3 of 3 debunked. 1) No WMDs 2) Not for the War on Terror and 3)
Not for freedom and democracy for Iraqis
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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,642825,00.html
Why al-Qaeda Thrives
President Bush says Iraq is the central front in the war on terror,
but security experts say Iraq is the reason Bin Laden's movement is
growing
By TONY KARON
Whether or not a decent outcome is eventually achieved, Iraq won't
present President Bush with the triumphant centerpiece of a
successful reelection campaign. Still, Americans' fear of terror
remains a rich seam of political support for the president
indeed, recent polls indicate that while more Americans believe his
presumptive challenger, Senator John Kerry, would do a better job
handling Iraq, Bush has a significant lead when the question is who
would do a better job of fighting terrorism. Not surprisingly,
then, the president's handlers have sought to make terrorism the
prism through which the Bush presidency must be viewed even when
the conversation turns to Iraq.
President Bush framed his Monday keynote address on Iraq around the
idea that the country is now "the central front in the war on
terror." He implied that the invasion of Iraq was a choice forced
on the U.S. by the Sept. 11 attacks and that the enemy facing the
U.S. there shares al-Qaeda's goal of establishing "Taliban-type"
rule. In all, he used the words "terror" or "terrorist/terrorism"
19 times. But the president's characterization will hardly have
resonated with his Iraqi audience, who see al-Qaeda as a problem
brought into their country by the U.S. invasion rather than by
Saddam Hussein. Even the U.S. intelligence community has
long maintained that Saddam's regime had no connection with the
9/11 attacks, while U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq say that
foreign terrorists constitute only a small fraction of the
insurgency facing Coalition troops there.
If, indeed, there is a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, it may
not be the kind the Bush campaign is likely to dwell on. The same
day the President spoke, the prestigious International Institute
for Strategic Studies released its annual survey that found, among
other things, that far from dealing a blow to al-Qaeda and
making the U.S. and its allies safer, the Iraq invasion has in fact
substantially strengthened bin Laden's network and increased the
danger of attacks in the West. And the London-based IISS
is not some Bush-bashing antiwar think tank; it hosted the
president's keynote address during his embattled visit to the
British late last year.
The IISS reported that al-Qaeda's recruitment and
fundraising efforts had been given a major boost by the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. It estimated that bin Laden's network
today commands some 18,000 men, of which about 1,000 are currently
inside Iraq. After almost three years of President Bush's war on
terror, the IISS offered the following assessment of the movement's
prospects: "Although half of al-Qaeda's 30 senior leaders
and perhaps 2,000 rank-and-file members have been killed or
captured, a rump leadership is still intact and more than 18,000
potential terrorists are still at large, with recruitment
accelerating on account of Iraq." The continuing danger of
an al-Qaeda strike inside the U.S. as it moves into election season
was underscored Wednesday by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who
warned that intelligence tips suggest that the movement plans to
attack inside the U.S. some time in the coming months. It was a
non-specific warning, of course, and the color-coded terror alert
level was not raised as a result. But the announcement affirmed for
Americans the fact that they remain vulnerable to al-Qaeda attack,
if better prepared and forewarned than three years ago.
So why is al-Qaeda continuing to grow and prosper despite the loss
of its Afghan sanctuaries and so many of its personnel, and the
fact that it has been relentlessly hounded by security services
across Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia? The consensus
among security analysts is that the key to eliminating
al-Qaeda as a threat is to transform the permissive political
environment in which it operates in the Muslim world. Instead, the
opposite has occurred Muslim anger at the U.S. has reached an
all-time high and continues to grow, driven by outrage at U.S.
actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by Israel's actions against
the Palestinians. The precipitous decline in support or
sympathy for the U.S. in the Muslim world after 9/11 has meant
fertile ground for al-Qaeda recruiters.
Authoritative voices from the IISS to former U.S. commander for the
Mideast and Bush administration envoy to the region General Anthony
Zinni to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies have lately warned that the
achievement of U.S. goals in the Middle East depends on its ability
to revive and complete the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process. The administration's approach has been to leave
that issue on the back burner while pursuing Iraq on the assumption
that ousting Saddam's regime would facilitate peace between Israel
and the Palestinians an argument dismissed as spurious by Zinni,
Cordesman and others. Instead, the Iraq occupation and the ongoing
conflict in the West Bank and Gaza has burnished al-Qaeda's appeal
in relation to the pro-U.S. Arab regimes it hopes to supplant,
because these regimes appear powerless to affect the plight of the
Palestinians and Iraqis. With seemingly no Arab leaders capable of
protecting Arab interests, bin Laden paints himself and his
politics of suicidal jihad as the path to redeeming Islam's lost
honor.
While al-Qaeda's appeal in the Arab and Muslim world has grown in
the years since 9/11, the group has not mounted a single attack in
the U.S. in the same period. Bin Laden's goals are to rally Muslims
to the cause of jihad, in order to drive the U.S. and its influence
out of the Islamic world and restore the Islamic empire of the
Middle Ages. And the antagonism provoked by U.S. actions
such as invading Iraq have been more effective even than the terror
of 9/11 in building support for the movement. Still,
al-Qaeda continues to seek to mount mass-casualty terror attacks in
the U.S. It has been hampered by the U.S.-led crackdown on its
organizational structures, and by the domestic security efforts
that have made operations across such great distances more
difficult. Al-Qaeda will necessarily have had to put new leadership
and communication protocols in place, and its decentralization and
dispersion may have changed the very nature of its operations. It
has continued to strike in Europe and Asia, and of course Iraq. But
now the Bush administration is warning that it plans to attack in
the U.S. too, in time to have an impact on the election.
The last al-Qaeda terror strike on U.S. soil rallied the
overwhelming majority of Americans strongly behind President Bush.
Whether and how a new terror strike on U.S. soil three years later
might do the same remains to be seen. But whereas the 9/11 attack
shocked and horrified much of the international community,
including the Arab and Muslim world, and drew them initially closer
to Washington, it's unlikely that a new attack would do much to
reverse the deep polarization of the international community
brought on by the war in Iraq.
