One Way or Another, We Were Going to Have that War with al Qaeda

With al Qaeda's apparent defeat in Iraq, it is worth asking what al Qaeda would have been doing over the last 5 years had we sheepishly withdrawn our troops that were amassed in Kuwait instead of invading and liberating that country from tyranny back in 2003. It is also worth considering what Saddam Hussein would have been doing over the last 5 years, but that's another story. What would al Qaeda have been doing?

To have the slightest hope of answering this question, you need to do enough homework to rid yourself of the amazingly inaccurate and easily disproved media narrative on Iraq. That narrative, which matches the liberal narrative, goes something like this:

George Bush took his eye off the ball when he invaded Iraq. Instead of concentrating on Afghanistan, where the real terrorists were and when they are now resurgent, he invaded Iraq, which had no WMDs and no ties to al Qaeda. This served to embolden radical Islamic terrorists by handing them a propaganda victory of historic proportions (it was, in fact, a "cause celeb" for jihadists), and [*] it resulted in a predictable civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, who have hated each other for centuries. Some al Qaeda terrorists came to Iraq after the invasion, but "al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) was largely a homegrown resistance force that never amounted to a significant part of the insurgency anyway. We need to withdraw our troops from Iraq, leaving a few to target the sprinkling of al Qaeda terrorists we attracted there, and concentrate on the fight in Afghanistan. That's where the real terrorists are.

I have placed an asterisk where the standard media narrative goes seriously astray. It's true that Saddam (not Bush) lied about having WMDs. He didn't have any of significance, and he deliberately misled the world into believing that he did. If you are angrily trapped in the "Bush lied!" quagmire, you should dig yourself out of it and go investigate for yourself why Saddam misled the world even when the U.S. had 200,000 troops massed on his border. The truth is vastly more interesting than the "Bush lied!" fantasy. But that's another story. The idea that Saddam was not yet a WMD threat when we invaded is hard to argue with. His relationship with radical Islamic terrorists is a lot more complicated, and it's ludicrous to suggest that he had no ties with them at all, but it is also probably the case that those ties were not as extensive as intelligence analysts imagined they were. Finally, the invasion of Iraq really was, for a time, a "cause celeb" for jihadists around the world. I doubt anyone would deny that. In fact, you'd have to be as misguided about Iraq as leading Democrats are to believe that the U.S. invasion did not attract jihadists like flies.

The standard narrative veers far from the truth where I have placed the asterisk. Anyone with the slightest intellectual curiosity about what went wrong in Iraq (and what is now going right) can easily figure out for themselves that al Qaeda has completely ignored Afghanistan while absolutely wreaking havoc in Iraq. This is a fact (not an opinion) that you need to understand before you can seriously inquire into what al Qaeda would have been doing for the last 5 years had the U.S. not invaded Iraq. Thus, before reading any further, I recommend that you educate yourself on this matter. The key to understanding the problem with the standard media narrative is hiding in plain view and has to do with the suicide bombers of Iraq and Afghanistan. If you believe that I am merely a neocon propaganda machine, then go investigate for yourself what is known about them. And then be amazed by what you discover. What you'll discover is that the suicide bombers of Iraq are almost all foreigners funneled in Iraq by al Qaeda to kill Shiite civilians (not to kill American troops) in order to provoke the Shiite militias into killing Sunnis. That was how al Qaeda decided it could topple the fledgling government of Iraq and send demoralized American forces home in ignominious defeat. Al Qaeda's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis over the years. Nearly 4000 Iraqi civilians were killed by suicide bombers in 2007 alone. Al Qaeda finally succeeded in bringing the Mahdi Army into the battle by bombing the Golden Mosque in Samarra in early 2006, and, in response, that Shiite militia probably killed 30,000 Sunnis in Baghdad alone. But it is important to keep in mind that they were deliberately provoked into doing so by al Qaeda, so, in a very real way, al Qaeda gets the credit for these deaths as well.

Not one word of this is debatable, but it is a little complicated, so surface-scratching reporters are not going to get it across to anyone. You have to dig into the details for yourself. When you do, you'll see that everything I say is true even though leading Democrats have denied it from day one. To them, AQI was an exaggerated neocon conspiracy theory. In reality (to them), al Qaeda was resurgent in Afghanistan because Bush "took his eye off the ball." To find out if the Democrats are right about this, go investigate for yourself what the suicide bombers of Afghanistan have been doing over the last 5 years. Please do that before forming a strong opinion on the matter. What you will discover is that (a) the suicide bombers of Afghanistan are a bunch of bumbling incompetents from Pakistan who only manage to kill themselves most of the time and (b) they have killed fewer people in 5 years than AQI killed every coupe of months in Iraq (before AQI was a spent force, that is). The reason is that al Qaeda has completely ignored Afghanistan over the last 5 years while they have concentrated everything they had in a now failed effort to achieve victory in Iraq. What was, for a time, a "cause celeb" for jihadists has become a propaganda catastrophe for al Qaeda's global mission.

If you believe otherwise, ask yourself: what actual evidence do we have that al Qaeda is active in Afghanistan? The suicide bombers are doing next to nothing in that country (you can easily determine this for yourself), but perhaps al Qaeda's global leadership is there. If so, perhaps we occasionally use a Predator drone in Afghanistan to take out a high ranking al Qaeda figure. That would certainly be evidence that al Qaeda's leadership is in Afghanistan. But it never, ever happens. What often happens is that those Predator drones take out al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan (here's an example). This is really important to understand. The Democrats often try to obscure the critical distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan by talking about the fact that al Qaeda's leadership is flourishing along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. In truth, al Qaeda's leadership is located inside Pakistan. Once you realize that, and once you add in the fact that suicide bombers of Afghanistan consist of relatively non-lethal bumbling incompetents organized by the Taliban (not by al Qaeda), then you are finally in a position to ask what al Qaeda would have been doing these last 5 years had we not invaded Iraq.

What would al Qaeda have been doing in recent years had we not invaded Iraq? A clear understanding of what actually happened over the last 5 years pretty much answers the question. If U.S. forces were not desecrating Muslim territory in Iraq but were instead only desecrating Muslim territory in Afghanistan, is it very hard for you to figure out what the jihadist "cause celeb" would have been? Obviously, al Qaeda's foreign suicide bombers would have been funnelled into Afghanistan instead of Iraq. Their game plan would have differed because there are not enough Shiites there to be worth killing, but suicide bombings in Afghanistan would have been vastly more frequent and vastly more deadly. High ranking politicians, Afghan army and police (including their high ranking officials), and NATO soldiers would have been relentlessly targeted. In short, Afghanistan would be an absolute mess, and it would have been caused by the same force that instead chose to turn Iraq into the mess it once was.

Imagine that scenario, and now add in the facts that (a) our invasion of Afghanistan was not approved by the UN and was illegal under international law (did you realize that?), and (b) theories abounded that the true purpose of the invasion of Afghanistan to facilitate the building of a major oil pipeline. You don't hear much about the illegal nature of the invasion or the "blood-for-oil" nonsense with respect to Afghanistan only because we achieved victory there so quickly. But those talking points would be front-and-center today had al Qaeda seriously opposed us there. But they never did, and my point for today is that they obviously would have had we not invaded Iraq. One way or another, we were going to have that war with al Qaeda. As it happens, we fought the war against them in Iraq (because they chose that battlefield), and we turned the tables by inflicting an ignominious defeat on them. In so doing, we disconfirmed the world's most dangerous theory, which is that America is a paper tiger with a powerful military that need not be feared. We came closer to confirming that theory than I ever thought possible in this post-9/11 world when the Democrats took control of Congress and were on a mission to withdraw our troops from Iraq. In the end, the Democrats failed, and al Qaeda has suffered accordingly.

Casualties in Iraq (May, 2008)

In a recent editorial, the editors of the New York Times said:

Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform.

An unwinnable war? I had to double check the editorial's date because it sounds like the authors are referring to Vietnam. But it was published just a week ago, so they must be referring to Iraq. That being the case, it is obvious that the editors stopped paying attention to the details a long time ago (which is odd for people who are supposedly in the news business, not the propaganda business). To see how this unwinnable war is going, take a look at my annotated history of civilian casualties in Iraq:


As always, the dark purple bars represent the months during which the troop surge unfolded and then became operational, and I have made some necessary adjustments to the numbers here and there (all data taken from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count).

The bombing of the Golden Mosque in February of 2006 was the crowning achievement of al Qaeda's unrelenting suicide bombing campaign against innocent Shiite civilians. The bombing of the mosque had the effect it was designed to have, which was to provoke the Mahdi Army into finally launching a Sunni extermination campaign in Baghdad. It was a brilliant and wretchedly evil plan. Not long after the mosque was destroyed, Iraq (Baghdad in particular) was descending into sectarian chaos. At this point, al Qaeda had the advantage, and they knew precisely how weak-willed Americans would react. Less than a year later, Barack Obama did not disappoint:

Obama Bill Sets Date For Troop Withdrawal

Candidate Goes Further Than Rivals

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 31, 2007; Page A04

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, one of the most prominent Democrats in the 2008 presidential field, proposed for the first time setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq, as part of a broader plan aimed at bolstering the freshman senator's foreign policy credentials.

Obama's legislation, offered on the Senate floor last night, would remove all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008.

I suppose that declaring surrender to al Qaeda in Iraq at the very height of uncontrollable sectarian violence in Iraq might bolster the freshman senator's foreign policy credentials in the eyes of some, but, in my eyes, it had the exact opposite effect. Although Obama's plan to withdraw U.S. forces effectively conceded defeat to al Qaeda, at least he did not come right out and say that the war was lost. But, as I am sure you remember, Harry Reid did:

Senator Reid On Iraq: "This War Is Lost"

Democratic Majority Leader Says Troop Buildup Is Not Working

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2007

"I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and — you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows — (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," said Reid.

He, like Barack Obama, was saying that this war was lost to al Qaeda. This is not really a debatable point because the violence he was referring to on that day was this:

Suspected Qaeda bombs kill nearly 200 in Baghdad

18 Apr 2007

BAGHDAD, April 18 (Reuters) - Suspected al Qaeda militants killed nearly 200 people in a wave of car bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday, including one that was the single deadliest attack in the Iraqi capital since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Nobody (except for me) ever mentions this amazing fact about Harry Reid's incredible declaration of defeat. He was, very definitely, accepting defeat at the hands of al Qaeda in Iraq (right on cue, I might add).

More recently, Nancy Pelosi has weighed in:

"Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal."

To be sure, she was basing that claim on the standard fiction the whole purpose of the troop surge was to create the breathing space needed for political reconciliation to occur (in the absence of which violent chaos would again automatically ensue). If you get your news from the New York Times, as I assume most on the left do, then you could be forgiven for uncritically accepting the demonstrably false idea that the "whole purpose" of the troop surge was to facilitate political reconciliation in Iraq. If you base your understanding about the purpose of the troop surge on the words of the man who actually ordered it and who explained why he did so in a speech to the nation (as you should), then you'd appreciate that a major purpose (the major purpose, I'd say) involved something else altogether:

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad...Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work.
...
Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to keep up the pressure on the terrorists. America's men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan -- and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Gee, you'd almost think that a major purpose of the troop surge was to inflict a crushing defeat on the terrorists and insurgents who were wreaking havoc in Iraq. It seems that the surge has, indeed, achieved that purpose. Although you don't know it (because you read the news), al Qaeda was responsible for the tremendous escalation of violence in Iraq throughout 2006 and most of 2007. Al Qaeda deliberately goaded the Mahdi Army into slaughtering Sunnis in an effort to stop what al Qaeda was doing, and it worked like a charm. That's what you thought was a civil war (again, because you read the news). And because you read the news, you thought all this talk about al Qaeda in Iraq was just another in a long string of preposterous neocon conspiracy theories. Besides, although some al Qaeda terrorists certainly came to Iraq in the aftermath of our invasion of Iraq, you (avid reader of the news that you are) knew perfectly well that these terrorists were just a tiny part of the overall insurgency. What you don't know, and what simply blows your comfortable fantasy out of the water, is that this supposedly minuscule part of the "insurgency" killed over 10,000 people in Iraq (nearly 4000 in 2007 alone), almost all of whom were innocent Shiite civilians. The leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq and their suicide bombers in Iraq were almost exclusively foreigners. Trying to fit these facts into a civil war scenario is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn't work, and this explains why the editors of the New York Times have stopped paying attention to the details. The details simply don't fit the narrative. Instead of changing the narrative, they ignore the details.

Because al Qaeda has been crushed, and their former Sunni allies now hate them (as do the Shiites and Kurds, of course), I do not see how they can make much of a comeback. And if al Qaeda cannot make a comeback, then victory in Iraq will be at hand. Evidence of apparent victory can be found in a chart showing US military casualties as well:


The dashed red line helps to place the casualty total for May into perspective. I wonder what the left thinks of moveon.org's "General Betrayus" ad now? I wonder if left wing extremists still experience spasms of pride over Hillary Clinton speaking truth-to-power when she said that to believe that things are getting better in Iraq requires a willing suspension of disbelief? I doubt anyone on the left thinks about those things. It's just an unwinnable war, facts be damned (and self-reflection be damned, too).

It seems that we may have already won this unwinnable war. In so doing, we have disconfirmed the world's most dangerous theory. That theory, which was shared by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alike, was that America's powerful military was not a force to be feared because the will of the American public could be easily broken with just a bit of bloodshed. That was the lesson these tyrants learned from Vietnam, and the actions of Barack Obama and Harry Reid seemed to confirm that 9/11 did not change anything. The lesson I have learned is that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were, to my great surprise, mostly correct. As they thought, most Americans do not have the will to sustain a bloody fight. But I've also learned that if the president alone does show that resolve, then that's all that matters. Now that al Qaeda in Iraq has been crushed, I suspect that they have learned this new lesson as well (well, bin Laden has).

As it turns out, it was al Qaeda, not America, that launched a misbegotten adventure in Iraq. Their great mistake in an otherwise brilliant plan was to think that even George Bush's will could be broken once the will of the American people began to flag. It was a monumental error on their part. Now, they have lost in Iraq, and they destroyed their reputation throughout the Muslim world because of the strategy they used in their unsuccessful effort to evict American forces. That strategy was to slaughter other Muslims (Shiites) to break the will of the American people instead of directly taking on the U.S. military. It almost worked, but the gamble appears to have failed. And here you thought that the invasion of Iraq was some sort of great propaganda victory for al Qaeda. Well, that's what you would think if you read the news.

Ironically, all of this is probably bad news for John McCain. You might imagine that Americans would appreciate how foolish the freshman senator was and how wise the veteran senator was when push came to shove on the issue of troop surge. The choice was between (a) defeat for America at the hands of al Qaeda, plus a hellacious explosion of genocidal violence in Iraq vs. (b) victory by America over al Qaeda, plus a relatively peaceful Iraq. Barack Obama favored the former; John McCain the latter. But if Iraq remains under control in November, Americans are more likely to just forget the whole thing and cast their votes based on gas prices, health care, taxing the rich, and so on. You can't campaign on achieving victory in Iraq if we've already won. John McCain had better start thinking about that.