A Question of Targets - A Reply to Tony and Nick Foresta

(JK: This post was originally composed on Oct. 3rd, 2003, and mistakenly left as a Draft. Though late, I believe that recent events have given it new relevance.)

Like many regulars here at Winds of Change, I read Tony Foresta's column and reacted rather strongly to it, as can be evidenced from the comments thread. My basic argument against Tony was that it was necessary to attack Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia in order to remove the greater threat to the United States.

One of the things I have noticed during my travels through blogosphere is that there seem to be a number of differing opinions as to which state must be removed in order for al-Qaeda to be either decapitated or sufficiently injured to the point where the finishing the remnants of the network off will be peanuts by comparison. For many people the answer was evidently Iraq, while for Michael Ledeen it is Iran, while noted readers of such websites as Rediff will no doubt come back with the opinion that all roads lead to Islamabad. In each case, the perception is that there is a central pivot around which the survival of al-Qaeda as a global terror network depends. For Tony and Nick Foresta, that pivot is Saudi Arabia.

My own opinion is that this judgement is erroneous.

A Global War For the Future

Al-Qaeda is a global phenomenon, and its bases range from Venezuela to Liberia and Burkina Faso to Mindanao to Sulawesi to even the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. I am not attempting to downplay the role that Saudi funding plays in maintaining the network and propagating the Wahhabism that its members adhere to, but as a result of the US waiting until after the events of September 11 to engage the network, in the short-term I have little doubt that the organization has enough cash available to fund whatever it needs to do. One of the principle problems with terrorism is that it was also a pretty cheap thing to do to begin with.

Obviously, the United States in of itself is incapable of fighting al-Qaeda on such a wide variety of fronts so we try to exercise other options whenever possible. If claims of CIA involvement in the Venezuelan coup are credible, this is one means of dealing with the problem. Similarly, US diplomatic and token military presence has resulted in the fall of Charles Taylor in Liberia. However, in the case of determined state sponsors, these methods are insufficient and military force must be brought to bear in order to ensure that al-Qaeda is not allowed a safe haven to regroup, reform, and come back at us again for another attack on par with or even superior to 9/11.

I don't consider this to be a right-wing position or part of the "never-ending war" that Not In Our Name likes to complain so much about. One of the real tragedies of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks is that most Americans and certainly most Europeans possess only anecdotal evidence as to what al-Qaeda intends.

According to the group's propaganda and ideological tracts available online, they seek to force a complete Western withdrawl from the Middle East in order to overthrow the region's governments and create a theocratic super-state spanning the entire region. Jemaah Islamiyyah holds much the same goals for Southeast Asia. They seek to destroy every facet of our culture and society and build in its place a totalitarian society rather akin to what the Taliban ruled over in Afghanistan and what the Muttahida Majilis-e-Amal is now striving to create in northern Pakistan.

If the Cold War was the ideological struggle to determine the future fate of Western civilization then the war on terror is the battle for survival of Western civilization. That is al-Qaeda's stated goal and I think we would do quite well to take them at their word on this one.

Perhaps I'm alone in all of this, but I don't view a desire to do what is necessary for survival as our society now stands as being a right-wing position.

As I noted at the beginning, however, al-Qaeda is a world-wide phenomenon and we can only tackle one head of the hydra at a time. In Afghanistan, we destroyed the organization's base of operations, captured or killed many of its key commanders, and threw the global network into disarray. But the battle neither began nor ended in Afghanistan and the question soon arose over who to deal with next. There is certainly no shortage of possible candidates here, depending on which pivot you view as the key to the global network.

Fortunately, I think that the administration has recognized that there is no key pivot - bin Laden was intelligent enough to set up his organization in such a way that there was no Achilles Heel. The decentralization of the network is such that it appears to formalized into key nodes in different countries, some state sponsors, some not, any one of whom is more than capable of overseeing operations in their specific geographic region. One such man was Hanbali, and what he was able accomplish is quite frankly chilling.

The administration certainly desires to deal with as many of these nodes as possible, but is constrained from doing so for reasons of realistic limitations of US power and delicate geopolitical alliances.

Where Does Iraq Fit In?

Over the last several months since I joined the Winds of Change team, I have documented the substantial dangers posed by Iraq and its alliance with al-Qaeda:

• In Abu Musab Zarqawi I detailed why administration's portrait of him as a key al-Qaeda leader was the accurate one, thereby answering why it is so concerning for him to have been in Baghdad.

• In the Imminent Threat I documented why the Iraqi relationship with al-Qaeda posed an unacceptable threat to international security entirely apart from any WMDs.

• In Distorted Intelligence ... From Europe I noted how claims that the administration "hyped" intelligence on Zarqawi and the threat posed by him can be seen as being patently inaccurate, as their originators in Germany now fully acknowledge.

I agree that diplomacy is the preferable course action for settling these kinds of issues. If you can't kill all of your enemies, you should at least try to have as many friends as possible.

However, in February 2003, Collin Powell went before the UN and basically laid out the entire al-Qaeda connection (and according to Newsweek, while he disagreed with much of the information that he was initially intended to present he agreed wholeheartedly with the final product) for the world to see. If Saddam had any sense in hell he would have immediately conducted an internal probe, tossed the 1993 WTC suspect to the dogs, and had the streets run red with the blood of every al-Qaeda operative in Baghdad, including folks like Shakir. Whether he was involved with al-Qaeda prior to that or not, he should have almost certainly conducted an internal probe to see whether or not these people who were supposedly vehemently opposed to his regime were operating freely in Iraq.

Instead, we get warnings from the CIA published in the NY Times, that al-Qaeda has cells set up in Baghdad, Mosul, and Irbil - the first two cities under tight Baathist control. Shakir and Abdul Rahman Yassin continued to live and operate freely, as did the Zarqawi deputy who was arrested by the US in Baghdad in mid-April 2003.

This leads to one of my core judgements, namely that the only thing that could convince Saddam Hussein not to associate with and assist al-Qaeda was the downfall of his regime and removal of his power base. CIA and Special Forces attacks, airstrikes, and the like are all ultimately irrelevant so long as Iraq was able to continue providing support to people who would do the United States irreversible harm if they had only the means to do so. They had tried to kill hundreds (thousands?) of people in Europe between November and January.

Those plots were thwarted, thank God, just like Oplan Bojinka was during the mid-1990s. But just because Bojinka was thwarted didn't make it go away - witness 9/11. We cannot allow ourselves to make that kind of a mistake again ever and I think that there's an imminent threat if you should desire one, entirely apart for the question of Iraqi WMDs.

It's a Long War

For me as an individual, I would not consider the war in Iraq a moral one under Just War doctrine if not for the issue of al-Qaeda. If anyone is truly interested at a more in-depth look at my opinion on this, you can find my theological moral opinions on the subject here and here - but be forewarned, it's a lot of Catholic theology.

One of the things that I have long believed is that most Westerners, even most American right-wingers whom I generally think have a better hold on reality than most here, possess only vague and largely anecdotal evidence for what al-Qaeda and its ilk intend for us apart from 9/11. You go to Dagestan or Algeria or the Maluccas or Mindanao or Somalia and you'll see very clearly what this war is really all about. This is why bitching complaining about progress in the war on terrorism is such an asinine thing.

Quite simply, this going to be a long war. There is no magic solution or single battle that will bring al-Qaeda down.

Saudi Arabia is a major pillar for holding up the organization, but so is Iran, so is Sudan (which is reportedly slated to be taken off the terrorist list out of US fears that Khartoum and its oil will fall into the Chinese sphere of influence), ect. All of these states and the governments behind them have to be dealt with in some fashion: political, military, or whatever. Nor are all these countries necessarily Muslim - Charles Taylor was happy to carry bin Laden's water and he's a nominal Christian despot.

Mr. Foresta says that if he were in Bush's position and received legitimate intelligence that Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaeda that he would make diplomatic efforts to settle the situation before using military force and even then carry out percision strikes against the targets in question.

Which was pretty much Clinton's solution in 1998 following the embassy bombings.

The Current Situation, And What's Next

Our recent removal of the Iraqi regime, combined with the loss of key commanders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Tawfiq Attash Khallad, put the organization very much on the defensive. Because the intended counter-attack to the Iraq war (the chemical plots in Europe and bombings in SE Asia) died on the table, the organization was forced to devise an improvised counter-offensive in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Chechnya. These attacks have very much compromised the infrastructure in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The Salafi Jihad has been thoroughly dismantled and over 600 operatives are now in Moroccan custody - they'll never be able to harm anyone ever again. The consequences of the Riyadh bombings have been even more costly - over 200 operatives lost and key commanders like Ali Abd al-Ghamdi and al-Ayyeri captured or dead. More to the point, the issue of the Iran-based leadership has now been brought to the forefront and the Iranians are working themselves overtime in their doubletalk until they have their own version of the bomb. The most recent loss of Hanbali has further weakened their operations in SE Asia, as has the capture of the students intended to serve as Jemaah Islamiyyah's next generation of leaders.

What is my point to all of this? The events of the Iraq war have sent the global terror network into disarray. The Saudi threat is still there, as is the Iranian one - but my point is that al-Qaeda is losing far more of its foot soldiers fighting in Iraq (and yes, the war there did assist the group in its recruiting efforts, but there are still only so many would-be jihadis and only so many places to train them).

My basic opinion is that the best way to neutralize the al-Qaeda network is to start focusing more on where the organization has been endeavoring to regroup.

Knocking out the training camps is every bit as important as knocking out the leadership and those camps are still open in Somalia, Sudan, Georgia, and the southern Philippines. That fact needs to change. So does the Saudi funding and the Pakistani tolerance of all the folks who don't give a rat's ass about Kashmir but think that India would make a nice piece of the global caliphate, etc., etc.

The problem is that you can't accomplish all of this at once.

If we could, US forces would have attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, the Ferghana Valley, Chechnya, Mindanao, Georgia, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Margarita Island, Ein al-Hilweh, Sulawesi, the Triple Border, the Allied Democratic Forces enclave in the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and at least three provinces in northern Yemen simultaneously. All at the same time that we started bombing the Taliban. You want to deliver a coup de grace to the network, that would pretty much do it.

The problem is that we can't for a number of reasons, so you take things step by step to accomplish the same eventual goal. This is what I see Bush as having done since 9/11. You remove those threats and you make sure that civilization wins this fight, so that all of us right-wingers and left-wingers to squabble over the planet. I also don't think of this as a partisan issue - Bayh, Biden, and Lieberman at least seem to understand what we're up against.

Al-Qaeda can still fight strike back, as the recent bombings in Iraq, Chechnya, and Bombay all demonstrate. I'm not at all surprised by this, that's simply the nature of the beast. It was specifically set up in a decentralized manner in order to negate the disadvantages associated with more pyramidal organizations. However, we've done more cumulative damage to the terror network in about two years than was done in the last twelve, and that is certainly something to be extremely proud about.

My Own Views on the War

I don't really care for an empire because I very much doubt that our political culture or general populace can sustain it (see Niall Ferguson's "The Empire Slinks Back" editorial for more on why this is) in the immediate to near future. I care even less about the benefit of corporate America except in the general sense that I desire for the economy to stay within a certain level so that I can enjoy the lifestyle to which I am currently attuned.

But above all else, I want to keep myself and my country safe. There is right now an exceptionally beautiful woman attending Vanderbilt University's music school in Tennessee whom I love. I don't want either myself or her to have to live in world where a non-state entity has access to the most hideous weapons ever conceived by humanity and to put it shortly - I don't want an American version of Halabja in Nashville because some jihadi with a crop duster decided to make Senate Majority Leader Frist pay for supporting US action in the war on terror.

And at the end of the day, that's why I support the US war against Iraq even prior to any action against Saudi Arabia.

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