shrine. But angry and distraught people raced on foot to the nearest hospital to see if friends or relatives were alive or dead.

"Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! God is Great! God is Great! This is a terrible disaster," chanted Sayef Ali Abed as he walked with a nervous gait as if frightened of what he would find at the hospital. "I heard what happened on the radio and came directly because I know my brother was looking for work there. I did not even tell our parents where I was going." In the hospital, Abbas Rada Mohammed, a distraught middle-aged man, was vainly studying a list of the names of 162 injured. "I am looking for my brother. Maybe he is dead or in another hospital."

The people torn apart were not the only ones to die in Iraq yesterday. In a Sunni village 10 miles north of Baghdad near Taji, men dressed as soldiers - and who possibly were soldiers - moved in just before first light and took away 17 men whom they handcuffed, blindfolded and shot. The dead included one policeman and several men who worked as drivers and construction workers at a US base.

One of the many reasons why Iraqis are becoming more terrified by the day is that they do not know if the policemen or soldiers who wake them in the middle of the night truly work for the government or are a death squad.

Another suicide bomb in northern Baghdad killed 11 people as they queued to refill gas cylinders. The attack in Qadimiyah was clearly aimed at killing as many Shia as possible since few Kurds or Sunni would have been present. Along with the other bombings, it was later claimed by al-Qa'ida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Zarqawi also declared war on Shias, Iraqi troops and the country's government in an audio message on the internet last night. The speaker, whose identity was not immediately authenticated, also said his militant forces would attack any Iraqi they believe had co-operated with the US-led offensive on Tal Afar. "This battle was timed to cover up the scandal of God's enemy, Bush, in failing to deal with [Hurricane] Katrina," it said.

Tal Afar, a city of 200,000, is an ethnic and sectarian mosaic. About 70 per cent of its people are Sunni Turkmans, sympathetic to the insurgents, and 30 per cent Shia Turkmans supportive of the Shia-Kurdish government in Baghdad. The Iraqi soldiers that stormed the city along with US troops were mostly Kurdish and Shia. The attacks came only hours after Iraq's President, Jalal Talabani, had stood beside President George Bush at a press conference in Washington.

Sa'af Jabber Ajmi, a Shia labourer from Nasiriyah, lying in the Noman hospital in the Adhamiya district, with shrapnel in his leg, shoulder and back, said: "I thought what happened was a reaction to the Iraqi President's visit to the US." In another bed was Ali Ghazi, also a Shia from the Iraqi deep south. "I believe it is the Americans who are doing this, pretending it is the Sunni, so there will be a civil war and they can control our wealth." Many survivors lying mangled by this morning's bombs subscribed to a conspiracy theory according to which the US wants to rule Iraq by fomenting differences between Shia and Sunni.

Near Noman hospital, gunmen killed a police general and other senior officers. When peoplewent to help them there was a second attack by a suicide bomber, which killed three soldiers and three policemen. These secondary attacks, now frequent, make it very dangerous to approach understandably jittery policemen and soldiers after an explosion because they may shoot at any vehicle approaching them.

At least three of the bombs were aimed at US patrols, with one Humvee being destroyed on the airport road, said witnesses. At least two soldiers were badly wounded. One US convoy was attacked just north of the Green Zone and the bomb injured 14 policemen. For 10 minutes afterwards there was the sound of heavy machine-gun fire.

Sectarian strife is increasing. In the mainly Sunni but hitherto mixed districts of Daura and Amariyah in south and west Baghdad, Shia residents have been shot and others intimidated into leaving. But at the same time many of those wounded denied there would be a war between Shia and Sunni. Mohammed Abdul Karim, an injured Shia at Noman hospital, pointed out that he was in a Sunni district and the Sunni doctors were doing everything to help him.

In the midst of this mayhem, Iraq finally agreed a constitution to be voted on in a referendum on 15 October. But it seemed hardly relevant yesterday.

Worst attacks

28 August 2003 - 85 dead

Among those killed by the car bomb attacks at Najaf shrine is the Shia cleric Muhammad Baqr Hakim

1 February 2004 - 109 dead

Twin attacks on Kurdish parties' offices in Irbil

2 March 2004 - 181 dead

Suicide bombers attack Shia festival-goers in Karbala and Baghdad

24 June 2004 - 100 dead

Co-ordinated blasts in Mosul and four other cities

28 February 2005 - 125 dead

Suicide car bomb hits government jobseekers in Hillah

16 July 2005 - 54 dead

Suicide bomber detonates fuel tanker in Musayyib

[magician]

http://nytimes.com/2005/09/15/international/middleeast/15cbs.html?pagewanted=all

Detention of Iraqi Employees Angers Western News Media

By ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: September 15, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 14 - On April 5, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman for CBS News, was struck in the thigh by an American sniper's bullet while filming the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Mosul. As he recovered in a military hospital, the Americans arrested him. They later said the film in his camera suggested he was working for insurgents.

More than five months later, Mr. Hussein is still in an American military prison. The Iraqi criminal authorities have reviewed his case and declined to prosecute him. Colleagues who were with him that day have produced affidavits supporting his innocence. The American military has not released any evidence against him, despite repeated requests for information by CBS producers, lawyers and even the network's president, Andrew Heyward.

Mr. Hussein's case exemplifies a quandary faced by Western news organizations here. Their own reporters are mostly confined to fortified compounds and military bases. As a result, they are forced to rely on Iraqis, who work in increasingly dangerous settings, where the line between observer and participant is not always clear.

Western bureau chiefs concede that they cannot be certain the people they hire do not have links with insurgents, though they do their best to weed out such people.

One thing is clear: dozens of Iraqis who carry out assignments for the news organizations have been detained while on the job, and sometimes released weeks or months later with no explanation. American forces have mistakenly killed a dozen others, including a soundman working for Reuters who was shot dead by a sniper on Aug. 28.

Some of those cases raise a broader question: how close can Iraqi reporters get to insurgents without being considered the enemy? American commanders often suggest that reporters who are tipped off about an attack are automatically implicated, but Iraqis often take a different view.

"Maybe some are working with insurgents, but many others just get a call from someone saying, 'There will be clashes,' " said Ibrahim Saraji, the director of the Iraqi Journalists' Rights Defense Organization, formed last year after the fatal shooting of two Arab journalists in Iraq. "It doesn't mean they are an insurgent."

Pentagon lawyers have told CBS that Mr. Hussein is being held on classified evidence, according to letters sent to the network that were provided to The New York Times. The military has released statements saying that Mr. Hussein tested positive for explosive residue, and citing accusations that he "had knowledge of future terrorist attacks." It is not clear who made the accusations, or whether the residue may have resulted from his proximity to the scene.

Mr. Hussein's friends and relatives - who have not been able to visit him in prison - say the military has not interviewed them or searched his home, standard procedure with people suspected of having ties to insurgents. CBS executives say the network has investigated the incident and has no reason to believe that its cameraman was working with insurgents.

Clearly, it is often difficult for American soldiers to tell a reporter from a combatant in Iraq's chaos, with no uniforms or clear battle lines. The fact that insurgents routinely film and distribute scenes of their attacks makes it even harder. The military cannot afford to give journalists special treatment under those circumstances, said Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

But Western bureau chiefs say the military often seems to arrest their Iraqi employees merely for getting too close to the action - in effect, for doing their jobs too well. When journalists are killed, the bureau chiefs say, the military often does little more than a cursory investigation.

"They seem to have moved to the view that everyone in a conflict area with a camera is a potential terrorist," said Alastair Macdonald, the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad. "The burden of proof is on them to prove that they're not."

A number of Reuters Iraqi employees have been detained by the American military, including three who said after being released that they were abused by American interrogators while being detained in Falluja last year. Ali al-Mashadani, a Reuters cameraman, was detained in Ramadi on Aug. 8 and remains in American custody. Mr. Macdonald said he had seen no evidence against Mr. Mashadani or clear accusations, and had no reason to believe he had any insurgent connections.

Iraqi employees with many other companies, including CNN, Associated Press Television News and Agence France-Presse have been detained for long periods in the past year. But some companies declined to comment about the detentions, saying they feared that doing so might harm their relations with the military.

Iraqi reporters often point out that they routinely receive death threats from insurgents, who have killed more reporters than the United States military by far. But they also say the military's suspicion is making it almost impossible for them to work in some areas.

"The American military has intelligence sources, but they don't seem to understand that we have sources too," said Maher Hassan al-Thanoon, 36, who has carried out assignments for Reuters in Mosul for 18 months. "They may just be people who live in insurgent neighborhoods. It doesn't mean they support what the insurgents are doing."

Western bureau chiefs also say that after being detained by American forces, their Iraqi employees often disappear into a void, where nothing can be learned about the case against them and their legal status is unclear. Mr. Hussein, for instance, was initially scheduled for a hearing with the Combined Review and Release Board, a nine-member panel formed to review detention cases. It is made up of three American military officials and six Iraqi government officials from the Justice, Human Rights and Interior Ministries.

But before the board could hold a hearing his case was transferred to the authority of the Iraqi central criminal court. He remained in American custody, though. The Iraqi criminal authorities reviewed the case, though they had not been provided with the classified part of it, and declined to prosecute it.

Jurisdiction over Mr. Hussein was then transferred back to the combined board, which is scheduled to hear his case on Thursday.

His status seemed uncertain in other ways, too. When CBS officials first asked about his health after he was shot and detained, military officials declined to answer, citing American laws on medical privacy.

On Wednesday, Iraq's justice minister, Abdul Hussein Shandal, criticized the detentions of Iraqi journalists in an interview with Reuters, saying he wanted to change a United Nations resolution that gives American troops immunity from Iraqi law. He said journalists were not free to report on all sides of the conflict.

He also dismissed American claims that his ministry had an equal say in detentions, suggesting that the American military controlled the Combined Review and Release Board.

Military officials in Iraq contend that some Iraqi cameramen and photographers show up at attacks so promptly that they must have had advance notice. Colonel Boylan said he knew of two Iraqi journalists in detention whose film footage indicated that they had filmed several attacks on one day, from the start.

Mr. Macdonald and other Western bureau chiefs say they have seen no evidence of such cases. They also say the frequent repetition of that accusation is irresponsible because it makes soldiers more likely to be aggressive with Iraqi journalists at attack scenes.

[ghuinness]

Magician,
May I ask your opinion?

Zarkawi seems to have been on a media blitz the last week and half. Could this mean that the operation in Tal Afur has hurt his group in a significant way? Although, I don't believe the actions in Tal Afur were orchestrated by him. Is he throwing everying out there as a last-gasp or is his group gaining strength? Personally, I think his sphere of control is diminishing.

thanks

[The Reaper]

One of the U.S. battalion commanders in country was saying that the number of hard core fighters is diminishing, and that more and more often, they are seeing untrained young kids being used by the insurgents.

While they can still drive a car bomb, or act as suicide bombers, this represents a change and it looks like a positive trend to me.

TR

[ghuinness]

One of the U.S. battalion commanders in country was saying that the number of hard core fighters is diminishing, and that more and more often, they are seeing untrained young kids being used by the insurgents.

While they can still drive a car bomb, or act as suicide bombers, this represents a change and it looks like a positive trend to me.

TR


Thank You TR.

[magician]

I have no idea.

I will say however, that I tend to notice things like the number of car bombings. Their number is an indicator. But the question is, an indicator of what, exactly?

While it may be some time before AMZ can prepare more VBIEDs for the next wave of attacks, their number, their geographical distribution, their quality, and the strategems used to deliver them to their target are all possible indicators. There are a host of facts that can be coaxed from such incidents. This list is not comprehensive.

It is important, however, to not look at such indicators in a vacuum. The analyst must remain agnostic. Misinterpretation is a genuine risk. Information from other sources needs to be integrated, and data accumulated over time, and in this way, the probability that such indicators can be correctly interpreted rises.

I am not conscientiously accumulating data and assessing it. I merely engage in a background process, I notice things periodically, and I tend not to form strong opinions as a result.

At this point, I have suspicions. I am not married to them.

One thing to consider about the number of car bombs: AMZ was able to designate that many drivers to commit suicide with their vehicles, and that many were successful, inflicting a great number of casualties. Does this mean that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has a plenitude of willing homicide bombers? Or does it mean that they patiently accumulated them, and shot their wad, and that it will take them weeks or longer to acquire more?

Graphed over time, this sort of information can suggest probabilities about AZM's particular slice of the insurgency. Where you draw the peripheries of the problem, how you defiine it, also effects your analysis. I have not done this in any systematic way.

Uncle Sugar has a host of folks who are better placed and better qualified than I to do such work.

For folks like us, consumers of media information, it is important to remember that such events are packaged for media consumption and distribution.

As has been said, terrorism is talk.

I would also like to point out that it can be counterproductive to form strong opinions based only on news reports in open media, for obvious reasons.

[ghuinness]

Magician.

Understand your points, Thanks.

[ghuinness]

Might not be completely in keeping with the thread, but I thought this op-ed was interesting. Maybe this latest round of attacks will unite instead of divide.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=70161&d=16&m=9&y=2005

THE bloodbath that has taken place in Iraq in the past couple of days defies condemnation. Over 160 dead on Wednesday, most of them Baghdadi laborers whose only crime was to try and find some work so that they could feed their families. It was an act of sheer evil.

People can understand why the insurgents attack the forces of occupation: Iraqis are a proud people; they are thankful to be rid of Saddam Hussein, but the ignominy of occupation is humiliating. Explicable too, though to a much lesser extent, are the attacks on Iraq’s fledgling security forces who bore the brunt of Thursday’s carnage. They are seen by the insurgents as collaborators with the Americans — even though that is not true. The Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces are pro-Iraqi.

But to send out suicide bombers to deliberately kill ordinary Iraqis is beyond any understanding. This was even worse than the suicide bombing two months ago which killed around 30 children. At least then there could be the pretence that American troops were the target. There can be no pretence this time. There was no attempt to target the Americans or the security forces. Just plain Iraqis gathered near a meeting point for laborers, hoping for a day’s work.

But, as we know, the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, has reportedly declared all-out war on Shiites in Iraq. Those blown up in Kazimiyah were largely, but not entirely, Shiite. In an Internet statement shortly after the outrage, he said it was in revenge for the attack on “the Sunni people of Tal Afar.” He may claim to be fighting for the Sunnis, but he cannot have their interests at heart. He is clearly desperate to trigger a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, but it is a war that cannot do any good for Sunnis. If there were such a conflict, the massively outnumbered Sunnis would face massacre. No outside force would intervene; the regional balance of power is too delicate. Any intervention would trigger a regional war, unless it were by all Iraq’s neighbors jointly — and that is hardly what Al-Qaeda wants.

This slaughter of the Shiites was no outburst at Iraq’s continued occupation. Nor was it linked to the proposed federal constitution which has left many in the Sunni community fearful for their economic future and which that very day was being submitted to the UN for approval; Zarqawi is not remotely interested in the Iraqi constitution. His interest is in creating an empire of killing fields where, as in the Cambodian original, anyone who does not fit into the desired model is to be exterminated — Shiites included. It is a vile, twisted vision, and it bears no semblance to Islam.

Iraq’s Sunnis must be as revolted and horrified by the attack and all that it implies as everyone else in the region. It raises the stakes dangerously — the mainstream Iraqi Shiite leadership will continue to refuse to be goaded, but there are others in the Shiite community, hotheads who may not listen to counsel of patience, who may take a different line. It is to be fervently hoped that they do not yield to their own passion for revenge.