Are we fighting "Al Qaeda in Iraq"? Yes or No?
Not really. Yeah, there are some AQ people and sympathizers in Iraq. The same is true for a lot of countries, Arab and non-Arab. For that matter, even non Muslim countries. I daresay there are AQ sympathizers in the US, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, and others. But the vast majority of the people fighting us in Iraq have nothing to do with AQ, and would just as soon they disappear from the face of the earth.
Is the Sunni insurgency in Iraq composed of Baathists AND Al Qaeda in Iraq? Yes or No?
Again, not really. Not even according to our own military commanders. There simply aren't very many AQ soldiers in Iraq. Have they done damage beyond their numbers? Undoubtedly--they are there solely for the purpose of killing Americans and wrecking mayhem. If we left tomorrow, would they still be there? Perhaps some of them would be--but if they continued to try to wreck mayhem, I daresay that they would be killed or kicked out in short order.
Is Iran sheltering top AQ figures, such as OBL's son Saad? Yes or No?
Frankly, I have no idea. Sure, things like that have been reported. But all sorts of things are reported, have been reported with respect to this conflict that have turned out to be untrue. You can keep repeating these things as much as you like, but you have to use some judgement in evaluating not only their veracity, but their significance. The fact--also widely reported, from many different sources--is that Iran helped the US in the first part of this battle against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Shiites in Iran have no love of Wahhabist interpretations of the Koran, or of Sunni AQ. Even if it turns out to be true that they are sheltering top AQ figures, it is questionable whether the term "sheltering" or "imprisoning" or "giving asylum to" is the apropriate description.
Look there is no monolithic "Islamic extremism." Any more than there was, during the Cold War, a monolithic "Communist conspiracy." There are Islamic extremists of many different stripes. Just as there are Christian or Jewish extremists of many different stripes. Or Communist sympathizers. To lump them all into one heap is not only falsify the reality of the situation, it makes the situation far worse than it should be or could be. Trudy Rubin had a nice column on this topic awhile ago, I posted it here:
Message 22787130
But you don't even touch Fred Kaplan's questions and points. Probably because it hits the real issue: what is the real nature of this conflict? Is it a "civilizational" war, a war like the war against the Nazis? Or is it just a fundamental delusion, a terrible mistake that has created a power vacuum that can't easily be fixed, that has unleashed rifts in Iraq society--and perhaps even in Arab society--that have simmered for centuries, and now can't be bottled up again or assuaged? And if it is indeed a civiliational war, why the hell can't Bush convince most other countries of this, and why hasn't he put this country on a serious wartime footing? You don't cut taxes and tell people that they are doing their part in a civilizational war by going out and shopping, lol. Here is a relatively brief excerpt from Kaplan's article, in case you've forgotten it, and don't want to read the whole thing:
But one passage in particular reveals that [Bush's] campaign is getting desperate:
The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq.
Here's the question: Does anybody believe this? If you do, then you must ask the president why he hasn't reactivated the draft, printed war bonds, doubled the military budget, and strenuously rallied allies to the cause.
If, as he said in this speech, the war in Iraq really is the front line in "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century"; if our foes there are the "successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists"; if victory is "as important" as it was in Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal—then those are just some of the steps that a committed president would feel justified in demanding.
If, as he also said, terrorism takes hold in hotbeds of stagnation and despair, then you must also ask the president why he hasn't requested tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for aid and investment in the Middle East to promote hope and livelihoods.
Yet the president hasn't done any of those things, nor has anyone in his entourage encouraged him to do so. And that's because, while the war on terror is important and keeping Iraq from disintegrating is important, they're not that important. Osama Bin Laden is not Hitler or Stalin. Baghdad is not Berlin. Al-Qaida and its imitators don't have the economic resources, the military power, or the vast nationalist base that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had.
So, the speech sends the head buzzing with cognitive dissonances. There's the massively exaggerated historical analogy (which should have been obvious, if not insulting, to the World War II veterans in the audience). And there's the glaring mismatch between the president's gargantuan depiction of the threat and the relatively paltry resources he's mustered to fight it.
Such dissonances could further diminish, not revive, his support.
President Bush is right about one thing: It would be a mistake to withdraw all our troops from Iraq—though, even here, he's right for the wrong reason. The danger is not, as he warns, that al-Qaida would take over Iraq. That's an exceedingly improbable scenario. First, al-Qaida's numbers in Iraq are small. Second, other well-armed militias, both Sunni and Shiite, would ferociously resist any such attempt to take power.
The real danger is that Iraq might devolve into anarchy and total civil war, the likes of which would make the present turmoil seem placid by comparison. Killings could soar into the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Neighboring countries, whether for aggrandizement or security, would feel compelled to intervene—Iran siding with the Shiites, Saudi Arabia bolstering the Sunnis, Turkey suppressing the Kurds—and, from there, one good spark could set off a horrendous war across the whole region.
Bush doesn't see this danger—he chooses not to see it—because it plays against his ideology. He views the world as locked in a titanic struggle between, as he put it in today's speech, the forces of "freedom and moderation" and the forces of "tyranny and extremism." This is, in his mind, "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."
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