Chalabi: The American tragedy in Iraq is that your friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, and your enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region

March 27, 2008 Iraq War Facilitated Recruitment by Militant Islamic Gr, War on Terror as Misguided Metaphor No Comments

Tomgram: Mark Danner, Generals Bin Laden and Bush, March 25, 2008

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to “take stock” of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts.

Iraq War Fuels Global Jihad

January 21, 2008 Iraq War Facilitated Recruitment by Militant Islamic Gr No Comments

Fawaz Gerges, Iraq War Fuels Global Jihad, Yaleglobal, December 21, 2007

Ordinary Muslims, not just Islamists and jihadists, view the “war on terror” as a war against their religion and values. Many Muslims who had initially condemned Al Qaeda and 9/11 are having second thoughts about bin Laden’s fight against the Americans and their allies. Bin Laden has gained credibility in their eyes. “Now he is defending the Ummah,” confided a young rising poet, Massoud Hamed.

Top American policymakers – as opposed to intelligence officers – have little appreciation for how their military involvement in Iraq, as well as their staunch support of Israel, is radicalizing mainstream Muslim opinion and legitimizing radical groups that wage armed struggle in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere. “Al-Muqawama,” or resistance, is the most popular slogan in the Muslim world today, resonating deeply among men and women of all ages with religious and nationalist orientation alike. The plight of the Palestinians and Iraqis, in particular, echoes widely.

I have yet to hear a Friday sermon in which believers are not reminded to lend a helping hand to their beleaguered Palestinian and Iraqi counterparts.

As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains, “[T]he Iraq War has become the `cause celebre’ for jihadists … and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

October 16, 2007 Afghanistan, Iraq War Facilitated Recruitment by Militant Islamic Gr, Bin Laden as perceived in the Muslim world, Al-Qaeda (al-Qa`ida), Iraq, Pakistan, War on Terror as Misguided Metaphor No Comments

Peter Bergen, How Osama Bin Laden Beat George W. Bush, TNR, October 15, 2007

The removal of Saddam Hussein would prove to be a boon to Al Qaeda–creating a base for the terrorist organization where none had existed before, energizing jihadists around the word, and confirming for many Muslims bin Laden’s contention that the United States was at war with Islam….

As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains, “[T]he Iraq War has become the [`]cause celebre’ for jihadists … and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”