It's Hard Out Here for a Terrorist

Poor Osama Bin Laden can't seem to get respect these days. His followers in Iraq have all but been eliminated, Iran tries to steal his thunder, and he's getting old for life on the run.

Not long ago, some opinion polls showed that al-Qaeda's support among mainstream Muslims was plummeting. Bin Laden's associate said "'I call upon the Muslim nation to fear Allah's question (at judgement day) about its failure to support its brothers of the Mujahedeen (holy Warriors), and (urge it) not to withhold men and money, which is the mainstay of a war',". Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has criticized Muslims for failing to support Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and elsewhere in a new audiotape posted on the Internet.

What's a terrorist leader to do? Well, often when Arab or Muslim leaders get desperate, they trot out the Palestinian cause. Bin Laden is no different, based on his most recent taped message.

The terrorist leader had originally called on "Muslims to stand with the Iraqi people against the United States." Thanks to the unremitting slaughter of innocents, that didn't seem to work, based on Zawahiri's own words.

It appears his advisers have told Bin Laden about the mounting failures of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Most recently, "Around 1,100 people have been arrested during the first four days of a government crackdown on Al-Qaeda jihadists in Iraq's main northern city of Mosul, the defence ministry said Saturday."

So what can he do? Focus on Palestine, of course. "'We will continue our struggle against the Israelis and their allies,' Bin Laden said in the 10-minute audio posted on a website used frequently by Al Qaeda. 'We are not going to give up an inch of the land of Palestine'."

This story says, "the voice on the tape said the fight for the Palestinian cause was the most important factor driving al-Qaeda's war with the West, and that it had fueled the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US."

Still, it might take a while for Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri to convince many Arabs and Muslims that Israel was not behind the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda likes to remind everyone that it was the gang responsible for the horrors.

With this latest vow to fight for Palestine, Bin Laden thinks he can get some respect the way Saddam Hussein and others did before him. That sure turned out well, didn't it?

Juan Cole the Secret Neocon

Is Juan Cole in need of a holiday? I ask because today he let it slip that he is, after all, a secret Neocon. True, he hasn't shown me his Neocon decoder ring or offered me the secret handshake. On the other hand, he did say this about relations between the U.S. and Ahmad Chalabi:

"This time the issue is said to be his deteriorating relations with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his closeness to Brig. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Jerusalem (Quds) Brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Actually my suspicion is that Chalabi is supporting the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr and that is the real reason for the tension with him."

Hmm. Cole has often referred to Mookie as a "young nationalist Shiite cleric." The prof also has said that Mookie is the leader of a "social movement" rather than a gang of thugs.

Now Cole claims that it is his "suspicion" that Chalabi is supporting the Mahdi thugs. (Among Iraqis and serious Iraq observers, it has been widely assumed that Chalabi has been manipulating Mookie for years.)

Anyway, Cole's years-old support for Mookie has been as clear as the professor's disdain for Chalabi. But if Cole likes Mookie, and Mookie is Chalabi's puppet, that means Cole and Chalabi are on the same side, no? Maybe they're giving each other the secret handshake even now.

Iraq After U.S. Withdrawal

While Hillary Clinton (within 60 days) and Barack Obama (in 2010) argue about who would withdraw U.S. troops faster, al-Qaeda announces its plans for a post-US Iraq.

Ayman Zawahiri, OBL's number two, says this about the U.S. withdrawal: "This is a stupid drama to cover up the failure in Iraq and for Bush to escape from the decision of withdrawing his forces, which would be considered an announcement of the defeat of the Crusader invasion of Iraq, and to pass the problem to the next president."

In today's tape Zawahiri says Bin Laden is "healthy and well." He also tells Muslims to "make Iraq a 'fortress of Islam' and railed against Shia Iran for siding with the US against Iraq – a plot which he said would lead to an explosion of violence in the Middle East."

Zawahiri says on the tape that "the battle for the establishment of a greater Islamic state was the 'most important duty' of every Muslim."

Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about this recently when he was in Washington with Gen. Petraeus, who called for more time to stabilize Iraq.

With their suicide bombings, al-Qaeda's murderers have shown that they're serious. It seems fair to ask why Clinton and Obama are in such a hurry to abandon Iraq to the killers and leave the rest of the World vulnerable to attacks from a victorious al-Qaeda.

Sustainable Stability In a Few Years

As an alternative to such nutty proclamations from dream warriors as, "the US is mainly fighting Sunni Iraqis, some of them neo-Baathists," a report from Ann Gildroy and Michael O'Hanlon today offers a more realistic picture of Iraq.

The writers say, "We believe that, after a 75 percent reduction in the rate of violence in Iraq over the past year, and significant accomplishments by Iraqi leaders on at least half a dozen key political matters, there is a reasonable prospect of achieving a sustainable stability there within the next few years."

Their opinion is not easy to dismiss. A captain in the Marine Corps Reserve who just completed her third tour in Iraq, and a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, they explain that "continued progress will be far more likely if major reductions in U.S. forces beyond those currently planned await early 2010. There are six key reasons that such strategic patience is appropriate."

After listing the reasons, which include elections and an oil law [oddly they overlook the Turkoman when discussing Kirkuk], the authors conclude: "There is real hope for major progress on most of these matters in the coming two years. If this does not happen, or if backsliding occurs on other key political and strategic issues where progress has been made recently, the case for a continued American presence in Iraq will weaken. Either way, we can aspire to major additional reductions in U.S. force levels come 2010. But alas, probably not before."

The Importance of Being Chalabi

It's perfectly understandable how an outsider might be taken aback by the sight of Ahmad Chalabi at a funeral gathering in Sadr City. The apparently incongruous vision of the impeccably dressed banker amid the modest people may not add up to the Westerner.

But for a reporter to misunderstand that image suggests that the journalist misses one of the most basic elements of Middle Eastern society. It is foolish to underestimate the importance of lineage.

Certainly lineage is important in other places. In the United States, for example, Caroline Kennedy's opinion of Barack Obama turns out to carry weight. Some French people are asking whether Nicolas Sarkozy's modest roots might be a reason he's disappointing the proud country.

In the Middle East, names are everything. In Lebanon, the unique Walid Joumblat, for example, is where he is today because of his father and grandmother. Moktada Al Sadr is able to draw a crowd because of his own's family's heritage. And Ahmad Chalabi is no exception.

One of McClatchy's reporter wonders what Chalabi is doing at a funeral in Moktada's turf. Chalabi is welcome there for many reasons. He is welcome because he has been the liaison between the Sadrists and the government pretty much all along. And, he is welcome because the Middle East values a member of a prominent family paying respects at a funeral.

Outsiders rely on local translaters and fixers. Most of the local hires are dedicated employees. And many follow the Arab tradition of telling people what they want to hear, which can complicate matters for the visitor.

Arabic language newspapers have their own problems. But many members of the Western media lack a basic understanding of the region they are covering. No wonder it's hard to know what's really going on in Iraq.

Speaking of Weak

The government's sacking of the 1,300 members of the Iraq police and military was offered up as an example of the weakness of the Iraqi forces. Well, British journalist Richard Butler will disagree. Butler, who was kidnapped in February, was freed by Iraqi forces in Basra.

Adding to the Confusion

The Boston Globe asks today whether its readers are confused about Iraq. The paper has a piece that is supposed to explain the conflict, but it actually confuses more than ever. The writer tells us the trouble is there are three civil wars in Iraq at the same time. The wars are in Basra, in Northern Iraq, and in Baghdad. He adds that it will only get worse when the Sunnis return to fight Shiite rule.

The real trouble is the piece is messy and based on nothing. Here's what the writer says:

"When the United States took Baghdad in 2003, it was about half Sunni and half Shi'ite. In January 2007, Baghdad was 65 percent Shi'ite. By summer of 2007 it was 75 percent Shi'ite. Hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs were displaced to Syria."

Any Iraqi would dismiss that as pure nonsense. Baghdad was a complicated, multi-cultural city. We had large communities of Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds, Sabeans, etc. Nobody knew the figures, because Iraq had not conducted a census since 1959. Guess the writer does not allow facts to interfere with his argument. So where does this absurd information come from?

The word "absurd" should have been a hint. It's from Juan Cole, who wrote in the Globe, "Groups of disadvantaged Sunnis are waging an armed insurgency against this government and the US troops supporting it. They are also engaged in a subterranean war with the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps, the two most powerful Shi'ite militias, which now dominate the capital."

The professor tells us "After the fall of Saddam, the formerly elite Sunni Arabs who disproportionately populated his Baath Party were pushed out of government jobs and lost their positions in the officer corps." Where Cole gets that information, nobody knows. Iraqis had to join the party regardless of their religious or ethnic backgrounds.

Cole concludes that "[b]y now, Baghdad is very largely a Shi'ite city, a humiliating blow to Sunni Arab nationalism." The professor owes Lebanon's Hassan Nasrallah and all the Palestinians who support him an explanation.

"This creates a deeply unstable situation: Sunni Iraqis are highly unlikely to accept this defeat, and they have wealthy backers and many have military experience," says Cole. "When the displaced Sunnis run out of money and come back from Syria - or are expelled by Syria as an insupportable financial burden - the fragile capital could see a second round of civil war, threatening any stability the country of Iraq has managed to achieve." So do they have wealthy backers? Or are they a financial burden to Syria? Guess Cole doesn't know.

Meanwhile, Iraq's Sunnis are working to stabilize Iraq. There's no mention of Anbar or al-Qaeda in Cole's piece. Guess it would be inconvenient to speak of the Sons of Iraq, the Sunni fighters who oppose al-Qaeda. Perhaps because they would intefere with Cole's argument of the Sunni warriors ready to slay the Shiites.

This Telegraph story talks to one of the fighters Cole overlooks. "For all that they despised the group, for a long time Mr Abbas and his neighbours in Jamia, a once-prosperous middle-class neighbourhood of west Baghdad, were simply too scared to defy them openly."

According to the story, Abbas, who receives threats from al-Qaeda regularly, tells us why he and others did not move against al-Qaeda earlier. The presence of extra US soldiers in the district as part of the 'troop surge' gave them the confidence to start their own rebellion.

In Iraq today, police and soldiers who did not support the effort to rid Basra of Mahdi army fighters were sacked by the Iraqi government. And U.S. soldiers put up concrete barriers in some parts of Sadr City.

We can all agree that Iraq is a tough subject. But Juan Cole is hardly the person to explain it. Surely the Globe can find someone who has a clue to write about Iraq.