In order to fully understand what we are fighting against we need to look at the big picture. This is not the Iraq War On Terror or the Afghanistan War On Terror it is a GLOBAL War.
While the Left, Anti Everything Crowds and Terrorists Supporters would have you believe that we attacked Iraq for no reason, there is some information in this post that they would deliberately supress or simply don't take the time to learn about. The threat here IS global and very frightening. This is no longer about hunting down Osama Bin Laden seeking revenge for 9/11 or bringing down the Saddaam Regime. This is about an everyday global threat. It is a war we HAVE to win. A war for civillisation.
Wearing down the West
THE war on terror, the long war, just now is going badly. Very badly. Our enemies are making solid progress, geographically, organisationally and in their brilliant public relations campaigns. The West is divided and in key battlefields losing resolve.Al-Qa'ida, the unique terrorist phenomenon of our time, has re-established itself in three crucial ways. Al-Qa'ida central has rebuilt the command structure that was destroyed by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. It has re-established its operational capability and its central command and finance organisation. It is not back to the level that it was in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but it is solid and capable again. Al-Qa'ida has also forged vital partnerships with pre-existing, autonomous or semi-autonomous groups in several parts of the world, in our region most notably with Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia. And its role as the inspiration and model for disgruntled Muslims in many parts of the world is going from strength to strength. Al-Qa'ida central is headquartered in the lawless areas of Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, where it runs deadly training facilities. It has established a vitally important new base in Iraq. If the Americans leave in surrender, this base must surely become a more substantial part of the equation. Along with its close cousins, the Taliban, it is making a comeback in Afghanistan. Its ranks in Britain are growing and are already so numerous - 200 pro-terrorist groups or more - as to have the British authorities at absolutely full stretch in trying to cope with them. Operation Crevice, which recently came to a conclusion in the British courts and which saw several young British Muslims jailed for terrorist offences, revealed that two of the July 2005 London bombers had come to MI5's attention well before the bombings. MI5 had not had the resources or ability to track them. Germany, The Netherlands and France have very grave problems. Al-Qa'ida has excellent prospects in Bangladesh and parts of Africa. Meanwhile, a slew of arrests in New Jersey, in the US, may provide the first genuine example of self-radicalising terrorists. Six men are being held without bail after allegedly plotting to attack the US Army base at Fort Dix. Previously, Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies had taken a kind of macabre consolation from the fact all the European bombers and terrorists so far discovered, prosecuted or killed had turned out to have some significant links with al-Qa'ida. They may have been home-grown, but many had at least gone to Afghanistan or more often Pakistan for indoctrination and training. The Americans may be the first real example of a group that is inspired by the al-Qa'ida ideology and moves to create a terrorist plot entirely on its own. This shows the awesome power of what the boffins call al-Qa'ida's "single narrative" for Muslims everywhere. The single narrative is the most powerful propaganda tool yet devised. It presents all of Muslim experience worldwide as a story of Western and Zionist persecution of Muslims. This embraces obvious cases such as Palestinians, Kashmiris and Bosnians, but also the experience of Muslims in the Middle East under corrupt governments, the experience of Muslims in India, the marginalised status of Muslims in western Europe, the conflict in Iraq and everything else. The beauty of the single narrative is that any grievance at all, real or imagined, whether based in fact or fantasy or conspiracy, can be fitted into it. In Southeast Asia the story is a bit better. The Indonesian Government has had significant counter-terror success. But a new report by the International Crisis Group suggests that the al-Qa'ida affiliate Jemaah Islamiah has 900 or more hard-core members and has taken a tactical decision to lay off big bombings of Westerners for the moment while it undertakes training and consolidation to deepen its military capabilities for the future. Other sources suggest JI is internally split and the Noordin Top faction would certainly like to return to big, anti-Western bombings. But, in any event, the lull may be temporary. The initiative rests with JI. In the southern Philippines there has been some progress, with Moro separatists reining in JI in their areas of influence as part of their negotiating strategy with the Philippines Government. But in southern Thailand the situation is diabolical, with violence continuing to escalate. So far it remains clearly an ethno-separatist campaign rather than part of the global jihadi movement. But the younger southern Thai terrorist leaders are more violent and more Islamist than their elders. An alliance between them and the global jihadi forces would be a savage blow not only to Thailand but to the global war on terror. Inquirer this week has undertaken a survey of where we're at with the global war on terror. This has involved as many official and unofficial conversations as possible. There is also a vast amount of information on the public record. Several key new documents have been published in the past few weeks. One was a survey of al-Qa'ida in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs by Bruce Reidel, a former senior CIA and National Security Council officer. Another is a survey of al-Qa'ida in Britain by The Economist that relies on much new information arising from the convictions in the Operation Crevice case. A third is the new ICG report on Jemaah Islamiah. The result of this survey is the negative assessment at the top of this article. Al-Qa'ida has had a very good year. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who of all Australians has been most closely involved with every twist and turn of the global war on terror, disputes this assessment. Not unreasonably, he points out that in a long war such as this, there will be moments when al-Qa'ida looks as though it's doing a bit better and moments when the reverse is true. He tells Inquirer: "Do I think al-Qa'ida are now more threatening to the US, to Europe, to Australia? No. I think their networks have been effectively confined to certain areas." But he acknowledges that al-Qa'ida has had a very active year, especially in Iraq. The best measure for its activity there is the number of suicide bombings: "In Iraq, the suicide bombings are almost always al-Qa'ida, targeting Shi'ites to create sectarian violence ... they have successfully killed a lot of people." Downer does allow a rare note of bitter irony to come into his voice when he acknowledges the effectiveness of al-Qa'ida's tactics: "In terms of their PR, I give full marks to al-Qa'ida. They've been very successful." "Every time there's a terrorist attack in Iraq there's a Western reaction not of how horrible these people are but that we must pull out, we should give up. I give full credit to al-Qa'ida for their excellent public relations." Downer is right in this withering analysis. Al-Qa'ida in a sense wins whether it wins or loses. If it kills a large number of innocents, the chief reaction among most commentators is that this is somehow the fault of the US or its coalition allies. The Western commentariat, not least in Australia, has embraced the pro-terrorist proposition that almost the only people not morally responsible for terrorism are the terrorists. Downer's comments also show how very difficult it is to make a strategic assessment of Iraq. This is partly because of the complex way that the war on terror interacts with traditional geo-strategic considerations. Both US Vice-President Dick Cheney and former US deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz have told me that they all along believed - and still believe - that Saddam Hussein had substantial connections to al-Qa'ida. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the then deputy secretary of state Rich Armitage told me that the danger of Saddam co-operating with terrorists, especially in the provision of weapons of mass destruction, was at the top of US concerns. Now former CIA head George Tenet has published a memoir in which he is generally critical of George W. Bush and tries to absolve himself of as much responsibility as possible for Iraq. However, Tenet makes absolutely clear (as several other memoirs have in less detail) that Saddam did indeed have a relationship with al-Qa'ida that was rightly of grave concern to Washington. In evidence that should be sensational, but has only really been given prominence by Bill Kristol in The Weekly Standard, Tenet describes how 200 al-Qa'ida fighters relocated to Iraq with Saddam's permission and how an al-Qa'ida camp in Iraq worked on the production of poisons such as cyanide. Intelligence reports led to the arrest of nearly 100 al-Qa'ida operatives in Europe who had planned to use such poisons. Other senior al-Qa'ida figures relocated to Baghdad with Saddam's permission. According to Tenet, there was evidence that al-Qa'ida associates in Iraq were planning operations against the US. Tenet also makes it clear that al-Qa'ida was trying hard to obtain a nuclear weapon. So was Saddam. Tenet writes: "The CIA assessed that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and that if he had to make his own fissile material, he probably would not be able to do so until 2007 to 2009." Tenet further says that Saddam clearly wanted nuclear weapons but it was unclear whether, at that moment and under the sanctions that were gradually corroding, he had a program to acquire them. The implication is inescapable: if sanctions had crumbled as they were in the process of doing, Saddam would have got nuclear weapons. I put all this to Downer, who takes it one step further and asks what the implications of the US and the UN backing down to Saddam would have been: "What would Saddam have done, given he was allowing those al-Qa'ida people to operate in Iraq without interference on the basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, in the war on terror if he had had the magnificent victory of staring down the UN and the US?" The US was thus impelled to go into Iraq for three separate sets of reasons: traditional geo-strategic concerns about the extreme danger of Saddam with WMDs; war on terror reasons concerning the danger of Saddam co-operating with al-Qa'ida; and humanitarian reasons to rid the Iraqi people of the worst and most brutal dictator of the past several decades. Reading the situation in Iraq today is exceptionally complex. Al-Qa'ida has established itself as a big force in the Sunni population in al-Anbar province west of Baghdad. Most of the membership of al-Qa'ida in Iraq is Iraqi, but a disproportionate number of the suicide bombers are foreign jihadis. So far there has been very little "bleed-out" of terrorists from other countries training in Iraq and going back to commit mayhem in their homelands. This was a central dynamic in Afghanistan. It may be that al-Qa'ida in Iraq is enjoying so much domestic success that it has no desire to go into the export business. But if the Americans leave in defeat, this al-Qa'ida base would surely become much more substantial, unless they are all slaughtered by Shi'ites in a terrible ethnic bloodbath. Anyone who thinks there are easy solutions in Iraq is mad, although as George Orwell remarked, the fastest way to end a war is to lose it. Defeat in Iraq could have far-reaching consequences. Yet all the signs are that the American political will is failing. Such failure would have consequences for both geo-strategic calculations and for the war on terror. The interaction of these factors produced the war in Iraq and could conceivably yet produce a war with Iran. The ability of the terrorists to create dramatic international events that feed into its single narrative, and play on pre-existing Muslim paranoia, which is greatly amplified by the anti-Western bias of much of the Western Left and media (as outlined in the seminal book What's Left by Nick Cohen), makes it extraordinarily difficult for the West to win the hearts and minds battle at the centre of the war on terror. In many ways the war on terror does mirror the Cold War, which was not a stable period based on the prudent doctrine of containment as the critics of Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard assert. Instead, it was a time of extreme danger and many hot sub-superpower wars in Korea, Vietnam, Central America and Africa. What stability prevailed was based on the radical premise that if the Soviet Union attacked the West in Europe with conventional weapons, the West would respond with nuclear war. The Cold War was much closer run than we like to remember. The war on terror will be the same. That's if we're lucky. |
I hope after reading this, more people understand the importance of supporting our Troops. They are the ones left to fight this war for OUR way of life.
AC
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