Iraq war little problem for Al Qaeda, experts say
Wed Nov 10, 9:40 AM ET
By Frank James Washington Bureau
While President Bush (news - web sites) has argued that the U.S. fights terrorists abroad to avoid fighting them at home, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s re-emergence in a new videotape recently was a chilling reminder of how much bin Laden still wants to wage his international jihad on U.S. soil.
In its way, bin Laden's reappearance cuts against the president's slogan--often repeated on the campaign trail but increasingly questioned by many observers, from terrorism experts to social commentators, even before the Al Qaeda leader's latest video.
"It's very much a reminder from [Al Qaeda] that despite all that's going on in Iraq (news - web sites), Afghanistan (news - web sites), Pakistan and everywhere else, they are still very much focused on executing an attack here," said Ben Venzke, chief executive officer of IntelCenter, which monitors terrorist groups and their activities.
Experts agreed that transnational and stateless terrorist groups, with their cells of operatives across the world, are quite capable of multitasking. "Believe it or not, Al Qaeda can actually do two or more things at once," Venzke said.
"It would be rather silly to think that just because the war began in Iraq that they packed up their entire infrastructure around the world, the support cells and execution cells," he said.
Patient organization
What's more, Al Qaeda has demonstrated that it is a patient organization, he said.
"It has multiple operations planned and in place over a period of years," said Venzke, meaning that operations in the planning stages before the U.S. launched the Iraq war could still be on track.
Also, Al Qaeda members have various capabilities, with some jihadists trained to conduct insurgency and guerrilla operations and others more skilled at launching terrorism attacks in cities, Venzke said.
Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corp., also doesn't believe that the slogan stands up to the test of evidence.
"The picture it conjures up is that somehow the terrorists have to make it through Iraq to get to here, it's a front line," Jenkins said.
"In fact, that is not true geographically. . It is also not supported by what we have seen since 9/11 and since the invasion of Iraq. What we have seen is not only a continuation of significant jihadist attacks worldwide but in fact at an accelerated pace."
Jenkins ticked off terrorist attacks linked to Al Qaeda or affiliated groups since the the start of the Iraq war, including those in Jakarta, Karachi, Madrid, Istanbul, Riyadh, Casablanca and most recently Egypt. The attacks have occurred at the rate of one every three months, Jenkins said. True, he added, there has been no terrorist attack in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001. That could be because the increased vigilance of the Homeland Security Department and other officials has made the U.S. a more difficult environment for terrorists, Jenkins observed, acknowledging that experts can only speculate on the exact reasons. .
More communication
In addition, terrorists are communicating more frequently since Sept. 11 and have continued to communicate since the invasion of Iraq, he said. And they have intensified their recruiting.
"Their pace of activity is accelerating. That does not support a notion that they are being blocked by our actions in Iraq, or necessarily being diverted," Jenkins said.
Moreover, some experts found the argument that America is fighting terrorism abroad to avoid it at home simplistic.
"It sounds really great and it's appealing to a domestic audience," said Charles Pena, a defense analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Of course we would rather fight the terrorists abroad than have them here on the streets of Washington, New York, Chicago or anywhere else as they're blowing things up. It's sort of an obvious statement."
Pena agrees with Jenkins that the evidence doesn't support the slogan. "The slogan . . . displays a real, to be charitable, underappreciation of what our problem really is," he said.
Pena said it falls short as policy "because the implication is we win this war by killing people. ... We're not dealing with a structure anymore, if we were ever. ... We are dealing with a radical Islamist ideology that is infusing itself inside the Muslim world. You don't win by just killing people."
The notion of fighting enemies abroad to avoid having to fight them here has been used before in American history, experts noted. For instance, during the Vietnam War, many of the war's supporters said if the U.S. didn't fight communists in Indochina, it would eventually have to fight them in Hawaii or on the beaches of California.
Bush, who employed the line extensively in the closing days of the campaign, has used it for more than a year. In a September 2003 interview with Fox News, the president said of the terrorists, "I would rather fight them there than here."
As Reed Dickens, a Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman, put it, "The president believes if you are hunting down the terrorists it makes it much more unlikely that they're going to pull off a major coordinated attack if they're having to run and hide in caves."And it's not just Bush. Iterations of the statement by Iraq war supporters can be found on the Internet.
"To me it's an empty phrase," Pena said. "It's a statement of the obvious that doesn't tell me anything about what we're doing and do we really have some plan that allows us to get somewhere that might approximate victory, however elusive defining victory is."
Even TV pundits have weighed in on the assertion that fighting terrorists abroad has precluded the likelihood of facing them on the home front.
On a recent episode of his HBO talk show "Real Time" that was broadcast before the election, comedian and cultural observer Bill Maher echoed those who are skeptical that the fight against terrorists can be kept offshore.
"To say we're going to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here makes it sound like they're some sort of an army that can get bogged down like Napoleon on the way to Moscow," Maher said. "But they're a virtual army. They can fight us there and here at the same time."
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