Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  Intelligence officers who had been working against Sunni extremism since the early 1990s understood that the looming Iraq war was certain to destroy two of our most important and reliable de facto allies in that anti-Islamist struggle, Iraq and Syria. And they were the best kind of allies, in that Washington did not have to arm, coerce, bribe, or cajole them into acting in the most murderous manner against most Islamists. While our purportedly dear and loyal friends in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates cared little about what Islamist militants did in the world beyond the Arabian Peninsula—letting aid and would-be fighters flow to them, and funding the education of young Muslims worldwide in the jihadists’ creed—Saddam’s Iraq and Hafez and then Bashir al-Assad’s Syria were on a permanent war footing against them.

  This is not to say that Saddam and the al-Assads were good guys—far from it. Yes, it is true that both Baghdad and Damascus did fund and train some Palestinian terrorists, secular and Islamic, who then attacked Israel. And Saddam did make cash payments to the families of successful Palestinian suicide bombers. Yes, Syria facilitated the flow of Iranian arms to Lebanese Hezbollah, which in turn used them to drive the Israel Defense Forces out of southern Lebanon. And yes, both regimes were willing to allow some Sunni extremists from groups like al-Qaeda, the Egyptian Gama’at al-Islamiyah, and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad to transit their territories, at times in a leisurely fashion. But what is even truer is that these Syrian and Iraqi actions primarily were meant to hurt Israel, not the United States, and that both the Baghdad and Damascus regimes viewed the Islamists as a significant threat to their hold on power. Neither state allowed Islamist groups bent on attacking the United States to establish permanent training camps or safe havens on their territory, and their security services dealt summarily with Islamists who overstayed their welcome or became involved in inappropriate activities while visiting. Each state tended to deal even more harshly with its domestic Islamist militants. In short, Saddam’s Iraq and al-Assad’s Syria were inherently helping the United States by standing as very effective bulwarks against any easy and secure westward movement of the Sunni jihad’s main base in South Asia toward the Levant, Israel, and Europe.

  Although it is not often mentioned, Saddam’s Iraq also stood as a bulwark protecting Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula from al-Qaeda insurgents. One of bin Laden’s worst nightmares has always been a Turkey that succeeds on its present course: an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim state with the potential for proving that Islam is compatible with a semblance of Western democratic institutions. And of course, Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states on the Arabian Peninsula have been al-Qaeda’s primary targets because Riyadh allowed U.S. and Western forces to deploy there starting in 1991 and because Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates have helped Washington maintain and, as needed, expand the U.S. military presence in the region since that year. As long as Saddam ruled Iraq, al-Qaeda and its allies had to content themselves with infiltrating Turkey from Europe and Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula through its ports and airports. Such infiltration could occur only in small numbers, giving local security regimes a sporting chance to suppress the activity. Without Saddam’s effective police state, Islamist infiltration into Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula stands a far better chance of larger and more regular success.

  Thus, after 9/11, as U.S. forces launched the war against al-Qaeda, Iraq and to a somewhat lesser extent Syria 10 stood in two ways as extremely important assets for Washington. In the short term the two countries were unwilling to host al-Qaeda fighters evacuating Afghanistan, thereby preventing an even greater westward dispersal than occurred. In the medium-to-long term, the existence and strength of the two regimes denied what bin Laden most needed to expand al-Qaeda’s organizational and paramilitary operations into the Levant, Turkey, and states of the Arabian Peninsula; that is, contiguous safe haven. Bin Laden and his fighters had learned their insurgent trade during the Afghans’ jihad against the Soviets. One of the major lessons bin Laden took from that war was the vital importance of contiguous safe haven for the survival, durability, succoring, and growth of the Afghan insurgency. The ability of the Afghan mujahedin and their Arab allies to establish facilities in Pakistan for refugees, to care for their wounded, and to train, rest, and store weapons and ordnance ensured that no matter how severe a drubbing they received at the hands of the Red Army and their Afghan Communist allies, the insurgents would never face a situation where they would have to fight to the death. Relatively safe areas inside Pakistan meant that Islamist fighters coming from outside South Asia were often able to relocate their families in the general vicinity of the war zone and visit them from time to time. The impression that the Pakistani safe haven made on bin Laden’s thinking is clear. On several occasions he publicly described his inability to send a substantial number of fighters to Bosnia because there was no Pakistan-like entity in the Balkans; al-Qaeda could not stage out of or escape to Catholic Croatia or Orthodox Serbia. Likewise, bin Laden has railed against Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon for refusing to allow non-Palestinian mujahedin to use their territory as a safe haven from which to attack Israel.11

  So even as U.S. and NATO military and intelligence services continued to pursue and bomb al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the spring of 2003, bin Laden could see that the pending U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was going to present new opportunities for al-Qaeda and its allies to project force westward and into the Arabian Peninsula. After temporarily closing the Afghan window, Allah was, in effect, preparing to open the Iraqi door. The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, therefore, yielded positive consequences for al-Qaeda from its first day, and while these consequences may have been unintended by Washington, they could certainly have been predicted. Absent the brutal but effective bulwark of Saddam’s regime, al-Qaeda and the Islamists had an open field for acquiring contiguous safe haven on the borders of the Levant, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran and with it the ability to project power toward all points of the compass. By destroying the regime of America’s de facto ally in Baghdad and weakening the helpful regime in Syria, Washington facilitated the relocation of the center of the Sunni jihad from Afghanistan to Iraq, in the middle of the Arab heartland, a thousand kilometers westward. The Bush administration’s Cold War trait of preferring to fight and defeat nation-states immeasurably strengthened the much more dangerous transnational threat posed by the Sunni Islamists.

  In the year preceding the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, moreover, the continuing dominance of Cold War thinking among senior U.S. government councils was apparent in the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The al-Qaeda–associated al-Zarqawi had established a small presence in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq in the years prior to the 9/11 attack and reinforced it by moving fighters there from Afghanistan in late 2001. U.S. intelligence had followed al-Zarqawi’s move to Iraq and managed to keep a good handle on his movements and activities there. By the spring of 2002, the intelligence showed that al-Zarqawi had established his headquarters in a camp in the Kurdish zone called Khurma or Khurmal. Physical and paramilitary training was being conducted in the camp, and there were credible reports that some members of al-Zarqawi’s group were conducting rudimentary chemical-weapons experiments in the camp. The experiments focused on producing anthrax and ricin, and those toxins were used on horses and other farm animals to determine their effectiveness.12

  Beyond knowing the location of the camp and having a good approximation of what was going on there, the information also showed that al-Zarqawi was in the camp. The flow of intelligence was steady, and thus the CIA’s targeting officers’ data quickly demonstrated the patterns of al-Zarqawi’s activities, putting well within the realm of possibility the ability to fix him at a given place and time for an attack. Over the summer and fall of 2002 the quality of the intelligence on al-Zarqawi remained high, and the targeters came to the point of being routinely and reliably able to fix al-Zarqawi’s location. Between March 2002 and the Iraq inva
sion, the White House had a chance to order an attack by the U.S. military on al-Zarqawi, his camp, and its chemical-weapons operations on at least a weekly basis. Reporting on such a high-priority target obviously was of high interest to the president, the NSC, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and data about al-Zarqawi’s location and activities were delivered to them on an almost daily basis. To be frank, the officers on the team targeting al-Zarqawi believed his days were numbered: he was located in an area outside of Saddam’s control, so an attack could not be viewed as an attack on Iraq; he was in Iraq preparing mujahedin forces to attack the U.S. military if an invasion occurred; his fighters were conducting experiments with chemical weapons; and all of this was occurring in a paramilitary training camp so there were no legitimate concerns about the collateral killing of civilians. Reinforcing this perception was the braying that senior administration and intelligence officials were doing about America having taken the gloves off its power after 9/11. They had betrayed these words by letting bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, so we were confident they would put their money where their mouths were in the case of al-Zarqawi. In the intelligence business there are very few dream targets, but we thought al-Zarqawi was one of those few.

  We had to think again. Day after day, week after week, and month after month, complete target packages for al-Zarqawi were sent to those senior U.S. officials who could order an attack, but the order never came. Why? In the first instance, I think, the quality and steadiness of the intelligence gave policymakers the sense that they could kill al-Zarqawi when they pleased and so there was no hurry to make the decision. As during the Cold War, Washington believed the al-Zarqawi problem could be addressed at a time that fit its schedule. The more important reasons for not attacking, however, lay in three other Cold War attitudes: coalition-love, public-opinion currying, and fixation on nation-state threats. When the al-Zarqawi target packages were sent to policymakers, the reason consistently given to CIA targeters for not attacking was that the White House and the State Department were still working to convince the French and German governments to join the U.S.-led coalition for the invasion of Iraq. The policymakers feared that if they attacked and killed al-Zarqawi, European public opinion would judge the United States to be a trigger-happy gunslinger and thus reinforce the determination of Paris and Berlin to abstain from the war. In other words, Washington saw the threat from a traditional nation-state like Iraq as more dangerous than the threat from a less quantifiable transnational group, and so first things first: get the French and Germans on board against Saddam, and let al-Zarqawi live. A fairly irrefutable indictment of the failure of U.S. policymakers to wean themselves from Cold War thought-processes surely lies in the fact that al-Zarqawi was instrumental in killing more U.S. soldiers, civil servants, and civilian contractors, between the 2003 invasion and his own demise, than was Saddam Hussein’s regime in the first and second Gulf Wars combined.

  Conducting the War

  The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq is another example of Washington’s specialty: projecting immense military power without achieving lasting positive results for U.S. interests. U.S. soldiers and Marines, as always, displayed speed, innovativeness, and courage in quickly defeating Saddam’s regular military forces. Encountering more resistance than anticipated from dispersed Iraqi regulars, armed Ba’ath party members, Iraqi irregulars (the Fedayeen Saddam13), and the first-arriving elements of non-Iraqi Islamist fighters, U.S. forces nonetheless prevailed in each battle in which they were engaged. Baghdad fell, Saddam’s statue was pulled to the ground, and the media broadcast live scenes of Iraqis rejoicing in the capital and other major cities. Apparently unaware of Mr. Lincoln’s advice about always being henlike and not cackling prematurely, President Bush, with some staged drama, declared that the U.S. mission in Iraq had been accomplished. Sadly, Mr. Bush, his lieutenants, and the American people did not recognize at the time that the mission that U.S. military forces had accomplished belonged to Osama bin Laden and the worldwide Islamist movement.

  In those first heady days after the statue fell and while Saddam was staying a step ahead of his pursuers, U.S. generals, meeting in the Iraqi president’s opulent palaces as befits imperial proconsuls, repeated their Afghan mistake of believing that to capture the cities of Iraq was to win the war. Like Ms. Rice viewing the scenes of rejoicing in Kabul after Taliban forces evacuated, the generals and the Bush administration extrapolated the celebrations in Baghdad and other cities into a country-wide assessment. In so doing, they misinterpreted relief over Saddam’s departure as a durable and heartfelt welcome for an invading non-Muslim army of occupation. That this massive error occurred twice in eighteen months demonstrates the historical ignorance of our political leaders and seniormost generals. Generally speaking, history shows that most nation-state populations, with the possible exception of the French, do not like to be invaded and occupied, even if the invaders hand out MREs to families, candy to children, and fistfuls of greenbacks to all and sundry. History’s list of unwelcomed and ultimately vanquished occupiers is far lengthier than the list of successful occupations. Iraq and Afghanistan were not Panama and Grenada.

  As in the case of Afghanistan, Americans must not let their political leaders and generals off the hook of culpability by claiming that what happened in Iraq is a series of unfortunate but unintended consequences. Let us again be more than fair and accept that the bipartisan political leadership that took America to war in Iraq really did not intend to create the reality that now exists—the great intensification of the Islamists’ power, motivation, manpower, and funding in Iraq and across the Muslim world. This surely is the major unintended consequence of the Iraq war, but it was an entirely predictable consequence. During the six years preceding the U.S.-led invasion, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri conducted an education program that taught Muslims what to expect in terms of future U.S. actions in the Islamic world. The United States would, they predicted, seek to destroy strong Muslim governments and replace them with “U.S. agent regimes.” It would forbid or replace Islamic law and put man-made law, elections, and parliaments in its place, as well as destroy any Muslim regime deemed threatening to Israel, seek to control Muslim oil resources, and occupy or destroy Islamic holy sites. Briefly sketched, this was the perception trap that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri set for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations; the former never understood it, and the latter walked unavoidably into it in Afghanistan and capriciously ensnared itself in it in Iraq. What most Muslims perceived in the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the confirmation of bin Laden’s predictions about the malignant intent of America toward Islam and its followers. Victory in Iraq belonged to al-Qaeda and the Islamists from the moment the war began because Washington reliably and eagerly played the part assigned to it by al-Qaeda: the infidel invader of a Muslim country, against whom the Koran requires a defensive jihad. There must have been times when bin Laden and his lieutenants thought it was all just too easy.

  Again, let us give the Bush team the benefit of the doubt and say they did not intend to provide the religious predicate for a worldwide defensive jihad against the United States, but they should be cut no slack whatsoever on the issue of predictability. Not a lick of classified intelligence information was needed to know what repercussions the invasion of Iraq would cause; all that was needed was to read the words of our Islamist enemies, know a bit about Islam and its history, and ignore the advice of politically motivated experts like Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, Fareed Zakaria, Max Boot, Fawaz Gerges, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and the rest of that prowar media lobby that helped sink U.S. interests in the sands of Iraq. And it is important to note that the damage done to the United States was done when the invasion’s first air strike hit and the first armored unit crossed the start line in Kuwait. The looting of Baghdad, the disbanding of the Iraqi military, the complete de-Ba’athification of the bureaucracy, and L. Paul Bremer’s reign of ruin and easygoing corruption all worsened the situation, but even without the
se factors the Islamists would have won. Once U.S. and Western forces set foot in Iraq, bin Laden’s predictions were validated, and not even the tens of thousands of Islamic scholars and jurists who are fully owned and operated by Hosni Mubarak, Bashir al-Assad, the Algerian junta, and the Jordanian and Saudi kings could craft a credible theological argument to deny that the Koran’s conditions for launching a defensive jihad had been met and then some. The Bush administration lost the war in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, because it did not know history and believed that, in any event, history held no lessons for the United States.

  And regarding the chances of a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq? Again, this was and is a no-brainer for anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Islamic and Iraqi history. Most Americans bought the White House’s denial that a civil war was occurring in Iraq for far too long primarily because of the absurd debate the administration generated with the media and academia over the definition of a civil war. Animosities between Sunnis and Shiites are deep, theologically substantive, a thousand years old, and always potentially lethal. No matter how dire the Afghan insurgents’ prospects were against the Red Army or how intense and bloody the Taliban’s campaign against Ahmed Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance, for example, they always had time and resources to take a break and slaughter Afghan Shias or Iranian diplomats and intelligence officers. Sunni organizations in Pakistan have long made murdering Pakistani Shia and their leading clerics a top priority. The Sunni regimes on the Arabian Peninsula worry about Iran getting a nuclear weapon not because of the weapon itself (Sunni Pakistan has the bomb, and only a fool would be confident that the Saudis do not have nuclear warheads nestled on the top of their China-provided CSS-2 ICBMs) but because the finger on the trigger would belong to a Shia hard-liner in Tehran. For most Sunnis, Shias are heretics of the deepest hue, and while the Islamic world is replete with examples of Sunnis and Shias living amiably side by side, both sides are well aware that at some point the two sects will have a violent final reckoning. Indeed, there are those on each side of the sectarian divide who long for such a cataclysmic reckoning; the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was one of them.