Demystification
The Left might still be churning out canard after treasonous canard, but the Iraqis ain't buying it.
Michael E. Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, both from the Brookings Institution, have penned an article for the NYT - and two distinguished gentlemen whom we should be familiar with have recently posted about that same article: tigerhawk and wretchard. Firstly, let us take a look at the latter's musings, which never fail to offer a fresh perspective and food for thought:And by shrewdly matching kinetic warfare with political warfare, organizing the victims of al-Qaeda's depredations, it brought the myth down to earth. As long as al-Qaeda remained an "idea" it might be regarded as invincible, a mystical will o' the wisp. But once this mystical force was forced to materialize in Iraq, it became embodied in the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his henchmen, who, viewed up close, turned out to be nothing more than brutal gangsters of the lowest and most sadistic type instead of latter day Companions of the Prophet...Familiarity with the genuine article brought disillusionment, contempt and finally hatred for al-Qaeda.
The narrative has always been the chink in aQ's armour, and just as I've been advocating for a long time now, along with a select few, aQ will be responsible for disabusing those it seeks to proselytise and indoctrinate of its own ideological fallacies - just like the Soviet Union dispelled all illusions of Communism as a progressive ideology open to reform, decades before its precipitated collapse.
Currently poring through Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11, and having more than just a glimpse of how al-Zawahiri and his ideological ilk had distorted the original concept of takfir to justify the wholesale bloodshed of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, believers and non-believers, dhimmi and kuffar - dichotomies are drawn for convenience's sake, at times for the purpose of discrediting ideological allies who threaten to wrest power from each other; at times to incite and instigate the perpetuation of chaos-riven sinkholes whereby the environment would favour the sowing of jihadist seeds - think the Balkans, Algeria, Somalia; in the present, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. al-Zawahiri, despite his 'pretensions to refinement', was the key figure who consciously made the transition from embracing takfir as a doctrine to punish non-believers to rationalising and legitimising via semantic obfuscation of that doctrine the condoning of suicide bombings and the cult of death that has permeated all non-elite strata of Palestinian culture.
As it should be common knowledge to those who have followed events closely in Iraq, al-Zawahiri himself had openly criticised Zarqawi's efforts at instigating sectarian conflict, most probably fearing that the latter would attempt to break away from the ideological model supported by Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri - much like how Stalin mulled over Tito's Yugoslavia in the early post-war years. However, with the historical vantage point of the present, coupled with retrospective hindsight, perhaps it should be noted that aQ itself had eventually succumbed to exploiting sectarian lines, copying the template of Zarqawi's modus operandi once it hurriedly deduced that it was the only other viable path towards perpetuating the atmosphere of failure and pessimism that would hopefully drive Iraqis and the American public to rally together and pull the troops out of Mesopotamia. We may never know for sure, but it does seem as though when Zarqawi's attempts to rile the Shi'ite militias into triggering an endless cycle of reprisal attacks threatened to offend the sensibilities of Sunnis and particular tribes who were beginning to suspect aQ's involvement in this, al-Zawahiri and his fellow ideologues began to worry about losing support from the Sunni Iraqis and more crucially, fearing that aQ would not be able to manage the chaos in Iraq in a manner as to exploit and manipulate it to its advantage i.e. bolster its ideological narrative in the process. However, after the success of the surge that rendered the Shi'ite militias and the Sadrists less willing to emerge from their strongholds, which signalled the dissipation of willingness on the Shi'ites' part to respond to attacks by the Sunnis, aQ decided to cross that red line - indiscriminately murdering Iraqis regardless of sect, tribe or affiliation.
In an ironic twist, Zarqawi may have had accelerated the push towards a scenario that would have been more favourable to the long-term survivability of aQ in Iraq, choosing to punish Shi'ites and provoking them audaciously through the Samarra bombings instead of sticking to the strict insurgent agenda that merely targeted coalition forces and collaborators with the interim government. What aQ perceived as a loss of management on Zarqawi's part was coincidentally followed by the latter's demise; nevertheless, aQ embarked on a path without recourse, with far worse consequences for the potential prospects for survival than Zarqawi's plan of action ever could have manifested. The extreme distortion of takfir possibly presented itself as another easy exercise in justification - not a big gap in terms of reasoning for Zawahiri and Bin Laden to bridge in order to sanction the murdering of innocent Iraqis. aQ was fully aware of the possibility of alienating support and undercutting its narrative right from the start - thereby explaining its concern with Zarqawi - but seemed to concur that with the coalescing of circumstances and the steady progress of Patraeus' strategy, aQ's best chance of survival was to go for the jugular and take Zarqawi's strategy to its logical extreme - the mistake it made was to do it unpredictably and indiscriminately - a point covered at length by tigerhawk:More concisely, a noncombatant will cooperate with the side that punishes noncooperation with the greatest specificity. If one side punishes capriciously, most rational noncombatants will decide that they are better off cooperating with the other side. Why? Because the more capricious side -- lacking good intelligence about who is and is not cooperating -- may punish noncombatants whether or not they cooperate with the other side. The side that punishes accurately, on the other hand, will only punish genuine noncooperation. Therefore, the smart noncombatant cooperates with the side that neither punishes too many actual cooperators or fails to punish too many actual non-cooperators, because he reduces his risk of punishment by the side that punishes efficiently without altering his risk at the hand of the side that punishes capriciously.
The only factor I didn't count on was how quickly this would perpetuate itself - the conscious decision made by aQ to focus all their energies on Iraq, coupled with the MNF-I's objectives to deal with aQ despite the presence and threat of other factions, certainly catalysed the eventual push of insurgent warfare towards such a degree that it shocked the Iraqis with alacrity, without giving them time to incrementally accept the costs of war, which would have made them more tolerant of aQ's tactics in the long term.Given that al-Qaeda made Iraq the center of its global efforts, O’Hanlon and Pollack's admiration of MNF-I's decision to focus against it seems perplexing. Surely Petraeus had no alternative? Surely he was simply picking up the gauntlet? But that would not quite be true. Through much of 2005 and 2006 a variety of lines were suggested. Some argued that the US should lash out against Syria or Iran for allowing "militants" to transit their borders. Some believed Shi'a militias should be the primary target operations.
Somewhere along the way, alternative narratives fell out of favour, leaving aQ's version as the core narrative that had to be stripped and discredited. Those taking the Syrian-Iranian line had good reasons to stick to it then, since the Shi'ite militias and death squads were wreaking havoc and tainting the rivers with Sunni blood, both SCIRI and the Sadrists were undoubtedly being funded by the mullahs, not to mention the fact that Iran was funding both sides. However, the Sadrists have been rather non-confrontational and inactive since Patraeus' strategy began to take root - perhaps Maliki and al-Sistani did indeed exert a considerable amount of influence that disincentivised the Shi'ite factions from responding to Sunni provocation. Without that angle to showcase that particular narrative, aQ took centre-stage - of course, not without the Saudis' help.
tigerhawk opines on this issue:It is more than that, though. In Iraq we presented them with an unavoidable but very hard target -- the Army and Marines of the United States, and the soldiers of the United Kingdom, Australia and other allies. The extremists chose a war that they soon learned they could not win on the battlefield. Their only option, then, was to horrify the media and thereby the voters in the countries that supported those soldiers. Their means for doing that necessarily polarized many Muslims against them.
Certainly, attacks on soldiers and uniformed military personnel possess an element of legitimacy, and that is exactly how Iraqis and those who believed and continue to believe that this is an "occupation" manage to sleep at night while justifying these horrific suicide bombings and murders of MNF-I troops. That aspect thereby provided aQ with ideological reinforcement, according it an aura of credence and emboldening it to further continue such attacks. However, through the polarising effects of the drawn-out insurgency that aQ manifested and manipulated on their own accord, the dichotomy between hard target and soft target could only become clearer and sharper. Discouraged by the progress in Iraq, aQ perceived that a change in strategy was in order, switching from hard targets to soft targets in a vain attempt to further intimidate and shock the populace into cooperating with them.
The fundamental problem with that is that attacks on civilians constitute zero legitimacy - in fact, it costs the insurgents the only currency that is sustaining the ideological superstructure of aQ.
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Iraq
1 spoke up:
Harrison - Damned good post, and points out the problem with terrorism: its only path to legitimacy is to de-legitimize the other constructs of mankind. FARC does this against capitalism, trade, and international agreements, seeking to carve out its own territory of non-Nation in Columbia and spread that elsewhere. Hezbollah does this against Nations directly in Lebanon, S. American Tri-Border Area, the Balkans, Algeria and elsehwere. The problem is that there is an 'end-game' to that, but it does not end with civilization and Nations as we know them today, but back to a former time of rule by blood and enslavement. Al Qaeda's main tool is destruction, with death and diminution of the power of others as their goal. Ditto for Hezbollah, FARC, Shining Path, Hamas, and all of the attendant hangers-on organizations and affiliates and 'fellow travelers' like ETA, various IRAs and 'Red' organizations. In being unable to gain any legitimacy by ballot, they resort to force and attempt to remove the basis of power of Nations. In that their attacks do succeed in crumbling will to stand against a persistent foe that will not stand up for itself, but prefers to ever strike from shadows.
And each inch given to any international concern that diminishes Nation State accountability to other Nations weakens civilization. Our very lives depend upon Nations working and succeeding... as James Burke pointed out in Connections - 'What would you do if the power went out with no hope of its return, and you were in an elevator? What is an elevator but a metal box with buttons on the inside? How do you survive?'
If the light of Nation States fail, what does happen to mankind? Will we fight to keep the power on... or curse the darkness and keep hitting the 'open door' button once it is gone? Stuck in a metal coffin of our own devising...
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