Is al-Qaeda in Iraq a Myth?

At The Washington Monthly former Stars & Stripes reporter Andrew Tilghman has a potentially explosive piece on what the title calls the "Myth" of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He concludes his piece thusly:

Five years ago, the American public was asked to support the invasion of Iraq based on the false claim that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to al-Qaeda. Today, the erroneous belief that al-Qaeda's franchise in Iraq is a driving force behind the chaos in that country may be setting us up for a similar mistake.

I have tended to be wary about underestimating al Qaeda's will to do the liberal west harm even if the organization does not have the capacity to carry out its most ardent desires. But I think we do need an honest an open debate about causation and correlation in Iraq, about al Qaeda's real role throughout the conflict there, and about the various options and consequences for each of them. There is no ideal result about to spring forth like a mirage from the desert sands. But there surely are better options, and those are what we have to seek.

More Misc.

Three recent New York Times articles have caught my attention:
Fifty years after the Little Rock integration crisis shrouded the city in infamy that it has never entirely cast aside, the city is again dealing with political divisions in which race plays a role. But the divisions are not quite along the lines of what you might suspect.

Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, current director of the Homeland Security Initiative at the Aspen Institute and the author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack, jumps out of his phone booth (get it? Heh.) in time to help try to rescue us from a future terrorist attack. The recommendations range from the commonsensical to the insightful, but it is always worth keeping these sorts of suggestions on the table. The threat is still out there, and if we can depoliticize the terrorism question, maybe we can even implement some of his ideas.

Finally, Colum McCann, a professor of creative writing at Hunter College and Dublin native uses personal experience to urge measured optimism about the recent advances in the always ongoing Northern Ireland peace process. Still, the Troubles once seemed every bit as intractable as the conflicts in the Middle East. There certainly is room for hope, but in geopolitics, hope must always be guarded.

Al Qaeda in South Africa?

Reuters reports an alarming development. Some US counterterrorism officials, including those responsible for following the money trail at the Treasury Department, are concerned anough about mosque preacher Farhad Docrat and his dentist cousin Junaid that they have placed the two men on its list of suspected al Qaeda supporters and will freeze their assets. The two men are based in Laudium, an unprepossessing community outside of Pretoria.

South African Muslims do not tend to have reputations for radicalism, and what radicalism there is stems from the anti-apartheid years when the demand was for more liberalism and democracy, a far cry from what radical Islamists demand. Nonetheless, what we see in this case, independent of what ultimately comes of the charges, is that one of al Qaeda's pernicious strengths, one of the aspects that makes the organizaton especially difficuly to combat, is that it is fungible. The organization does not know and barely recognizes national borders. I've long argued that all of Africa is potentially fertile ground for radical Islam. South Africa is unlikely to become a major safe haven for Islamic radicals, to be sure, but this news shows that no place is entirely safe either.

The Unbearable Lightness of Dinesh D'Souza

Warren Bass, a senior editor at The Washington Post's "Book World" served on the professional staff of the 9/11 Commission. On Sunday he kicked the bejesus out of Dinesh D'Souza's latest screed, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. It is pretty tough to pull out just one representative excerpt from what Bass calls "the worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11," but I'll go with these paragraphs:

Of course, the ascetic bin Laden doesn't like American culture or values, including such far-left ideas as democracy or educating women, but he has a clear politico-religious agenda that's important to take seriously. You'd never know it from reading D'Souza, but bin Laden's February 1998 "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders" -- the most considered summation of his casus belli -- laid out three main grievances for which al-Qaeda kills. First and foremost comes the post-Gulf crisis deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which are "occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories" and "using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." Second comes the supposed Crusader-Jewish alliance's "long blockade" of the Iraqis, designed "to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors." Finally, America's anti-Muslim wars "also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it." See anything about Hollywood there?

D'Souza breezes past clearly articulated core al-Qaeda goals (such as toppling the "near enemy," as bin Ladenists call the impious regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt) to enlist bin Laden as an ally for D'Souza's side of the American culture wars. But the 1998 declaration bluntly states that "the purposes of the Americans" in their crusades against Islam "are religious and economic" -- not cultural. D'Souza is too busy projecting to really grapple with al-Qaeda's politics, strategy or ideological appeal; it's as if he read Mein Kampf and concluded that its author's main concern was not Aryan supremacy or genocidal anti-Semitism but distaste for Weimar theater.

For a Stanford fellow, D'Souza shows a surprising ignorance of the growing literature on jihadist ideology. One has to ask which is more likely: that such authors as Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright, Peter L. Bergen, Marc Sageman, Jessica Stern, Richard A. Posner and Bruce Hoffman could have scrutinized al-Qaeda ideology and somehow failed to notice that bin Laden's main beef was with America's corrupt cultural left, or that the grinding sound you hear off in the distance is D'Souza with an ax. Or consider the work of another heavyweight, Michael F. Scheuer, the tough-minded founding chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, who advocates the massive use of the U.S. military as our principal tool for fighting al-Qaeda. (D'Souza, oddly, lumps him in with a bunch of lefties.) "Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us," Scheuer has written. "None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world." There's a feisty and interesting debate among terrorism specialists about whether Scheuer has the balances right, but "The Vagina Monologues" isn't high on any serious analyst's list of al-Qaeda grievances.

I saw D'Souza last night on The Colbert Report. He was just awful. In addition to the inanities about the cultural left, D'Souza tried to claim that all Republican Presidents have bravely and successfully tried to wage war against terrorism while Bill Clinton, naturally, failed. In addition to being utterly intellectually dishonest, such an assertion shows D'Souza's absolutely blind fealty to a Ronald Reagan who never was. There are lots of reasons and lots of justifications -- no one could have anticipated the rise of radical Islam, in the waning years of the Cold War there were bigger issues, and so forth -- but the reality is that no presidency set the table for the modern crisis than did Reagan's.

D'Souza is a fatuous hack whose jeremiads have pretty consistently been little more than ideological puff pieces for the right and hatchet jobs on the left. It appears that in this book, D'Souza has reached a nadir. Good for Bass for not flinching from rigorous criticism of such slipshod, dishonest work.