Today I was quite surprised to read this story in the New York Times because while I was quite familiar with the topic at hand, I can't in all honesty believe that the Times agreed to print this given that they've been sitting on it for quite awhile now.
I would strongly suspect that there's a correlation between when they got ahold of the story and Mr. Clarke's debut back in April. The issue of when the Times chooses to publicize what it does is, of course, beyond my ken, so I will solely reside myself to killing a few common memes with respect to Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda.
"Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq."
This is not altogether surprising, given that Saddam Hussein was quite willing during various periods in his career to harbor terrorists who sought the overthrow of neighboring governments. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the Turkish PKK, and even the Abu Nidal Organization (which is opposed to Yasser Arafat's Fatah) all found safe harbor inside Iraq. In another era, one can easily imagine the same situation occurring with respect to various pretenders to the throne in Europe.
As far as why this is only coming out now (or rather, April) with respect to the former Iraqi regime, I don't think that many of the people truly understand the situation we're in with respect to the sheer number of documents that were recovered from Iraq. To quote Michael Ledeen, "It was an information revolution ... and the information won." If one is interested in learning the truth concerning al-Qaeda ties to Saddam Hussein, I would suggest that you learn Arabic and join some kind of US intelligence service, as there are literally hundreds of thousands of unread Mukhabarat documents in Qatar that are still awaiting translation.
"American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization. He was based in Sudan from 1992 to 1996, when that country forced him to leave and he took refuge in Afghanistan."
Al-Qaeda was a full-fledged terrorist organization when it was formed in 1989 by the time that this document was written (~1995) by any reasonable definition. I can provide specific dates for attacks or failed attacks during this period if one desires.
"The document states that Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and that a request from Mr. bin Laden to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered. There is no further indication of collaboration."
Given that no one has been alleging any concrete examples of collaboration (except perhaps Laurie Mylroie) around this period, this is hardly surprising. The Clinton administration allegations dealt in large part with respect to the al-Shifa plant in Sudan as well as the confessions of al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadhl. I would also submit, though I imagine that individuals are going to take issue with this, that the key underpinnings of the administration rationale for war dealt primarily with Abu Musab Zarqawi's interaction with the Iraqi regime post-Afghanistan, i.e. in the spring of 2002.
Skipping past what we already know about what the 9/11 commission stated on the subject ...
"The new document, which appears to have circulated only since April, was provided to The New York Times several weeks ago, before the commission's report was released. Since obtaining the document, The Times has interviewed several military, intelligence and United States government officials in Washington and Baghdad to determine that the government considered it authentic."
And why is that? Well, let's see ...
"The Americans confirmed that they had obtained the document from the Iraqi National Congress, as part of a trove that the group gathered after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government last year. The Defense Intelligence Agency paid the Iraqi National Congress for documents and other information until recently, when the group and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, fell out of favor in Washington."
And in case anybody is curious as to why the US was continuing to pay the INC, this document and others like it are the principle reason for that decision. It's certainly been better than, say, all the cash we've more or less thrown way to the Palestinian Authority, where it's no doubt well spent on kickbacks and enriching local Fatah bosses.
"Some of the intelligence provided by the group is now wholly discredited, although officials have called some of the documents it helped to obtain useful."
Another related document that has been released to the public lists bin Laden as a Mukhabarat asset as far back as 1992. That's important as well, because immediately prior to the Gulf War, bin Laden originally went to the Saudi royals and offered to use al-Qaeda to fight the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The princes decided instead to call in Western assistance, which the conventional wisdom holds was the beginning of bin Laden's animosity with the Saudi regime. The reality is a little more complicated, but this document also helps to fill in gaps in what the United States knows about the early years of al-Qaeda.
"A translation of the new Iraqi document was reviewed by a Pentagon working group in the spring, officials said. It included senior analysts from the military's Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and a joint intelligence task force that specialized in counterterrorism issues, they said."
And in case somebody asks, no, the translation of the document had nothing to do with the OSP.
"The task force concluded that the document "appeared authentic," and that it "corroborates and expands on previous reporting" about contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden in Sudan, according to the task force's analysis."
Sounds accurate enough to me.
"It is not known whether some on the task force held dissenting opinions about the document's veracity."
I'm sure the Times will be more than happy to give all dissenting views the necessary platform from which to be aired.
"At the time of the contacts described in the Iraqi document, Mr. bin Laden was little known beyond the world of national security experts. It is now thought that his associates bombed a hotel in Yemen used by American troops bound for Somalia in 1992. Intelligence officials also believe he played a role in training Somali fighters who battled Army Rangers and Special Operations forces in Mogadishu during the "Black Hawk Down" battle of 1993."
His "associates" also supervised the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the "Day of Terror" plot to bomb NYC landmarks in 1994, and the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka, which was financed by none other than bin Laden's brother-in-law.
And those are just the failed attacks launched against American interests!
The problem was that no one, at least in Western intelligence services, was able to recognize his hand in the attacks, in spite of the fact that the US had a copy of the al-Qaeda training manual years before the 1998 embassy bombings that no one had even bothered to translate. As Egyptian, Ugandan, or Ethiopian intelligence could tell you during the same period, however, bin Laden had aligned himself with a coalition of dozens of different Islamist terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East and East Africa and was effectively running a sizeable chunk of the Sudanese government. To even pretend that he was a bit player during this period would have been a definite mistake, and one that our government unfortunately made during this period.
"Iraq during that period was struggling with its defeat by American-led forces in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when American troops used Saudi Arabia as the base for expelling Iraqi invaders from Kuwait."
Indeed, which is precisely why the Mukhabarat tried to assassinate the elder President Bush in 1993.
"The document details a time before any of the spectacular anti-American terrorist strikes attributed to Al Qaeda: the two American Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the strike on the destroyer Cole in Yemeni waters in 2000, and the Sept. 11 attacks."
Which makes sense, seeing how both of those took place after 1995 ...
"The document, which asserts that Mr. bin Laden "was approached by our side," states that Mr. bin Laden previously "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative," but was now willing to meet in Sudan, and that "presidential approval" was granted to the Iraqi security service to proceed."
The fact that bin Laden was approached by the Iraqis to begin with would tend to dispute this new conventional wisdom that he and Saddam Hussein were somehow enemies or that the "secular" Iraqis would never work with a religious fanatic. The reluctance bin Laden displays here is fairly similar to that which Abu Zubaydah described during a custodial interview within which he stated that bin Laden rejected a formal alliance with Iraq but would be willing to work with anyone who hated the United States.
"At the meeting, Mr. bin Laden requested that sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric be rebroadcast in Iraq. That request, the document states, was approved by Baghdad."
I'm interested in learning who exactly this cleric is, though I suspect that it's likely bin Laden's spiritual advisor Safar al-Hawali or one of his minions. Any sermons that were rebroadcast inside Iraq would be Wahhabi in nature, I should add, which would also tend to drive a stake through the heart of the argument that Saddam Hussein would never encourage Islamism with his nation because he saw it as a threat to his regime. That very much tracks with what Stephen Hayes documented in The Connection concerning just how apt Saddam was to align himself with Islamists following his defeat in the Gulf War.
"But the document contains no statement of response by the Iraqi leadership under Mr. Hussein to the request for joint operations, and there is no indication of discussions about attacks on the United States or the use of unconventional weapons."
The document also doesn't state that Hussein said no either. In fact, it is entirely silent on the subject and we do know from the arrival of an al-Qaeda emissary in Baghdad in 1998 based on documents found by the Daily Telegraph that if nothing else contacts continued after this point.
"The document is of interest to American officials as a detailed, if limited, snapshot of communications between Iraqi intelligence and Mr. bin Laden, but this view ends with Mr. bin Laden's departure from Sudan. At that point, Iraqi intelligence officers began "seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship, in light of his current location," the document states."
Those channels were likely none other than Hassan Turabi, the prominent Sudanese Islamist who served as a mentor to bin Laden during his time there and wanted to create an Islamist internationale similar to the old Comintern.
"Members of the Pentagon task force that reviewed the document said it described no formal alliance being reached between Mr. bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence. The Iraqi document itself states that "cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement."
And the task force is quite correct to take this view solely on the basis of the document. At the very least, however, that last line in the above paragraph should definitely be taken to heart by those who assert that any Iraqi interaction with al-Qaeda was one of mutual animosity.
The rest of the piece deals primarily with the much-discussed Staff Statement No. 15 of the 9/11 commission, which I have my own problems with if anybody cares enough to scan through my writings.
"The Iraqi document states that Mr. bin Laden's organization in Sudan was called "The Advice and Reform Commission." The Iraqis were cued to make their approach to Mr. bin Laden in 1994 after a Sudanese official visited Uday Hussein, the leader's son, as well as the director of Iraqi intelligence, and indicated that Mr. bin Laden was willing to meet in Sudan."
The Advice and Reform Commission (ARC) was the name of bin Laden anti-Saudi front operation that was run out of London prior to the 1998 embassy bombings and I believe that their chairman is still fighting extradiction to the US in British court. These days, the main al-Qaeda operation run out of the UK is the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA), whose chairman probably should be fighting extradiction to somewhere sufficiently nasty but is unfortunately still free to serve as bin Laden's mouthpiece. He's remarkably up-front about al-Qaeda's ties to Iran, incidentally.
"A former director of operations for Iraqi intelligence Directorate 4 met with Mr. bin Laden on Feb. 19, 1995, the document states."
In other words, right after Ramzi Yousef and Co's plans in the Philippines were disrupted.
Now don't get me wrong, this document certainly doesn't in of itself justify pre-war claims of Iraqi collaboration with al-Qaeda. But it does rather bury two extremely common memes that one encounters when discussing the subject: that Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were blood enemies and that they would never collaborate on issues of mutual interest. The former is now demonstrably untrue and regarding the latter, the only question that remains to be asked is to what degree such collaboration existed.
Not that this changes the obvious failure of the US to establish an acceptable post-war government, the complete failure to find any chemical or biological weapons, or the obvious disdain in which the former regime elements hold Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda contingent.
BTW, Dan, I thought you might be interested in this, although you no doubt disagree with Steele's politics. He even has a meetup.com group!
Feh, one of the things you learn in Washington is that it isn't so much politics (at least in foreign policy) as it is a disagreement over What Needs To Get Done and How To Do It. I'm already familiar with the website, but thanks a lot for bringing it to my attention.
Praktike,
Whate you referenceing on the OSS site?
Well, Dan is an advocate of open source intelligence. Steele is an OSINT evangelist. His agenda is to get the State Department to set up its own open source intelligence network along his principles.
As for the FoxNews story, well, that gives me little confidence. Just take out Al-Douri and the resistance will disappear! Fallujah is the epicenter of it all! That's the same kind of bankrupt thinking that led to the card-crossing-off debacle of the summer and fall.
Ba'qubah and Mosul have been problem areas from day one, and the insurgents' guerilla warfare strategy had been plotted for years. What's new is that Islamists who opposed Saddam are colluding with Ba'athist generals. They formed an alliance last May and June to resist the occupation. What we are seeing now is a more mature stage. Perhaps they don't like the foreigners telling them what to do, but that doesn't solve the problem, which is largely indigenous.
Praktike:
I would actually tend to regard Fallujah as being more akin to where the fight is than anything else, though the Fallujah Brigade has more or less quieted the al-Dulaimi tribal resistance to the US as well as provided us with actionable intel.
As far as places like Mosul are concerned, there we have a rather interesting scenario because there was an al-Qaeda cell in place there before the war. In addition, the Baathists there are personnally loyal to al-Douri, as were the folks down in Ramadi. Now that al-Douri has converted from Sufism to Wahhabism and joined Zarqawi, the insurgents are more or less all under the same roof again for the first time since Saddam Hussein was captured. I would also argue that the ties between the Islamists and the Baathist generals goes back even before the war to all of the foreign jihadis that Saddam brought in to fight for him. After the jihadis and the generals were defeated, they simply built on the tactical alliance that had already existed to launch the insurgency.
You're correct about the foreigners part, praktike, which is exactly why al-Douri and his sons are doing what they are. In addition to being one of the few people still around from the former regime who had a personal loyalty base among the Iraqi Baathists, al-Douri also has impeccable nationalist credentials which is why he's such an asset to Zarqawi. That his sons have also pledged themselves to bin Laden is also indicative of this strategy, as his sons are both themselves notable figures within the old regime hierarchy.
Your final two links are not up to your usual standards: I suspect AEI's slipshod ethics are getting to you. The first link says that terrorists are trying to recruit Iraqi scientists who have the know-how to make WMD. I don't think the existence of highly-trained scientists in Iraq has ever been questioned. What was Saddam supposed to do, kill them after the Gulf War? If he'd done so, you'd be using that as an argument for war. And I don't believe anyone has argued that the Ba'ath "remnants" and Zarqawi aren't making common cause now, but unless you believe that Churchill and Stalin were making common cause in 1940, there is a big gap in your argument.
Andrew J. Lazarus:
"Your faith in Chalabi-supplied documents is touching."
I believe that this is known as the genetic argument. Perhaps it might be better to say that I believe authenticated Chalabi-supplied documents and judging from the NYT piece I am hardly alone on this one. But then again, they're only US intelligence, so what do they know ...
"Well, I suppose it's better than the last Feith/Hayes proof of Iraqi involvement in Al Qaeda, which was predicated on their own spelling mistake."
Sigh
I already dealt with the issue of Shakir (and Cole, for that matter, who seems to have finally come to the conclusion that perhaps, just perhaps, all that talk of foreign fighters wasn't just some sinister neocon scheme to lay the pretext for a future invasion of Iran and Syria) here and here. Cole appears to have forgotten that there are three fedayeen rosters with a Shakir on it, but even beside the point, he, like you, appear to have missed the bombshell that was dropped in one of the attempts to "debunk" what Lehman said.
According to the Landay Knight-Ridder story, Shakir "Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was employed with the aid of an Iraqi intelligence officer" while he was in Kuala Lumpur. Not even Hayes went that far in either his book or the press accounts and it has even been argued within some in the CIA that there was no way that Shakir's contact at the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia was a Mukhabarat contact because he was too low in the pecking order. So whether or not Shakir is in fact an officer in the Saddam Fedayeen, he is unquestionably an al-Qaeda operative of some notoriety (as can be discerned by what was found when he got jugged in Qatar) who was apparently got his job in Malaysia with the help of a Mukhabarat operative. So in the process of trying to "debunk" the Shakir/Fedayeen connection, there was inadvertently an open-source intel diamond in the rough that rolled out.
Oops.
"Your final two links are not up to your usual standards: I suspect AEI's slipshod ethics are getting to you."
Why, because they both go to Fox News?
"The first link says that terrorists are trying to recruit Iraqi scientists who have the know-how to make WMD."
I was actually referring to the link in question because it stated that Duelfer said that we're now at 10-12 artillery shells containing sarin or mustard gas that have been found, not because of the scientist scenario. I should have been much more specific, as the statement was intended to be more tongue-in-cheek than anything else.
"What was Saddam supposed to do, kill them after the Gulf War? If he'd done so, you'd be using that as an argument for war."
I doubt it, as I never found the WMD rationale a particularly persuasive case to invade Iraq to begin with. As I said, perhaps I should have been more specific on this one.
"And I don't believe anyone has argued that the Ba'ath 'remnants' and Zarqawi aren't making common cause now, but unless you believe that Churchill and Stalin were making common cause in 1940, there is a big gap in your argument."
Actually I believe that Juan Cole and others have attempted to argue this on occasion, though not recently. As I said, it was intended as a tongue-and-cheek statement based on the existing meme (and one I wrote this analysis up in large part in order to refute) which you yourself have indulged in on occasion that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda completely detested one another and were bitter enemies prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. If this is New York Times piece is anything to judge by, this would appear to be demonstrably untrue, as would the claim that no collaboration ever occurred. If Saddam agreed to help bin Laden out with propaganda, that's collaboration no matter how you try to get around it and the issue at hand then becomes how much collaboration occurred, not whether or not any occurred.
Dan, here's a WaPo story which corroborates Fox's account that Iraqi xenophobia is kicking in.
Thanks for the link.
This is actually probably better for US efforts in the long-term. The GIA pissed away any chances it had at achieving Islamist revolution in Algeria with the mass killings during the mid-1990s and the Shining Path pretty much did the same in Peru. If Zarqawi goes Khmer Rouge and gets alienated from the locals, even the ones that don't necessarily like us, that'll help us out a great deal in the long-term. I expect he realizes this too, hence the formalizing of his ties to al-Douri.
I'm also not too sure about using the term xenophobia to describe the Iraqi reaction. I sure as hell wouldn't want a band of crazed psychopaths murdering innocent people (especially my own) by the hundreds no matter what their origin. Xenophobia to me has already had an irrational component to it, but this may be just a personal impression.
Thanks for the link.
This is actually probably better for US efforts in the long-term. The GIA pissed away any chances it had at achieving Islamist revolution in Algeria with the mass killings during the mid-1990s and the Shining Path pretty much did the same in Peru. If Zarqawi goes Khmer Rouge and gets alienated from the locals, even the ones that don't necessarily like us, that'll help us out a great deal in the long-term. I expect he realizes this too, hence the formalizing of his ties to al-Douri.
I'm also not too sure about using the term xenophobia to describe the Iraqi reaction. I sure as hell wouldn't want a band of crazed psychopaths murdering innocent people (especially my own) by the hundreds no matter what their origin. Xenophobia to me has always had an irrational component to it, but this may be just a personal impression.
"At the meeting, Mr. bin Laden requested that sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric be rebroadcast in Iraq. That request, the document states, was approved by Baghdad."
According to Eberhard Kienle's Ba'th v. Ba'th (p.171), Iraq did the same thing with a faction of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s:
"After March 1982 [i.e. one month after the failed Hama uprising], of the different Islamic groups, only the one led by 'Adnan Sa'd al-Din continued to co-operate with Iraq and soon was granted half an hour of broadcasting time a day on the Voice of Arab Syria."
I would really like to know if Mamoun Darkazanli was part of that faction.
One of the interesting aspects of Kienle's book is that it suggests that the Hama uprising coincided with a serious, Iraq-sponsored attempt to overthrow Hafez Assad (e.g. p.162, a coup by pro-Iraqi Syrian Baathists, including an airstrike on the Central Committee building, was supposed to coincide with the uprising).
Dan, some questions if you have a moment:
Would al-Douri's bay'at al-Zarqawi be binding upon all Baath Party members still at large?
If not, is there a lesser pledge in the Islamic world that al-Douri could make, in his capacity as the highest ranking Baathist still in the field, that would constitute a formal alliance between the Baathists and Jamaat al-Tawhid wal Jihad.
If so, would al-Douri have the authority to enter the remnants of the Baathists into such an alliance?
Okay, so looking over pp. 197-216 of Republic of Fear, I think I can better understand how difficult it is to separate Ba'athist ideology from Islam. The intellectual founder of the Ba'ath party, Michel 'Afliq, is quite explicit on this point as he tries to reconcile Islam and pan-Arab nationalism. Where the apostasy comes in for guys like Bin Laden is when humans try to create their own system of rules rather than accepting that which is derived directly from God. There in fact a number of synergies as well as points of departure, but the bottom line is that in no way is Ba'athism "secular." Makiya lays this out with some precision.
In any case, this certainly bolsters your argument, Dan, so I would read up on it if you haven't yet done so.
mitch:
I can't speak for Darkazanli, but I do know that Imad Yarkas, the now-jailed head of al-Qaeda's operations in Spain and a major conspirator in the 9/11 attacks, certainly was, even to the point of receiving training in the 1980s. I bring this up because it was Yarkas's top deputy, Yousef Galan, who was getting invitations to parties at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid - under his al-Qaeda nom de guerre.
Robert:
"Would al-Douri's bay'at al-Zarqawi be binding upon all Baath Party members still at large?"
No, because the command structure has broken down and the Baathists have schismed into at least 3 distinct factions since the capture of Saddam. Al-Douri, however, commands the loyalty of the majority of the former Iraqi military and intelligence services, who have reportedly purged themselves of any Christians still in their ranks and joined Zarqawi. My guess would be that this means that al-Douri can like rally anywhere between several hundred to several thousand fighters to his banner and he also has contacts among the non-Alawite members of the Syrian Baathist Party plus its lesser branches in Jordan and Yemen.
"If not, is there a lesser pledge in the Islamic world that al-Douri could make, in his capacity as the highest ranking Baathist still in the field, that would constitute a formal alliance between the Baathists and Jamaat al-Tawhid wal Jihad."
Bayat is roughly analogous to what we Westerners would call fealty in the (very) medieval sense of the term. I would also note that while al-Douri has pledged himself to Zarqawi, his sons, both capable commanders on their own right, have pledged themselves to bin Laden. While that's more or less the difference between pledging yourself to the king directly or to one of his dukes, what I think we're seeing here that concerns me is that al-Qaeda's ideology is continuing to broaden to encompass just around anybody in the Arab world who hates America. While both al-Douri and his sons had to convert from Sufism to Wahhabism as a result of their new allegiances, their followers did not and I've got a very disturbing theory that bin Laden, who's the ultimate driver of all of this, doesn't give a damn about one's ideological purity so long as they hate America and are willing to fight for him - Turabi's influence on him was much stronger than I had previously thought in that regard.
The reason I bring this up is because once one accepts that al-Qaeda seeks to incorporate Arab nationalist as well as Shi'ite Khomeinist (the leadership's current IRGC hosts) into its "big tent" ideal, then we're basically setting the stage for their ideology to broaden even further across the spectrum, which is a Very Bad Thing.
"If so, would al-Douri have the authority to enter the remnants of the Baathists into such an alliance?"
Al-Douri is the current C-in-C of the Iraqi military under the old chain of command by virtue of the fact that he is neither dead nor in US custody. That is his primary argument in favor of him succeeding Saddam Hussein, though the al-Tikriti Baathists argue for a more dynastic approach to such things. That being said, I doubt the old chain of command very much holds up amongst the Baathists on a national level and I'm hardly alone in this opinion. However, al-Douri is the only surviving member of the former regime who bothered to instill loyalty as well as fear amongst his subordinates, which is why he's such a dangerous SOB.
praktike:
Many thanks for the page listings, it's been quite awhile since I re-read Republic of Fear. Also keep in mind that the brand of Salafism to which bin Laden adheres borrows a healthy bit from Trotsky with the idea of smashing the state and such. In order to return to the perfect order of Islam, the existing system must be completely destroyed. That's why (among other reasons) so many analysts conclude that bin Laden would never align with an existing government that he doesn't already control, though the problem is that they don't recognize the strong streak of pragmatism that al-Qaeda has instilled within its ideology by virtue of folks like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, Abu Qatada, and Hassan Turabi. It's a goal-based rather than rule-based organization, and this is a distinction to be noted.
Dan - let me confirm that I understand what you're saying. You're saying that Imad Yarkas received training from Iraq in the 1980s, as part of Iraq's sponsorship of the Syrian MB? That's highly significant if true, but I'd like to see evidence. So far I have not been able to place any of Al Qaeda's Euro-Syrians - Zouaydi, Zammar, Yarkas, Darkazanli - in the context of the broader history of the Syrian MB (names to search for - Adnan Saadeddin(e), Bayanouni, Issam al-Attar). Zouaydi et al have all been named as Syrian MB members, and Darkazanli was once reported to be "acting sheik" of the movement, but it all seems disconnected from the movement's history of exile in Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
And I've now noticed that Yusuf Galan is also said to be a former member of ETA!
Something we really need, incidentally, is a global history of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is an interesting history of the Jordanian wing (note the brief appearance by Azzam on page 31). The MB's history intersects with so much else - Hizb ut Tahrir, Al Muhajiroun, Turabi's movement... It stretches from Qaradawi in Qatar to Alamoudi in the USA. And we have Zarqawi's scornful opinion, that "they make a profession of trading in the blood of martyrs and build their counterfeit glory on the skulls of the faithful".
It looks to more and more to me like AQ , HT, the MB, and so on are merely factions of what is a utopian revolutionary movement. What you're hearing from Zarkawi there is really just a quibble over tactics and strategy. As such, I think it's absolutely essential to look at other revolutionary movements to see how they succeded or failed, and draw some lessons there. What are some of the key mistakes that, say Czar Nicholas or Louis XVI made? How and why did the opposition become so radicalized? What are the milestones (if you get the reference) along the way? In the long run, does brutal repression work? Think Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Uzbekistan. Or is it better to co-opt and inorporate (Tajikistan, Tunisia, the new Iraq)?
If I may venture a worst case scenario, I'd say that we may soon reach a time when popular overthrow of these regimes is inevitable. Where is the inflection point at which switch from supporting the status quo to throwing our weight behind the least worst options?
mitch:
Can't go into specifics, but Yarkas was a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who was trained in Iraq during the 1980s. So is Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, who is believed to be Zarqawi's #2. As for Galan, he was at one point a member of Batasuna, the political wing of the ETA.
"If I may venture a worst case scenario, I'd say that we may soon reach a time when popular overthrow of these regimes is inevitable. Where is the inflection point at which switch from supporting the status quo to throwing our weight behind the least worst options?"
I think that rumors of Turkey's demise as a secular state are greatly exaggerated. Tunisia and Morocco likewise have enough popular support to stay afloat for the time being, as is probably also true of Jordan (and Iraq, judging from the poll results). As far as when worst-case infection becomes too bad for us to stomach, I honestly don't think that there's much of coherent policy on that one because the whole issue of when that point is rests on a number of very specific judgement calls.