The tragic violence in Iraq that has left more than 160 dead over the last 2 days may strike some as disillusioning in the wake of the success and reasonably non-violent elections on December 15.
As I noted at the time:
As long as Zarqawi is still out there, though, I think it's naive to think that he isn't going to make a renewed effort to destroy whatever government comes to power following the election, which is why as Cordesman and others have noted that the neutralization of his network must serve as an integral part of any strategy for stabilizing Iraq.
That, not the progress of the new Iraqi military, security forces, or government, is what Washington policy-makers need to consider when talking about troop withdrawl. Zarqawi sat out the Iraqi elections for a variety of reasons and has probably been planning this attack for awhile now with the goal of scuttling a new national unity government (see Hakim's remarks in the New York Times story that he almost certainly considers a sign of success at this point) and drawing as many Sunnis who believe that they were screwed out of the Iraqi elections and are now willing eschew political participation in favor of joining al-Qaeda in Iraq. Lest this be seen as an apocalyptic account, I want to be clear that I expect that the actual number of recruits that he is going to get out of this is going to be quite small but recall that his entire group, its allied groups, and the entire Iraqi insurgency as a whole was never a majority of the Iraqi Sunnis to begin with.
Several other points should be noted, the first being based on my conversations with Bill Roggio and others are that I suspect Zarqawi now has considerably more trouble getting his suicide bombers and additional foreign recruits in from Syria since the military operations in western Iraq in late spring and throughout the summer that appear to have successfully disrupted his supply lines. Irrespective of whatever actions the Syrian government claims (and I'm skeptical of most of the arguments that Damascus would never support the infiltration of jihadis into Iraq) to have taken against jihadis, such as the Majallah Minbar Suriyyah al-Islami claim in July 2005 that Syria had arrested 1,300 jihadis - maybe the ones who couldn't infiltrate themselves into Iraq? In any event, because of this disruption, Zarqawi isn't able to stage nearly as many suicide attacks as he might prefer to and was staging with a far greater regularity from the spring of 2004 to the late spring of 2005 when the US mounted a concerted campaign to disrupt the "rat lines" operating along the Syrian border. While most members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are Iraqis, numerous studies have demonstrated that the vast majority of suicide bombers are foreigners, generally Saudis.
As a result of this loss of a source of easily replaceable suicide bombers, Zarqawi is likely conserving those he is still able to infiltrate into Iraq or was able to get in before the rat lines were sealed for major mass casualty attacks like those that have unfolded today. If this trend holds, we may see a trend towards larger terrorist attacks aimed at inflicting a maximum death toll spaced out over a greater period of time. There isn't much of a quantitative difference between this and Zarqawi's earlier ling chi strategy as far as its ability to disrupt both the day-to-day life of Iraqis and the political process in addition to the high casualties his attacks generate, which is one of the reasons why Zarqawi and his network simply has to be eliminated before Iraq can stabilize.
Finally, for those who might otherwise forget that we are engaged in a global war of which Iraq is an aspect, it behooves me to note that more than 100 Jordanian Islamists attacked Swaqa prison (where Zarqawi was incarcerated through much of the 1990s) in an apparent effort to free the Zarqawi followers held there who were responsible for the assassination of a US diplomat in Amman in October 2002 - I think we can guess who the "Islamists" in question are. For those who are curious about why I was so pissed about ABC reporting the current location where senior al-Qaeda leaders are being held is that I can easily imagine the GSPC mounting a parallel operation in Algeria or Morocco. Now in the case of the Swaqa raid, the Jordanians were able to repel it, but does anybody want to guess what would happen were the GSPC able to rescue KSM, Abu Zubaydah, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, and the other members of the assorted villain's gallery that the US has rounded up over the last several years? Those who wanted to make their objections to the secret detentions known can do so in ways that don't involve revealing valuable intelligence to the enemy.
As an addendum, I should note that there was a suicide bombing in Afghanistan the other day. I don't think that it's all that unfounded to suppose that there might well be a connection between this and the attacks in Iraq given al-Qaeda's love for simultaneous operations.
which is to say, you can't have decent security in IRaq as long as the mullahs reign in Tehran, right?
Well, who's harboring the al-Qaeda leadership at present? Where do people think that Zarqawi's getting his marching orders from? Who do they think is coordinating the global jihad?
Defeating an enemy that blends with the population and strikes from the shadows at will is extremely difficult for a standing army that operates according to standard military and human rights conventions.
Northern Ireland is tiny compared to Iraq. The ethnic composition of the people is more homogenuous than in Iraq. The citizenry all speak english. Yet the British occupying forces were never able to achieve a final military victory over provisional IRA volunteers, many of whom were mere teens.
Al Qaeda in Iraq understands the American vulnerabilities very well. I'm dubious that any Iraqi force will emerge any time soon, with both the intelligence and military capability to uncover and root out this terror nexus in Iraq. These attacks on allied forces will likely continue as the US hands over authority and undertakes phased withdrawals.
That people like Ayman al Zawahiri are gloating the wings is hardly surprising.
Michael's comment up top with respect to Iran and its nefarious influence bears consideration. These disparate terror groups would find it much more difficult to operate efficiently if their command and control structure was severely compromised.
Raids against this or that nest of terrorists, won't make much difference so long as the organizational effectiveness of Al Qaeda (loose though it is) remains intact. Successful efforts have been taken in Pakistan and elsewhere, but there are indeed pressing questions about the role of Iran as far as this particular insurgency is concerned.
Iraq is loaded down with weapons. Anybody who wants to fight anybody else has what they need.
So they're fighting every which way, and we label the ones who shoot at us "insurgents" or "terrorists". They don't need a lot of command-and-control. They're doing us hardly any damage but they do a lot of damage to everybody else.
There was a statistic a few months ago -- US forces were attacked 4 times as often as the iraqi army, but they took 4 times the casualties. That is, iraqi troops took 16 times the causalties we did, per attack. I'd estimate the difference is mostly that we have good armor and they don't.
Imagine how it would be and we weren't there, and there were the same number of attacks. (There's no reason to think there would be the same number of attacks, but let's not complicate it just yet.) With iraqi forces getting 5 times the attacks they did get, they'd be taking 80 times the casualties we're taking. If our casualties, killed and wounded are around 6000 a year, theirs would be -- 480,000?
The only hope here is that they won't get attacked as much. They're fellow iraqis, we're foreign invaders and occupiers. They can get far far better intelligence; they know the language and more people will tend to tell them the truth.
And persian influence is surely not that strong. They'll accept aid from iran and from whoever else will give them aid, but are they ready to die for the iranian government? Hardly. Iranians are foreigners, they're a different culture.
Once we pull out there's a decent chance -- a chance -- that things will turn out OK. But while we stay in there we can only expect more of the same.
Of course, if you like the iraq war you'll just love being at war with iran too....
IMHO,
AlQueda specifically, and the so called "resistance" generally, have from the beginning waged a war of "perception".
If ones goal is to "Drive out the infidel invader", why blow up a bunch of innocent people in Karbala?
If we allow ourselves the speculative thought process that AlQueda leadership has already concluded that victory in Afghanistan and Iraq is impossible, then an alternative strategy would be to provide physical evidence to support the DNC's contention that the US is "cutting and running".
The DNC and some notable US publications are more than happy to provide a narrative, if AlQueda just provides a few "grains of truth".
I a subcriber to the Einstein School of Thought, random does not exist.
The reality of "Hundreds die...as US troops begin to withdraw" was deliberately tied with Zawahiri's "AlQueda is succeeding in driving the invader from Muslim Lands"