Before I begin ...

My colleague Colt was kind enough to post his response to the points I made in my previous post. I thought they were good to get his general sense of things, so I'd like to reproduce them here along with my immediate reaction:

1. Hamas carrying out an attack, and denying all knowledge - even claiming it for al-Qaeda - should be considered, especially in light of the Jamal Aql case. This would also explain the use of Egyptian rather than palestinian expendables.

For those unfamiliar with him, Jamal Zakariya Abdel al-Aql is a Hamas operative who had planned attacks against Israeli targets in Canada and then claiming that it was al-Qaeda who was responsible. Colt has a pretty good summary of his activities available over at the Eurabian Times for your reading pleasure. He also notes the planned subway bombings during the early 1990s as indications that Hamas would carry out attacks outside of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

My response to this would be that Egypt is not the US or Canada, it is the definitive life-blood of the illegal arms trade that Hamas needs to remain a viable force in the Gaza Strip. In large part because of the success of the Israeli government at thwarting terrorist attacks, I suspect that few Americans really understand just how many strikes against the "Zionist adversary" the organization attempts to carry out on literally a daily basis. The Gaza Hamas leadership (I hope that Colt forgives me for not recalling off-hand who is at the top of the totem pole these days now that both Rantisi and Saruman Sheikh Yassin are dead) is keenly aware of this situation and I do not see them venturing into such an attack without a great deal of discussion and debate with Khalid Meshaal and the Damascus-based leadership. Discussion and debate between Hamas leaders mean chatter, which to the best of my knowledge there wasn't a spike in such chatter prior to the Taba bombings.

Moreover, while Hamas may have planned to carry out an attack against Jewish targets abroad and then pretend to be al-Qaeda taking credit for it in the case of al-Aql, to date Hamas has been pretty much a mono-ethnic terrorist group, recruiting only Palestinians to serve within its ranks. I'm sure that Colt would agree that if Hamas is evolving from mono-ethnic to multi-ethnic or Pan-Islamist this moves them up considerably in terms of their ability to inflict harm against either Israeli or American targets. I would also tend to question the designation of the Egyptians as "expendables," as Hussein was an employee at the Central Sinai Irrigation Department, which is a lot higher up in the pecking order than it sounds to us over here.

Egypt blamed "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" at one point, which suggests to me that at last some parties in the Egyptian govt believe there was some palestinian involvement.

Correct and likely accurate. However, the Egyptian government has just about every reason to lie at this point, which is why I would be more interested in hearing from them on the factual evidence side of the equation and then turn to the US or Israelis for analysis. A former senior Egyptian official, for example, has gone on record as blaming the US and/or Israel for the attack.

The Israelis are probably right (that the Brigades of the Martyr Abdullah Azzam as being part of al-Qaeda's global network of terrorist cells). That does not mean the perpetrators were who they say they were.

Agreed and that's the problem with quasi-anonymous claims of responsibility for terrorist attacks. One of the interesting things I noted, however, was that no Palestinian terrorist group has taken credit for the Taba bombings whereas normally 3 or 4 of them rush to the phones every time anything explodes in Israel. The reason, I think we can agree, is simple: they all know what a golden goose the arms trafficking is for their organizations and don't wish to kill it prematurely.

Yes, A-Q is in Gaza. But the chances are that Salah was involved with a more local group. A-Q is extremely low key in Gaza, thought to be number no more than a handful, while Hamas and PIJ members can walk around unmolested. (They'll be police officers armed with U.S. tax-payers dollars soon, too, but that's for another thread :-)

Salah would have to have been extremely fortunate to bump in to an al-Qaeda man in Gaza, let alone get acquainted and work together. By contrast, one cannot breathe there but for local terrorists.

Agreed, but you don't just get a half dozen Egyptians leading reasonably good lives by the standards of the region (tourist guide, irrigation official, metal worker, car smuggler) to risk drawing the wrath of their authoritarian state without sufficient influence. We still have absolutely no idea how they were recruited by Salah (and for all we know it could have been the other way around) or whether Salah was at the top of the pyramid in this little operation. There is also the matter of the 100 or so Bedouin who took up arms against Egyptian security forces in order to defend Fulayfel and Gumaa - was this just out of adherence to desert hospitality or was there something more going on there? Here again, I think that the only way to get some definitive answers to these questions is for the Egyptian government to release more information about the now-deceased immediate perpetrators of the attacks.

The Egyptian govt has also said they believe the attack was aimed at Israel, rather than Egypt. I'm not disagreeing with you, but just adding to your comment :-)

True, but the people at the hotel are dead regardless of the specifics of the attackers' political grievances. Would you want to vacation in Sinai any time soon?

I'd refer you back to Jamal Aql, as well as the Brooklyn subway bombers of 1997. I expect there are other examples.

Yes, and I should have added those caveats ahead of time. What I was trying to say is that one of the reasons that the bright boys running the Intifada were able to win so much public support this time around is that they've managed to by and large contain the violence to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Certainly this is one of the reasons why so many Arab (and probably European) governments are willing to let Hamas operate openly on their soil. But you get a major terrorist attack by Hamas on Arab soil and Meshaal is going to watch the donations drop like a hammer from across North Africa and probably most of the Gulf states as well. You can argue (and I do) that they shouldn't allow such donations to occur in any event, but that is unfortunately the way that things are.

Attacking the Great Satan or Canada is a somewhat different matter, however. With all due respect to Joe and his countrymen, Hamas is likely well aware that Canada is unlikely to take anything resembling well, real action against the group except arresting and prosecuting the immediate perpetrators involved. And attacking the US could be framed (at least in 1997) as an action for which there would be no real consequence, as the US had already been attacked in Saudi Arabia twice by that point and failed to retaliate military against the group responsible.

Which is (if I'm right) why they've denied all involvement, just as they would have done with Aql and the 1997 Brooklyn plot. Neither of those attempts were intended to help Hamas raise cash or prestige, but to satisfy bloodlust and aid the jihad. The intent of Hamas operations is to make Jews feel unsafe everywhere, whether it be Egypt, Israel or (in Aql's case) the U.S. and Canada.

And if, as it seems, they covered their tracks, I'll [all?]I have is their past acts and a gut feeling.

Well, it's certainly as good a circumstantial case as any that I can come up with. I would point out, however, that both the al-Aql attack and the planned 1997 Brooklyn plot were reasonably small-scale, requiring very little in the way of the kind of coordinated, simultaneous strikes that we saw in Taba. Ignoring that this is al-Qaeda's MO (that's been known for years and Hamas could have duplicated the technique), that implies to me that these weren't just peons like al-Aql or the Brooklyn plotters but had authority to carry out the attacks by Meshaal and Co. in Syria. The best way to determine this would be to release more information concerning the perpetrators, but thus far the Egyptian government seems loathe to do this.

An Outgrowth of Iraq?

One of the theories that some observers have postulated is that the recent violence is an outgrowth of the Iraqi insurgency. My answer would be that it is but at the same time that it isn't. This sounds contradictory, so let me try to explain what I mean.

Thus far, the Kuwaiti al-Qaeda (the only one of the three cases that can be definitively traced back to the terror network) are the only ones who have thus far shown any connection to Iraq and according to Kuwaiti authorities, a number of them did receive "on-scene" paramilitary and explosives training, probably in Fallujah or the surrounding area prior to the US offensive there in November 2004. Yet to attribute the appearance of the Kuwaiti al-Qaeda network to the US invasion of Iraq is to confuse the cause with the effect.

First, the Kuwaiti al-Qaeda are not a homogeneous group but rather a network of at least 3 component parts: the Peninsula Lions, the al-Dousari network, and the Kuwaiti Mujahideen. The Peninsula Lions are a subset of the al-Haramain Brigades that have previously appeared in the past, al-Dousari appears to be an international al-Qaeda recruiter whose origins lie in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwaiti Mujahideen were financing al-Qaeda plots throughout the Gulf and acting mainly in a logistical capacity from at least October 2001 onwards. This is not to say, however, that al-Qaeda recruiters in the Gulf have not likely exploited the surge in anti-Americanism in the Gulf states following the US-led war in Iraq, just as they previously did the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Kargil conflict, the Russian invasion of Chechnya, etc. However, thus far all three Kuwaiti al-Qaeda components appear to be led by individuals who, at the very least, have been involved in Islamist extremism for sometime and are only now beginning to come out of the woodwork.

The real test for whether Iraq has increased on decreased al-Qaeda recruiting isn't likely to be fully known until a few years from now when and if veterans of the Iraqi jihad start showing up to cause trouble in other parts of the world at the behest of bin Laden or his successors the way their predecessors who served in Afghanistan or Chechnya have. As I noted in my commentary on one of Gerecht's articles for the Weekly Standard, if you're just looking at the 2004 enrollment in the madrassas like Binori Town that supply al-Qaeda's officer corps, the people to be worried about are Thais, not Arabs. This is not to downplay the threat posed by the Iraq-hardened jihadis, but rather to keep it in perspective at this point.

Interestingly enough, Zarqawi's recent successful offensives against US and Iraqi forces would seem to indicate that he retains at least some strike capability, at least inside his traditional geographic base of the Sunni Triangle. It also raises one potential theory for why Zarqawi chose not to attack during the Iraqi elections: he was unable to carry out any attacks outside of the Sunni Triangle and didn't want to sacrifice fighters he might well need later to blow up targets in the Sunni areas in order to intimidate a local population that wasn't likely to vote anyway.

An Outgrowth of Saudi Arabia

With the exception of the Kuwaiti Mujahideen, the other two components of the Kuwaiti al-Qaeda network strike me as being very much an outgrowth of the Saudi campaign against the network since the May 2003 Riyadh bombings. The Peninsula Lions, as mentioned above, are a declared outgrowth of Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin's al-Haramain Brigades, whereas al-Dousari's filial and tribal ties strongly suggest a southern origin for his own terrorist ties. The number of Saudi jihadis picked up alongside the Kuwaiti al-Qaeda as well the apparently free access that both groups seem to have had on either side of the border is likely indicative of this.

Leaving aside past issues as to Saudi treachery (and let us just say that Clown Crown Prince Abdullah and Interior Minister Prince Nayef calling for a crackdown on terrorism is akin to John Gotti calling for a crackdown on organized crime), the princes have a number of good reasons (from their perspective) to direct as many aspirant jihadis northwards as possible. First, they are currently fighting a de facto al-Qaeda insurrection with a sizeable amount of both popular and government support, an insurrection that they would very much like to redirect as far outside the Kingdom as possible. Second, the Saudi general population, like that of much of the pro-US authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, is deeply up in arms over the US invasion of Iraq and as long as they're cheering on the brave Iraqi mujahideen they aren't turning against the monarchy for its own ties to the US. Third and finally, as long as the Saudis are encouraging the Iraqi jihad they push the US or bin Laden's inevitable reckoning with them just a little bit further down the line and try once again to play both sides against the middle for their own gain.

It wouldn't work before and it won't work now, but it remains to be seen how many people have to die before the princes come to understand this.