Character Test and Healthcare Reform

The Republican lie machine goes on and on, exploiting short memories, fear, and racism. What is the real opposition to healthcare reform? It's all about their long standing policy against Social Security and any other form of social insurance.

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One of the side benefits of health reform is that it has acted as a character test. If, for example, you thought of Mitt Romney as a person of character, his desperate attempts to disavow what is essentially his own policy proposal have cured you of that affliction. And as Menzie Chinn points out, Robert Samuelson’s hysterical reaction to what is, when all is said and done, a fairly modest — and paid for! — expansion of social insurance tells what what really lies behind his constant harping on the long-run fiscal issue.

Menzie has a nice chart comparing four policies and their impact on the budget: the two big Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the health reform:

It’s curious, then, that Samuelson and others are driven wild only by the last of these. But Dan Gross explained it all a while back:

it’s about a strain of intellectual Toryism bedeviled by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be getting social insurance.

All that high-minded talk about fiscal responsibility is just a cover for this deeper-seated concern.

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What Future has Kurdistan? Regional War?

Kurdistan in Iraq has been relatively peaceful since 1991 except for a brief civil war in the mid-90s. They operate essentially an independent entity aligned in mostly name only to Iraq conducting their own commerce, and providing their own service, as well as maintaining their own independent army, the infamous Peshmerga, known as the most effective fighting force in the region. This article reviews the history of Kurdistan, divided by the peace treaty at the end of WWI between Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. This border divided people represent a major risk for a regional conflict.

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As, over time, the KRG fuses with the once-rival ruling parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and trade increases rapidly with Turkey and, to a lesser degree, with Iran and Syria, the notion of a sovereign Iraqi Kurdish state becomes more plausible while making the fantasy of reunification of "Greater Kurdistan" much less so.

Kurdistan cannot escape its landlocked geography quadrisected in the ashes of World War I. The roughly 35 million ethnic Kurds are the world's largest ethnic group without their own country. Iraqi Kurdistan's ruling politicians and their corresponding corporate interests are now shuttling between the central government in Baghdad and various regional capitals to feel out which way the winds of change are blowing.

The Kurds have been caught in a web of wildly varying, intolerant nationalisms for most of the post-Ottoman era from which they have not been able to escape. The most significant of these is Turkey's secular and militarist Kemalism. Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk the "Father of Turks", replaced the unifying Islam of the dying Ottoman caliphate with so-called "Turkishness".

Millions of Kurds, in what would become the Turkish Republic, were to be absurdly labeled "Mountain Turks". Ataturk insisted on doing away with any cultural practice related to the caliphate, including the tolerance of linguistic and religious minorities under its jurisdiction.

The newly created Turkey, forged in 1923, left no room for "Kurdishness" and Turkey's Kurds began rebelling almost at once. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran did away with the enforced secularism of the Pahlavi dynasty and enshrined a form of Shi'itism as the state ideology around which the nascent Islamic Republic was formed.

The then-new Iranian regime presented itself to the outside world as a pious Persian Shi'ite monolith, leaving little room for Iran's restive, mostly Sunni Kurdish minority. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's unorthodox interpretation of traditional Shi'itism and the creation of the velayat-e-faqih ("The rule of the jurisprudent" - considered an unwelcome innovation by much of the Shi'ite clerical establishment) left the Kurds of Iran's Kordestan and Western Azerbaijan provinces disaffected even more so.

The takeover of Iraq and Syria by Ba'athists in the 1960s led to the rise of a myopic pan-Arabism in Baghdad and Damascus that left no room for the Kurds' distinct language, culture and traditions. The Cold War Arab socialism of the Ba'ath party was, for the Kurds, simply more ethno-chauvinist demagoguery, that, as in Turkey and Iran, was bent on the destruction of their massive stateless nation.

One of the only identifying factors that these highly divergent ideologies of Kemalism, Khomenism and Ba'athism had in common was their policy of constant Kurdish repression. Internal jingoistic state policies being carried out in their respective Kurdish-majority regions in the name of law and order over the decades have now morphed across borders into external forces of political expediency unifying Turkey, Syria and Iran on the suppression of their respective "Kurdish questions".

Along with all of the external historic forces allied against them, the Kurds themselves are also internally divided by dialect, tribe and clan. In the case of Iraqi Kurdistan, these divisions translated into political allegiances that have now formed the backbone of the KRG.



Save for the very short-lived, Soviet-backed Republic of Mahabad in 1946, the Irbil-based KRG is the closest thing any of the Kurds in Kurdistan's four sectors have to an independent state. As Turkey's hopes for full-scale European Union accession have been fading into the background, Turkey's relations with Iran, Iraq and Syria have greatly improved.

Syria, which for a time once supported PKK insurgents in a petty proxy struggle with Turkey regarding disputes over water usage rights, has long since dropped all known tolerance of Turkish Kurd fighters operating from Syrian territory. Turkey has come to the realization that as much as it has looked Westward from Ataturk's secularist revolution onward, it has no choice but to integrate a higher level of cooperation with its less stable borderlands to the south and east.

Oil flowing north into Turkey from Iraq, and water flowing south into Syria and Iraq, defies Turkey's past isolation from Middle Eastern issues and may slow its Europeanization. Syria's realization that it needs Turkish cooperation on water caused the Bashar al-Assad regime to quickly snuff out its support of the PKK in Syrian Kurdistan, espoused by his late father. In so doing, Damascus has produced a remarkable thaw in Turkish-Syrian relations.

[..]
Turkish warplanes are striking PKK positions from above while Iran is firing Katuysha batteries at PJAK positions over the ridgeline from the Iranian side of the border. The Turkish and Iranian goals in the area appear to be the same and it seems to serve both Ankara and Tehran to conflate the two groups. The PKK rebels have also made statements in the press contradicting what was recently told to this correspondent by the PJAK regarding its operational independence from the PKK.

The United States government has been supplying Turkey with "actionable intelligence" [2] to target PKK outposts in Iraqi territory which the PJAK told Asia Times Online was being shared with the Iranians. Allegations that Turkey is passing on classified US intelligence to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps cannot be going down well at the Pentagon.

Turkey and Iran, at odds since Iran's revolution in 1979 collided with Turkey's rigid secularism, have a common foe in their shared attacks on Kurdish irredentists sheltering in Iraq.

Rojhilat told Asia Times Online that for the two opposing state ideologies, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", in reference to their dislike of the Kurds in their midst.

Last week, Turkey's parliament ratified a renewal of the mandate allowing its military to continue to strike Iraqi territory [3] and further coordination with Tehran may become the norm. The PJAK states that it seeks to topple the Islamic Republic to replace it with an inclusive, federal democracy - but the group does not maintain secessionist sentiments in the immediate term. The PJAK claims to have broad support among the Kurds of northwestern Iran and the EU's Kurdish diaspora. At least one of the men I met had arrived in Qandil from Finland to take up arms against Iran.

For now, the PKK and the PJAK maintain their hearty guerrilla bases in the Qandil Mountains, while Irbil continues to look the other way. For the stateless Kurdish revolutionaries launching operations out of Iraq's hinterlands, the tolerance of their bases could evaporate as the Kurds of Iraq assert themselves and Baghdad's unstable politics continue to evolve.

The prospect of an internationally recognized Kurdish state carved out of northern Iraq may seem far-fetched at present to many, but Iraqi Kurdish elites are harboring contingencies for such an eventuality. This scenario would make quite a bitter pill for Turkey, Iran and Syria to swallow and the independence of one sector may forever negate the potential for secession of the other three.

So while Iraqi Kurdistan elects its own parliament, forges oil contracts independent of Baghdad and prepares for its future, the "other" Kurdistan still seethes with repression and rage from nation-states that have refused to accept the Kurdish realities existing within their borders.

via Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs.

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FBI Whistleblower says Neocons Negotiated Iraq Invasion with Foreign Agents in Summer 2001

This pretty well documents the Bush White House planning before 9/11 to invade and partition Iraq.  Finally, something close to mainstream media (MSM) is paying attention to Sibel Edmonds and her testimony. I've been writing about this story since 2005 when I first heard about it. So far, few MSM agencies have chosen to give this story much attention.

This has far reaching implications and chronicles a hidden power game within the Bush Administration including illegal espionage activities by key neo-cons. It also gives a glimpse of Bush's conspiracy to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people based on false information.

Suggested here also is evidence, as I have pointed out before, that Turkish, Iranian and Israeli spies had inappropriate access to the Bush Administration and very likely manipulated Bush towards an invasion of Iraq.

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In an interview with former CIA officer Phillip Giraldi, FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds named Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle as having been wiretapped and recorded discussing plans with the Turkish ambassador in the Summer of 2001 to invade Iraq and occupy the Kurdish region bordering Turkey.

A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations "credible," "serious," and "warranting a thorough and careful review by the FBI." Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. "60 Minutes" launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.

via Daily Kos: FBI Whistleblower says Neocons Negotiated Iraq Invasion with Foreign Agents in Summer 2001.

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Whodunnit in Baghdad

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Juan Cole as usual makes the most sense about the most recent bombings in Baghdad. al-Maliki's refusal to reconcile with Sunni's is coming back to haunt him.

Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi government is blaming an "alliance of Baathists and al-Qaeda" for the bombings. But terrorist cells don't work that way. Six coordinated bombings requires tight-knit and cohesive cells along with close command and control. So it was likely one or the other. Given the military discipline and precision of the operation, I suspect former Baath officers of involvement, regardless of their current ideology, whether secular or religious.

Looked at in this way, the attack on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was the most massive in firepower, deaths and woundings, was a continuation of the bombings last week of Shabak and Yazidi Kurdish villages outside the northern, largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul. Mosul is a center for Arab nationalism, Baathism, and Sunni fundamentalism.

The Ilaf newspaper agrees with me that these bombings are a sign that elements in the Sunni Arab community are not reconciled to the rise of Shiite and Kurdish rule over Iraq. The problem cannot be solved either by federalism or democracy, the newspaper argues. Iraqi Sunni Arabs would not benefit from any kind of partition, even soft partition, since they don't have any developed hydrocarbon fields in their part of Iraq. And the Iraqi parliament is so far set up with a single chamber where there is a tyranny of the Shiite majority.

So as I have hinted, I have a slight preference for the theory that ex-Baathist or neo-Baathist or generally Sunni Arab nationalists were behind the attacks. A lot of ex-Baathist officers and leaders are hiding out in exile in Damascus.

[..]After all, al-Maliki has already more or less been running for prime minister in the upcoming January elections on the basis of his ability to get the American troops out of people's hair and to supply security in their stead. It is easy for his Sunni Arab foes in Damascus and Mosul to undermine that claim with bombings like those on Wednesday. Al-Maliki has been adamantly against negotiating with the Baathists or, indeed, any guerrilla group with blood on its hands. A portion of the Sunni Arab community let him know Wednesday that they simply will not accept the new status quo. Al-Maliki has surprised a lot of people by being much more assertive and much more successful in restoring security in places like Basra and Amara in the Shiite south, than many expected. But unless he finds a way to reconcile with the Sunni Arabs, his political future is cloudy.

via Informed Comment: Whodunnit in Baghdad.

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Analysis: The Baghdad attacks

As these analyst make clear, this attack in Baghdad, was against the Maliki government and an attempt to manipulate the election. Certainly this is Al Qaeda's modis operendi, but many others have to gain from this happening.

Mosab Jasim, Al Jazeera English producer in Baghdad

In my experience, getting inside the Green Zone to cover media activity is not easy.

First of all, you have to get at least two or three badges that allow you inside. Then, you have to cross through at least two or three security checkpoints, which are at least 600m outside of the Green Zone. At these checkpoints, you get searched, and after you pass through them, you are allowed on to the street that leads to the Green Zone and, from there, there is a final checkpoint and that's when you've finally arrived.

So it would be really difficult to bring in a truck filled with explosives unless it was co-ordinated from inside the Green Zone. Obtaining a badge means you've gone through all the clearance procedures. The bombers who were able to put the truck inside the area of the Green Zone had gone through all the necessary security measures and once they were cleared, they also received the badges which gave them access into the area.

I spoke to our police source in Baghdad and he was telling me that his sources said an attack would occur every three minutes from each other, exactly timed. He said the attacks had nothing to do with sectarian violence, but that they were something very well organised and co-ordinated.

[..]Ahmed Rushdi, Iraqi journalist in Baghdad

The problem with this government is that its only bonus is the security situation, which means a lot worse goes on in Iraq like corruption, insufficient services.

All these issues show the failure of the government but what happened today sends a very clear message regarding the failure of the security situation in Iraq.

No one knows who was behind these attacks, some say they are inside the ruling coalition and they are opponents of al-Maliki [the Iraqi prime minister], saying that the people who led these attacks did so to prove how poor security is in Iraq.

Al-Maliki simply has too many opponents and the Iraqi people are the ones who must suffer from this the most.

via Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Analysis: The Baghdad attacks.

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95 killed on Iraq's deadliest day since U.S. handover

Al Qaeda WANTS the US to stay in Iraq and remain targets. They know blowing up Iraqis will not help them in the long run unless they can spark the Shia-Sunni war they've so far failed to do.

A series of bombings rocked Iraq's capital within one hour Wednesday, killing at least 95 people and wounding 563 others, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.

The six explosions marked the country's deadliest day since the United States pulled its combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns nearly two months ago.

In one attack, a truck bomb exploded outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, damaging the building. Another truck bomb went off outside the Ministry of Finance building.

Near the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iraqi security forces stood with shocked expressions as ambulances screamed past.

In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded on Kifa Street, and another bomb exploded in the Salhiya neighborhood, where on Tuesday security forces had avoided injuries by successfully defusing a truck bomb. Wednesday's other two bombs exploded in eastern Baghdad's Beirut Square, officials said.

Two people believed to be connected to the bombings have been arrested, an official with the Iraqi army told CNN.

The two suspects were driving in a car rigged with explosives before they were arrested by Iraqi Security Forces, the official said.

The two suspects were believed to be al Qaeda in Iraq senior leaders, the official said.

via 95 killed on Iraq's deadliest day since U.S. handover - CNN.com.

Syria pulls some strings in Iran

Wise diplomacy makes some strange bedfellows. Such is the price of effectiveness. Bush was more interested in looking tough to the American voter than being effective diplomatically. Obama means what he says that he intents to do what he thinks is best for the American people. Of course, the truth is, he too is concerned about 2012.

Asia Times Online.

Appearing in court on Saturday, a tearful Afshar admitted she had been involved in post-election unrest, saying that "brothers at the Intelligence Ministry made me understand my mistake", the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The decision to arrest Afshar would have needed the approval of either Ahmadinejad or Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khemanei; only top officials can order such an arrest, given Iran's troubled relationship with Europe.

The decision to release her, however, would have needed the consent of Khemanei as it involved overriding the judiciary that had her on trial. The fact that Syria was a go-between is testimony to the excellent relations Damascus enjoys with the supreme leader.

Syria has played a similar role in mediating conflicts with Iran. In 2007, it helped secure the release of 15 British sailors abducted in Iranian waters - mainly because it had the ear of the grand ayatollah. It also helped win the freedom in 2007 of BBC reporter Alan Johnston, who was being held captive in Gaza by an Islamic group close to Hamas.

During the long years of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), Syria helped secure the release of American hostages, notably the president of the American University of Beirut, David Dodge, after he had been abducted by militias linked to Tehran.

The latest release comes as part of a long list of initiatives made by Damascus. Long accused of being a source of instability in the region, Syria has proved yet again that countries that can destabilize can also play a crucial role in stability.

This week's developments raise the possibility that Iran and Syria are sending a message to the world by showing how they have the ability to coordinate their efforts to diminish Western influence in the Muslim world.

Beyond that, what matters is how influential Syria is not only within Iran but also with non-state players like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. It illustrates that US President Barack Obama - who never embraced the notion of breaking the Syrian-Iranian alliance - was right after all.

The US president does not see the merit in trying to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran; rather, he sees the Syrian-Iranian friendship as a blessing in disguise. He clearly believes the Syrians are a people with whom he can do business, especially as they do not have a history of anti-Amercanism, as the Iranians have had since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Obama's predecessor, George W Bush, faced a difficult reality in 2006 when the Baker-Hamilton Report [1] was issued and it advised working with Syria and Iran to restore normalcy and security to war-torn Iraq. Bush then had a choice: either talk to Damascus, or talk to Tehran. Talking to both was too problematical.

Bush thus approved some contact with Syria, notably at the Sharm al-Sheikh summit in Egypt of 2007, when then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice met with her Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Mouallem. The Syrians at the time, however, reasoned that any meaningful breakthrough with Bush was close to impossible, so they kept all their cards close to their chests until Obama entered the White House in January.

Since then, there has been a chain effect of positive gestures between Syria and the US. Military delegations from US Central Command have twice visited the Syrian capital to discuss security in Iraq. Syria used its considerable influence in Baghdad to get angry Sunni tribal leaders to vote in provincial elections this January.

The Sunni street of Iraq - which Obama needs to get in order before the Americans are totally out of the country by 2012 - has traditionally been divided between Syria and Saudi Arabia. As long as these countries were in disagreement over Lebanon, progress in Iraq would be minimal, at best.

Now that the two have settled their differences over internal Lebanese affairs, the prospects of real results in Iraq are high. Syria has one advantage in Iraq, however, that the Saudis do not have - a strong influence in the Shi'ite street.

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Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

via Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder.

Mercenaries, by definition, are hired killers. No one should be surprised when they misbehave.

The Hush-Hush Story: Why They Tortured

The LA Progressive

The US Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued April 21, on the interrogation techniques employed against detainees following the September 11 terrorist attack, wrote Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times, "reads like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it all started even before a single 'high-profile al-Qaeda detainee' was captured.
What Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture memos were just a cog in the imperial machine."
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman mentioned it in his column April 24, writing, "For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract 'confessions' that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way." Krugman was more explicit in his blog, titled "Grand Unified Scandal" appearing the previous day, after the Senate report came out. "Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link," he wrote. "There's a word for this: it's evil."
The impetus for the comment by Krugman and Escobar was a story carried April 21 in the McClatchy Newspapers by Jonathan S. Landay The story has made the rounds on the internet and in some of the foreign press but as of this writing has been ignored or obscured by most of the major U.S. media.
"The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist," wrote Landay. "Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
"The use of abusive interrogation - widely considered torture - as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them."
Landay went on to quote "A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue" saying former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 'demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.'
"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," Landay was told. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

Few dare call Ahmed Chalabi what he is, an Iranian intelligence agent, who along with AIPAC officials, Israeli Intelligence agents duped Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal into invading Iraq.
And now the Israeli spies will get away with it because the truth of the huge security hole in the Bush Administration will become obvious to all.
Reuters

"Given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment," Dana Boente, acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

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MUJAHIDEEN BLEED-THROUGH, Part 3 - Jordan: Al-Qaeda clouds a precarious future

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Asia Times Online By Michael Scheuer
Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Jordan has been a nation living in an uneasy relationship with the Sunni Islamist movement. With a population more than 50% Palestinian, Jordan became an ever-more useful place for Palestinian radicals to hang their hats while preparing plans to destroy Israel.
Under King Hussein bin Talal (1952 to 1999), the radicals were allowed to be in Jordan, but the country's pervasive and effective security services moderated the domestic problems they caused, save for flashes of admittedly intense violence. Over time - and after another war - King Hussein also became a central player in the Arab-Israeli peace process, earning the animosity of some of Jordan's Palestinian guests, as well as those of Jordan's domestic Islamist leaders, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist organizations - most of whom enjoyed external funding from the Gulf.
To say that Jordan was always one step ahead of Islamist trouble probably is fair, but King Hussein proved to be a deft political operator and managed both to keep the security lid on and maintain popularity among the people.
Then Hussein died, his son Abdullah took the throne, and the United States-led coalition invaded Iraq, all of which yielded a significantly more dangerous internal security environment for Jordan. The new king, Abdullah, was not made of the same stern stuff and craftiness as his father and he seemed to exude a Westernized persona that did not sit well with the country's Islamists.
While this weakness might have been overcome in time, Abdullah soon encountered a situation in which he first aligned Jordan with Washington's post-9/11 "war on terror"; then with its invasion of Iraq - for which it was rewarded by a doubling of US aid in 2004 and continuing increases since; and finally with the West's aid-boycott of the Hamas-led government in Gaza.
The Amman regime began running hospitals in Fallujah in Iraq and Mazar-i-Sharif - the latter in North Atlantic Treaty Organization-occupied Afghanistan - and soon after paid the price for supporting US policy in Iraq with attacks on its interests and personnel within Iraq. Most importantly, Jordan now faced a world in which the durable shield of Saddam Hussein's Iraq - which had prevented the entry of large numbers of Sunni jihadis from the Gulf and South Asia - was shattered.
Of the Levant's Arab states, Jordan suffered quickly and most severely from the US-led coalition's destruction of the anti-jihadi bulwark Saddam's Iraq reliably provided on Jordan's eastern border. The end of Saddam's reign vastly increased Jordan's domestic security problems:

• Jordan's domestic Islamists and their organizations not only resented King Abdullah's decision to support both of Washington's wars, but they quickly moved to incite young Jordanian Muslims to go to Iraq and fight the foreign occupiers.
  These groups also assisted non-Jordanian Muslims from across the Islamic community to securely transit the country and enter Iraq to join the mujahideen. That the Islamists' anti-US and anti-regime attitudes found increased popular support after the invasion of Iraq is evident in the success of the Islamic Action Front (the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm) in winning 17 seats in Jordan's parliament in the 2003 election, the largest single group in that 110-seat body. This total dropped to six in the 2007 election when the Front ran candidates in only 30 seats because of the regime's failure to follow through with promised electoral reforms.

• The invasion and occupation of Iraq also gave unexpected scope to the lethal talents of a Jordanian named Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, who quickly rose from being the leader of his own small group to being named the commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi's organization continued expanding inside Jordan while he was in Iraq - including with some success in the country's military - and his heroic style and successful military operations inspired a large number of young Jordanian men. Since al-Zarqawi's death, al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups cite what they describe as his "knightly example" as an element of their propaganda products.

• The willingness of the US-led coalition to condone a quiet campaign of ethnic cleansing by Iraqi Shi'ites drove enormous numbers of Iraq's Sunnis abroad. For Jordan this meant hosting 500,000 to 800,000 Iraqi refugees - some estimates range up to a million. Most of these refugees entered the country illegally and so are only slowly becoming known to the security services. In addition, the refugee population contains a proportion of Iraqi Shi'ites, and their presence in the country is sharpening sectarian differences in overwhelmingly Sunni Jordanian society. The large refugee presence, moreover, probably ensures that Jordan would be the scene of fighting between its Iraqi Sunni and Shi'ite guests if Iraq slips into civil war.

• Most recently, the apparently temporary success of the US military "surge" in Iraq resulted in a large number of al-Qaeda and Sunni fighters deciding to leave western Iraq for safe havens abroad, a majority of them heading for Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. As a result, Jordanian security services are now confronting the potential for trouble posed not only by would-be mujahideen who have been unable to get through Jordan to Iraq, but also by veteran fighters angry that they had to leave Iraq.

In response to these realities, the Amman government clamped down on Islamist activities within the country, especially after Zarqawi's forces launched missiles against Israel from Jordanian territory and bombed the Radisson Hotel in the capital. Jordanian authorities harassed Islamist parliamentary deputies who expressed condolences for Zarqawi; imprisoned a poet writing verse praising Bin Laden; acted to put the authority for issuing fatwas under a state-appointed council; and made state approval necessary before mosque clerics could begin preaching.
After Islamist violence increased in Jordan, Abd-al-Bari Atwan, the editor of London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, wrote, "The most dangerous thing that could result from these bombings is the Jordanian government's exploitation of them to impose more restrictive security measures on the pretext of confronting terrorism."
Atwan's worst-case scenario appears to have come to pass, although it is not clear Amman had any other choice. The government has passed more stringent anti-terrorism laws, and the security services have used them in ways that increased the alienation of much of the Islamist community, especially in the Islamist-heavy towns of Zarqa, Ma'an, Salt and the Palestinian refugee camp near the city of Irbid. The government's heavy hand in checking the Islamists has undermined King Abdallah's efforts to increase his popularity and reinforced the Islamists' negative assessment of Abdallah and his regime as "the West's favorite ally".
Jordan is not, of course, in immediate danger of being swept by an Islamist tide; the domestic Islamist movement is not powerful enough to take power by force, the country's security services are formidable, and the government will not permit a fair general election.
Still, Jordan's long-term stability is precarious because of the Iraq war's negative impact on a society constantly threatened by destabilization because of its Palestinian population and support for the Western-advocated Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
As in the case of Lebanon and Syria, the end of the Saddam-maintained barrier preventing the entry of most Sunni militants into the Levant through Iraq has left Jordan to face not only its own growing Islamist community - the growth of which is in part due to Amman's support for the Iraq war - but also an inflow of foreign Islamists, some of whom are veteran mujahideen and many of whom appear to be Saudi-style Salafists.
From al-Qaeda's perspective the situation in Jordan is progressing in a favorable manner. Bin Laden has long targeted the Hashemite monarchy because of its refusal to allow the mujahideen to launch raids from Jordan into Israel. Al-Qaeda itself has had a shadowy presence in Jordan, first led by Bin Laden's late brother-in-law Muhammad Jamal Khalifah, almost since its inception in 1988. Bin Laden and his lieutenants surely see Jordan as a target for destabilization, as well as a place from which al-Qaeda can establish a presence capable of attacking Israel.
Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; his most recent book is Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. Dr Scheuer is a Senior Fellow with The Jamestown Foundation.

(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with permission.)
(Copyright 2008 The Jamestown Foundation.)Related articles by Zemanta

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MUJAHIDEEN BLEED-THROUGH, Part 3 - Jordan: Al-Qaeda clouds a precarious future

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Asia Times Online By Michael Scheuer
Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Jordan has been a nation living in an uneasy relationship with the Sunni Islamist movement. With a population more than 50% Palestinian, Jordan became an ever-more useful place for Palestinian radicals to hang their hats while preparing plans to destroy Israel.
Under King Hussein bin Talal (1952 to 1999), the radicals were allowed to be in Jordan, but the country's pervasive and effective security services moderated the domestic problems they caused, save for flashes of admittedly intense violence. Over time - and after another war - King Hussein also became a central player in the Arab-Israeli peace process, earning the animosity of some of Jordan's Palestinian guests, as well as those of Jordan's domestic Islamist leaders, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist organizations - most of whom enjoyed external funding from the Gulf.
To say that Jordan was always one step ahead of Islamist trouble probably is fair, but King Hussein proved to be a deft political operator and managed both to keep the security lid on and maintain popularity among the people.
Then Hussein died, his son Abdullah took the throne, and the United States-led coalition invaded Iraq, all of which yielded a significantly more dangerous internal security environment for Jordan. The new king, Abdullah, was not made of the same stern stuff and craftiness as his father and he seemed to exude a Westernized persona that did not sit well with the country's Islamists.
While this weakness might have been overcome in time, Abdullah soon encountered a situation in which he first aligned Jordan with Washington's post-9/11 "war on terror"; then with its invasion of Iraq - for which it was rewarded by a doubling of US aid in 2004 and continuing increases since; and finally with the West's aid-boycott of the Hamas-led government in Gaza.
The Amman regime began running hospitals in Fallujah in Iraq and Mazar-i-Sharif - the latter in North Atlantic Treaty Organization-occupied Afghanistan - and soon after paid the price for supporting US policy in Iraq with attacks on its interests and personnel within Iraq. Most importantly, Jordan now faced a world in which the durable shield of Saddam Hussein's Iraq - which had prevented the entry of large numbers of Sunni jihadis from the Gulf and South Asia - was shattered.
Of the Levant's Arab states, Jordan suffered quickly and most severely from the US-led coalition's destruction of the anti-jihadi bulwark Saddam's Iraq reliably provided on Jordan's eastern border. The end of Saddam's reign vastly increased Jordan's domestic security problems:

• Jordan's domestic Islamists and their organizations not only resented King Abdullah's decision to support both of Washington's wars, but they quickly moved to incite young Jordanian Muslims to go to Iraq and fight the foreign occupiers.
  These groups also assisted non-Jordanian Muslims from across the Islamic community to securely transit the country and enter Iraq to join the mujahideen. That the Islamists' anti-US and anti-regime attitudes found increased popular support after the invasion of Iraq is evident in the success of the Islamic Action Front (the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm) in winning 17 seats in Jordan's parliament in the 2003 election, the largest single group in that 110-seat body. This total dropped to six in the 2007 election when the Front ran candidates in only 30 seats because of the regime's failure to follow through with promised electoral reforms.

• The invasion and occupation of Iraq also gave unexpected scope to the lethal talents of a Jordanian named Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, who quickly rose from being the leader of his own small group to being named the commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi's organization continued expanding inside Jordan while he was in Iraq - including with some success in the country's military - and his heroic style and successful military operations inspired a large number of young Jordanian men. Since al-Zarqawi's death, al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups cite what they describe as his "knightly example" as an element of their propaganda products.

• The willingness of the US-led coalition to condone a quiet campaign of ethnic cleansing by Iraqi Shi'ites drove enormous numbers of Iraq's Sunnis abroad. For Jordan this meant hosting 500,000 to 800,000 Iraqi refugees - some estimates range up to a million. Most of these refugees entered the country illegally and so are only slowly becoming known to the security services. In addition, the refugee population contains a proportion of Iraqi Shi'ites, and their presence in the country is sharpening sectarian differences in overwhelmingly Sunni Jordanian society. The large refugee presence, moreover, probably ensures that Jordan would be the scene of fighting between its Iraqi Sunni and Shi'ite guests if Iraq slips into civil war.

• Most recently, the apparently temporary success of the US military "surge" in Iraq resulted in a large number of al-Qaeda and Sunni fighters deciding to leave western Iraq for safe havens abroad, a majority of them heading for Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. As a result, Jordanian security services are now confronting the potential for trouble posed not only by would-be mujahideen who have been unable to get through Jordan to Iraq, but also by veteran fighters angry that they had to leave Iraq.

In response to these realities, the Amman government clamped down on Islamist activities within the country, especially after Zarqawi's forces launched missiles against Israel from Jordanian territory and bombed the Radisson Hotel in the capital. Jordanian authorities harassed Islamist parliamentary deputies who expressed condolences for Zarqawi; imprisoned a poet writing verse praising Bin Laden; acted to put the authority for issuing fatwas under a state-appointed council; and made state approval necessary before mosque clerics could begin preaching.
After Islamist violence increased in Jordan, Abd-al-Bari Atwan, the editor of London-based al-Quds al-Arabi, wrote, "The most dangerous thing that could result from these bombings is the Jordanian government's exploitation of them to impose more restrictive security measures on the pretext of confronting terrorism."
Atwan's worst-case scenario appears to have come to pass, although it is not clear Amman had any other choice. The government has passed more stringent anti-terrorism laws, and the security services have used them in ways that increased the alienation of much of the Islamist community, especially in the Islamist-heavy towns of Zarqa, Ma'an, Salt and the Palestinian refugee camp near the city of Irbid. The government's heavy hand in checking the Islamists has undermined King Abdallah's efforts to increase his popularity and reinforced the Islamists' negative assessment of Abdallah and his regime as "the West's favorite ally".
Jordan is not, of course, in immediate danger of being swept by an Islamist tide; the domestic Islamist movement is not powerful enough to take power by force, the country's security services are formidable, and the government will not permit a fair general election.
Still, Jordan's long-term stability is precarious because of the Iraq war's negative impact on a society constantly threatened by destabilization because of its Palestinian population and support for the Western-advocated Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
As in the case of Lebanon and Syria, the end of the Saddam-maintained barrier preventing the entry of most Sunni militants into the Levant through Iraq has left Jordan to face not only its own growing Islamist community - the growth of which is in part due to Amman's support for the Iraq war - but also an inflow of foreign Islamists, some of whom are veteran mujahideen and many of whom appear to be Saudi-style Salafists.
From al-Qaeda's perspective the situation in Jordan is progressing in a favorable manner. Bin Laden has long targeted the Hashemite monarchy because of its refusal to allow the mujahideen to launch raids from Jordan into Israel. Al-Qaeda itself has had a shadowy presence in Jordan, first led by Bin Laden's late brother-in-law Muhammad Jamal Khalifah, almost since its inception in 1988. Bin Laden and his lieutenants surely see Jordan as a target for destabilization, as well as a place from which al-Qaeda can establish a presence capable of attacking Israel.
Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; his most recent book is Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. Dr Scheuer is a Senior Fellow with The Jamestown Foundation.

(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with permission.)
(Copyright 2008 The Jamestown Foundation.)Related articles by Zemanta

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LEBANON-SYRIA: MUJAHIDEEN BLEED-THROUGH

Image via Wikipedia

Asia Times Online By Michael Scheuer

Al-Qaeda's organizational goal in Iraq was to acquire contiguous territory from which to spread its influence and operatives, as well as those of its Islamist allies, into the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey.
Having been weaned as an insurgent in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden has consistently refused to commit large al-Qaeda resources to jihads lacking country-wide maneuver room or Pakistan-like contiguous safe haven. The US-led invasion of Iraq, therefore, opened a chance for the above-described expansion by al-Qaeda and its allies that would not have been possible under a Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq.
This is the first of four articles that will assess the initial stages of the penetration of the Levant - an ancient term for a region stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia - by al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. This piece will look at Syria, and will be followed by analyses of the bleed-through from Iraq into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The quartet of articles will seek to assess the validity of the recent claim by the state-run Syrian newspaper al-Thawara that because of the war in Iraq "the [Levant] region is throbbing with terrorists".
After crushing the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) at the city of Hama in 1982 - killing up to 20,000 people and leveling a quarter of the city - president Hafiz al-Assad adopted the traditional and traditionally unsuccessful tack of Arab tyrants of trying to use government largesse to co-opt Syria's remaining Islamists and thereby moderate their message. Under Assad's program tens of thousands of new mosques were built; 22 higher-education institutions for Koran-based learning were opened; regional sharia schools for men and women were started; and Muslim students from more than sixty countries were invited to receive their Islamic schooling in Syria.
Assad's son Bashar, however, is discovering that his father's efforts to co-opt Syrian Islamists have yielded not a tame, state-sponsored Islam but a trend toward militant Islamism in both urban and rural areas of Syria. After the September 27 terrorist attack in Damascus, an Arab journalist suggested:
The Syrian regime fell - as have others - in[to] the famous illusion that they can toy with the terrorist fundamentalist bear at the beginning of the day and then get rid of it or put it back in the cage at the end of the day! This is an illusion that is repeated and always repeated in the Middle East region. No side wants to learn from the experience of others. Toying with religion or attempting to revolutionize religion or some of its aspects and then trying to benefit from this revolution on the political level without any repercussions or consequences is the biggest illusion of all. It is the first and last mistake because if you commit this mistake once it would be fatal and there would be no second time!
Compounding the failure of co-optation for Damascus is the fact that the senior al-Assad's Hama operation, although massively murderous, was not comprehensive: the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was not wiped out. Besides members who survived Hama and remained in Syria, a number of senior SMB leaders escaped and were welcomed in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states where they found succor, academic posts, and a safe haven in which to reorganize and plan for revenge.
The bin Laden family was among the many wealthy, non-royal Saudi families that had hosted SMB leaders both before and after Hama. Indeed, Osama in his youth met senior SMB leaders on their pilgrimage, and while living in Sudan (1991-1996) several SMB members worked for or were supported by al-Qaeda's multiple businesses.
It is important to note that an al-Qaeda-led mujahideen bleed-through from Iraq to Syria had fertile ground in which to take root in 2003. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous and brutal Syrian security services, there was a Damascus-permitted militant Islamist environment to be exploited when the US-led invasion of Iraq occurred. Not only had the targets of regime co-optation become more militant, but there were also SMB remnants in the country, as well as the long-time official presence of Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, and various Palestinian resistance groups.
Into this made-to-order milieu, then, came hundreds and perhaps thousands of young Muslim men from across the Arab and Muslim worlds, eager to enter Iraq and join the fatwa-sanctioned jihad against the US-led coalition. Bashar al-Assad's regime allowed these men to enter Iraq, trusting that they would make life miserable for US forces, kill enough American troops to force a US withdrawal and end up being killed before they could head for home. Washington singled out Damascus for sole responsibility for this cross-border flow of would-be mujahideen, but al-Assad's regime was the focal point for the flow because of the easy physical access to Iraq that it afforded.
Al-Assad certainly assisted his domestic Islamist firebrands to get to Iraq, but the non-Syrian Muslims who came to Syria en route to Iraq were sent by their own governments - Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, etc - in an effort that mirrored Assad's: send the young Islamists to Iraq to fight and die and thereby create a safety valve that lessens the pressure from domestic Islamist militancy. Obviously, al-Assad indulged the other Arab regimes by permitting the flow through. This is the same method of operation that most Arab and many Muslim regimes used during Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89).
Having now tightened up Syria's borders with Iraq under pressure from Washington and the French government, Bashar al-Assad is now running a country-size hotel for a variety of ill-tempered Islamist guests. In addition to long-term tenants Hamas, Hezbollah, and the secular Palestinian fraternity, Syrian security has to keep tabs on newer and not fully domesticated guests: a growing Syrian Muslim Brotherhood organization; a militant "official" clergy that is stoking greater Islamic fervor at the grassroots level; more than a half-million Iraqi refugees; a multinational assortment of veteran mujahideen stranded in Syria after leaving Iraq; and would-be fighters who got to Syria but were prevented from entering Iraq.
Among the veteran fighters are a contingent of Syrians who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - some commentators are calling them the "Syrian Afghans" - with military skills they can impart at home and in other countries of the Levant.
All told, Assad - a man not as skilled as his father or as able to control the regime's security services - is faced with a growing Islamist threat to the stability of his regime. While the regime is not in danger of falling, it is likewise not in the same position as it was in the "seventies and eighties when the [Syrian] authorities were able to liquidate, with the use of force only, what they then called the conspiracy of the 'Muslim Brothers'."
For the foreseeable future, al-Assad and his security forces will have to deal with internal Islamist anger and threats - based on Damascus' decision to tighten its borders to prevent jihadis going to Iraq, and its indirect talks with Israel - in a manner that is not so severe and brutal as to promote the coalescing of the disparate Sunni militant groups now in Syria.
They also will have to cope with an external threat by better controlling the Syria-Lebanon border to prevent the infiltration of Islamist fighters angry with Damascus and eager to strike back for the blocking of routes to Iraq. Assad and other Syrian officials have already claimed the border is being infiltrated by violent, Saudi-backed "Salafists", "Takfiris" and other "extremist forces" from northern Lebanon, and several Arab commentators have noted that this is a legitimate concern for Damascus because northern Lebanon lies close to Syria's "Sunni belt", once a hotbed of support for the SMB.
Damascus' recent decision to sign a security-cooperation deal with the Lebanese regime shows the depth of the Assad regime's concern with the Islamist threat, but the time may be passing when either Damascus or Beirut can fully control the Sunni militant forces operating on or from their territory.
Lebanon always has been a country whose people are more loyal to family, clan, tribe and faith than to the concept of Lebanon as a united nation-state. Since 2003, this existing internal divisiveness has been sharpened by the United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and the US-led international effort to drive Syria out of Lebanon.
The former opened a role for Lebanon as part of the path for would-be jihadis traveling to fight in Iraq. The latter - together with the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war - forced the precipitate decline of effective governmental authority in Lebanon, allowing jihadis to use the country for transit and basing. This made it a target for aggressive expansionist efforts by Saudis and other Salafis and encouraged the rapid growth of internal violence between political and religious factions.
Overall, the Iraq war and Syria's departure from Lebanon gave al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies an unprecedented opportunity to infiltrate their influence and manpower into Lebanon, as well as help strengthen the Sunni Salafist trend in northern Lebanon.
It is now old-hat to say that the US-led invasion of Iraq was a casus belli for Sunni Muslims worldwide, and especially among the Salafists who are prominent in al-Qaeda, other Islamist radical groups, and the Saudi regime, who are now effectively expanding their power across the Arab and Muslim worlds. A glance at the map showed jihad-bound Sunnis that Lebanon was a geographic key to infiltrating Islamist fighters into Iraq. The war itself made many Sunni Lebanese eager to assist that entry process, with some ready to go and fight there themselves.
With Syria effectively in charge of Lebanon at the start of the Iraq war, it appears that the transit of would-be mujahideen through Lebanon was kept moving by Syrian authorities and did not initially result in the buildup of non-Lebanese Sunni Islamists within the country.
The West's pyrrhic 2005 victory in forcing President Bashar al-Assad to evacuate Syrian forces from the country, however, seems to have created a situation which now finds growing numbers of non-Lebanese Salafi Islamists present in Lebanon and a growing Salafist movement in the north - especially in Tripoli, which is Lebanon's largest, most conservative Sunni city - as well as in the city of Sidon and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps.
In addition to the growth of Salifism and Islamist militancy engendered by the passions aroused by the Iraq war, Saudi Arabia has been fishing in troubled waters by encouraging the growth of each in northern Lebanon. Riyadh has paid for the construction of new mosques in Tripoli and reportedly has assisted militants residing in the northern territory abutting Syria.
According to the media, Lebanese and Syrian sources are reporting that Saudi National Security Chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan is supervising the Saudis' pro-Salafist agenda in Lebanon, a program which includes sponsoring Islamist terrorist operations in Syria. Riyadh's activities in northern Lebanon hold the promise of fulfilling two longstanding Saudi goals: (1) creating a viable, well-armed, and militant Sunni Salafi movement in Lebanon as a military counterweight to the Shi'ite Hezbollah, and (2) to enable Riyadh to cause domestic instability for their Syrian enemy.
The turmoil of post-Syrian Lebanon also has been exploited by al-Qaeda forces based in Iraq. Multiple media reports indicate that al-Qaeda fighters - mostly Yemenis, Saudis and Jordanians who left Iraq to avoid the US "surge" and its surrogate Sunni fighters - went to both Syria and Lebanon. They have established themselves in Lebanon along the Syrian border, in the Lebanese city of Tripoli and in the Ain al-Hawah Palestinian refugee camp; they also have built working relationships with the Sunni militant groups Asbat al-Ansar and Fatah-al-Islam. In 2007, the latter fought the Lebanese army for 15 weeks at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.
In the face of growing Salafist and al-Qaeda influence, one Lebanese academic claimed, "Security in Iraq is improving, but the militants are being driven across the border. There are a large number of militants coming into Lebanon and Syria, and our countries are paying the price for what is happening in Iraq." The academic's words are an apt description of the westward-bound jihad highway for Sunni mujahideen that the US and its allies have unwittingly built across Iraq.
As in Syria, the growing al-Qaeda and Saudi-backed Salifist movement in Lebanon's north and its Palestinian refugee camps clearly is in part a product of the militant bleed-through from Iraq. But, as in Syria, Salafism's Lebanese growth is occurring in already fertile soil: Lebanon's Sunni north has been slowly radicalizing for much of this decade - Tripoli's Sunni leaders long viewed Hezbollah as the "resistance", but now regard it as the "party of evil" - and the eviction of Syrian forces has substantially reduced Beirut's ability to limit the growth of Salafism. Bin Laden's operatives and Saudi intelligence will continue to push these trends, thereby once again demonstrating just how closely aligned are the interests of al-Qaeda and Riyadh outside the Arabian Peninsula.
This said, al-Qaeda still has considerable work to do in Lebanon. While Ayman al-Zawahiri said in April 2008 that Lebanon was now "a Muslim frontline fort", Lebanese Salafists will for the foreseeable future be more concerned with securing increased political power and communal autonomy in the country than in flocking to support the worldwide Sunni jihad.
The possibility of the Shi'ite Hezbollah and its allies winning a majority in the spring 2009 parliamentary elections, for example, could provide a flashpoint for a confrontation between Hezbollah forces and the expanding Salafist Sunni force in the north. For now, the Salafist leaders will continue to work with Saad Hariri's "Future Movement". A group of Lebanese Salafists recently told the media, "Hariri is our leader, we respect and support him." Rather ominously, however, they added, "If [cooperation with Hariri] fails, we have another option called bin Laden."
For its part, al-Qaeda will strengthen its presence in Tripoli and the north as well as its ties to Lebanese Sunni militants and Palestinian refugees. It will also continue to spread its influence across the country in a manner that will place its operatives as close as possible to Israel's territory.
NEXT: Jordan
Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; his most recent book is Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. Dr Scheuer is a Senior Fellow with The Jamestown Foundation.
(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with permission.)
(Copyright 2008 The Jamestown Foundation.)

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LEBANON-SYRIA: MUJAHIDEEN BLEED-THROUGH

Image via Wikipedia

Asia Times Online By Michael Scheuer

Al-Qaeda's organizational goal in Iraq was to acquire contiguous territory from which to spread its influence and operatives, as well as those of its Islamist allies, into the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey.
Having been weaned as an insurgent in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden has consistently refused to commit large al-Qaeda resources to jihads lacking country-wide maneuver room or Pakistan-like contiguous safe haven. The US-led invasion of Iraq, therefore, opened a chance for the above-described expansion by al-Qaeda and its allies that would not have been possible under a Saddam Hussein-controlled Iraq.
This is the first of four articles that will assess the initial stages of the penetration of the Levant - an ancient term for a region stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to Mesopotamia - by al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups. This piece will look at Syria, and will be followed by analyses of the bleed-through from Iraq into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The quartet of articles will seek to assess the validity of the recent claim by the state-run Syrian newspaper al-Thawara that because of the war in Iraq "the [Levant] region is throbbing with terrorists".
After crushing the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) at the city of Hama in 1982 - killing up to 20,000 people and leveling a quarter of the city - president Hafiz al-Assad adopted the traditional and traditionally unsuccessful tack of Arab tyrants of trying to use government largesse to co-opt Syria's remaining Islamists and thereby moderate their message. Under Assad's program tens of thousands of new mosques were built; 22 higher-education institutions for Koran-based learning were opened; regional sharia schools for men and women were started; and Muslim students from more than sixty countries were invited to receive their Islamic schooling in Syria.
Assad's son Bashar, however, is discovering that his father's efforts to co-opt Syrian Islamists have yielded not a tame, state-sponsored Islam but a trend toward militant Islamism in both urban and rural areas of Syria. After the September 27 terrorist attack in Damascus, an Arab journalist suggested:
The Syrian regime fell - as have others - in[to] the famous illusion that they can toy with the terrorist fundamentalist bear at the beginning of the day and then get rid of it or put it back in the cage at the end of the day! This is an illusion that is repeated and always repeated in the Middle East region. No side wants to learn from the experience of others. Toying with religion or attempting to revolutionize religion or some of its aspects and then trying to benefit from this revolution on the political level without any repercussions or consequences is the biggest illusion of all. It is the first and last mistake because if you commit this mistake once it would be fatal and there would be no second time!
Compounding the failure of co-optation for Damascus is the fact that the senior al-Assad's Hama operation, although massively murderous, was not comprehensive: the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was not wiped out. Besides members who survived Hama and remained in Syria, a number of senior SMB leaders escaped and were welcomed in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states where they found succor, academic posts, and a safe haven in which to reorganize and plan for revenge.
The bin Laden family was among the many wealthy, non-royal Saudi families that had hosted SMB leaders both before and after Hama. Indeed, Osama in his youth met senior SMB leaders on their pilgrimage, and while living in Sudan (1991-1996) several SMB members worked for or were supported by al-Qaeda's multiple businesses.
It is important to note that an al-Qaeda-led mujahideen bleed-through from Iraq to Syria had fertile ground in which to take root in 2003. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous and brutal Syrian security services, there was a Damascus-permitted militant Islamist environment to be exploited when the US-led invasion of Iraq occurred. Not only had the targets of regime co-optation become more militant, but there were also SMB remnants in the country, as well as the long-time official presence of Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, and various Palestinian resistance groups.
Into this made-to-order milieu, then, came hundreds and perhaps thousands of young Muslim men from across the Arab and Muslim worlds, eager to enter Iraq and join the fatwa-sanctioned jihad against the US-led coalition. Bashar al-Assad's regime allowed these men to enter Iraq, trusting that they would make life miserable for US forces, kill enough American troops to force a US withdrawal and end up being killed before they could head for home. Washington singled out Damascus for sole responsibility for this cross-border flow of would-be mujahideen, but al-Assad's regime was the focal point for the flow because of the easy physical access to Iraq that it afforded.
Al-Assad certainly assisted his domestic Islamist firebrands to get to Iraq, but the non-Syrian Muslims who came to Syria en route to Iraq were sent by their own governments - Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Sudan, etc - in an effort that mirrored Assad's: send the young Islamists to Iraq to fight and die and thereby create a safety valve that lessens the pressure from domestic Islamist militancy. Obviously, al-Assad indulged the other Arab regimes by permitting the flow through. This is the same method of operation that most Arab and many Muslim regimes used during Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89).
Having now tightened up Syria's borders with Iraq under pressure from Washington and the French government, Bashar al-Assad is now running a country-size hotel for a variety of ill-tempered Islamist guests. In addition to long-term tenants Hamas, Hezbollah, and the secular Palestinian fraternity, Syrian security has to keep tabs on newer and not fully domesticated guests: a growing Syrian Muslim Brotherhood organization; a militant "official" clergy that is stoking greater Islamic fervor at the grassroots level; more than a half-million Iraqi refugees; a multinational assortment of veteran mujahideen stranded in Syria after leaving Iraq; and would-be fighters who got to Syria but were prevented from entering Iraq.
Among the veteran fighters are a contingent of Syrians who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - some commentators are calling them the "Syrian Afghans" - with military skills they can impart at home and in other countries of the Levant.
All told, Assad - a man not as skilled as his father or as able to control the regime's security services - is faced with a growing Islamist threat to the stability of his regime. While the regime is not in danger of falling, it is likewise not in the same position as it was in the "seventies and eighties when the [Syrian] authorities were able to liquidate, with the use of force only, what they then called the conspiracy of the 'Muslim Brothers'."
For the foreseeable future, al-Assad and his security forces will have to deal with internal Islamist anger and threats - based on Damascus' decision to tighten its borders to prevent jihadis going to Iraq, and its indirect talks with Israel - in a manner that is not so severe and brutal as to promote the coalescing of the disparate Sunni militant groups now in Syria.
They also will have to cope with an external threat by better controlling the Syria-Lebanon border to prevent the infiltration of Islamist fighters angry with Damascus and eager to strike back for the blocking of routes to Iraq. Assad and other Syrian officials have already claimed the border is being infiltrated by violent, Saudi-backed "Salafists", "Takfiris" and other "extremist forces" from northern Lebanon, and several Arab commentators have noted that this is a legitimate concern for Damascus because northern Lebanon lies close to Syria's "Sunni belt", once a hotbed of support for the SMB.
Damascus' recent decision to sign a security-cooperation deal with the Lebanese regime shows the depth of the Assad regime's concern with the Islamist threat, but the time may be passing when either Damascus or Beirut can fully control the Sunni militant forces operating on or from their territory.
Lebanon always has been a country whose people are more loyal to family, clan, tribe and faith than to the concept of Lebanon as a united nation-state. Since 2003, this existing internal divisiveness has been sharpened by the United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and the US-led international effort to drive Syria out of Lebanon.
The former opened a role for Lebanon as part of the path for would-be jihadis traveling to fight in Iraq. The latter - together with the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war - forced the precipitate decline of effective governmental authority in Lebanon, allowing jihadis to use the country for transit and basing. This made it a target for aggressive expansionist efforts by Saudis and other Salafis and encouraged the rapid growth of internal violence between political and religious factions.
Overall, the Iraq war and Syria's departure from Lebanon gave al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies an unprecedented opportunity to infiltrate their influence and manpower into Lebanon, as well as help strengthen the Sunni Salafist trend in northern Lebanon.
It is now old-hat to say that the US-led invasion of Iraq was a casus belli for Sunni Muslims worldwide, and especially among the Salafists who are prominent in al-Qaeda, other Islamist radical groups, and the Saudi regime, who are now effectively expanding their power across the Arab and Muslim worlds. A glance at the map showed jihad-bound Sunnis that Lebanon was a geographic key to infiltrating Islamist fighters into Iraq. The war itself made many Sunni Lebanese eager to assist that entry process, with some ready to go and fight there themselves.
With Syria effectively in charge of Lebanon at the start of the Iraq war, it appears that the transit of would-be mujahideen through Lebanon was kept moving by Syrian authorities and did not initially result in the buildup of non-Lebanese Sunni Islamists within the country.
The West's pyrrhic 2005 victory in forcing President Bashar al-Assad to evacuate Syrian forces from the country, however, seems to have created a situation which now finds growing numbers of non-Lebanese Salafi Islamists present in Lebanon and a growing Salafist movement in the north - especially in Tripoli, which is Lebanon's largest, most conservative Sunni city - as well as in the city of Sidon and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps.
In addition to the growth of Salifism and Islamist militancy engendered by the passions aroused by the Iraq war, Saudi Arabia has been fishing in troubled waters by encouraging the growth of each in northern Lebanon. Riyadh has paid for the construction of new mosques in Tripoli and reportedly has assisted militants residing in the northern territory abutting Syria.
According to the media, Lebanese and Syrian sources are reporting that Saudi National Security Chief Prince Bandar Bin Sultan is supervising the Saudis' pro-Salafist agenda in Lebanon, a program which includes sponsoring Islamist terrorist operations in Syria. Riyadh's activities in northern Lebanon hold the promise of fulfilling two longstanding Saudi goals: (1) creating a viable, well-armed, and militant Sunni Salafi movement in Lebanon as a military counterweight to the Shi'ite Hezbollah, and (2) to enable Riyadh to cause domestic instability for their Syrian enemy.
The turmoil of post-Syrian Lebanon also has been exploited by al-Qaeda forces based in Iraq. Multiple media reports indicate that al-Qaeda fighters - mostly Yemenis, Saudis and Jordanians who left Iraq to avoid the US "surge" and its surrogate Sunni fighters - went to both Syria and Lebanon. They have established themselves in Lebanon along the Syrian border, in the Lebanese city of Tripoli and in the Ain al-Hawah Palestinian refugee camp; they also have built working relationships with the Sunni militant groups Asbat al-Ansar and Fatah-al-Islam. In 2007, the latter fought the Lebanese army for 15 weeks at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.
In the face of growing Salafist and al-Qaeda influence, one Lebanese academic claimed, "Security in Iraq is improving, but the militants are being driven across the border. There are a large number of militants coming into Lebanon and Syria, and our countries are paying the price for what is happening in Iraq." The academic's words are an apt description of the westward-bound jihad highway for Sunni mujahideen that the US and its allies have unwittingly built across Iraq.
As in Syria, the growing al-Qaeda and Saudi-backed Salifist movement in Lebanon's north and its Palestinian refugee camps clearly is in part a product of the militant bleed-through from Iraq. But, as in Syria, Salafism's Lebanese growth is occurring in already fertile soil: Lebanon's Sunni north has been slowly radicalizing for much of this decade - Tripoli's Sunni leaders long viewed Hezbollah as the "resistance", but now regard it as the "party of evil" - and the eviction of Syrian forces has substantially reduced Beirut's ability to limit the growth of Salafism. Bin Laden's operatives and Saudi intelligence will continue to push these trends, thereby once again demonstrating just how closely aligned are the interests of al-Qaeda and Riyadh outside the Arabian Peninsula.
This said, al-Qaeda still has considerable work to do in Lebanon. While Ayman al-Zawahiri said in April 2008 that Lebanon was now "a Muslim frontline fort", Lebanese Salafists will for the foreseeable future be more concerned with securing increased political power and communal autonomy in the country than in flocking to support the worldwide Sunni jihad.
The possibility of the Shi'ite Hezbollah and its allies winning a majority in the spring 2009 parliamentary elections, for example, could provide a flashpoint for a confrontation between Hezbollah forces and the expanding Salafist Sunni force in the north. For now, the Salafist leaders will continue to work with Saad Hariri's "Future Movement". A group of Lebanese Salafists recently told the media, "Hariri is our leader, we respect and support him." Rather ominously, however, they added, "If [cooperation with Hariri] fails, we have another option called bin Laden."
For its part, al-Qaeda will strengthen its presence in Tripoli and the north as well as its ties to Lebanese Sunni militants and Palestinian refugees. It will also continue to spread its influence across the country in a manner that will place its operatives as close as possible to Israel's territory.
NEXT: Jordan
Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror; his most recent book is Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. Dr Scheuer is a Senior Fellow with The Jamestown Foundation.
(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with permission.)
(Copyright 2008 The Jamestown Foundation.)

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