So the spokesmen for the U.S. military and the Coalition Provisional Authority are always looking for good news. They tout the election of an Olympic Committee (elections being alright for athletes, in the Coalition’s view, but not so good for constitutional conventions) or the installation at long last of a cell-phone network in the Iraqi capital. When asked why, despite such happy events, the number of attacks on Americans and suicide bombings aimed at Iraqis working with them has increased, the answer is always pretty much the same: the resistance is getting desperate, so the more things improve, the more murderous it will become. With such bulletproof logic, the occupation spokesmen can pretend that the policy, at least, is invulnerable.
Now we discover that one infamous terrorist may actually agree with the American spin. Amid great fanfare, the Coalition has released a letter ostensibly found on a CD-ROM sent by one Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi to his betters in Al Qaeda, wherever they may be. The tone of the English-language “highlights” provided to the press is so self-serving it’s almost embarrassing. As Coalition spokesman Dan Senor summed it up yesterday: “Mr. Zarqawi says in the memo that if the Iraqis assume effective control of their own government, the terrorists, the Al Qaeda elements, will lose their quote-unquote ‘pretext’ to wage terror in this country–and he says they will literally have to pack up and go somewhere else, find another battle. We hope he’s right, because that’s the path we’re on; we are on the path toward handing over sovereignty, and we are on the path toward defeating these terrorists. The two are inextricably linked.”
But it gets better. Zarqawi, you’ll recall, was the gimpy Palestinian-Jordanian figure cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell last year as a vital link (sort of, maybe) between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. So the mere mention of his name allows those who conjured up the Iraq invasion in the first place to bring out their old smoke-and-mirror routine implying that Saddam was behind September 11.
Given the Bush administration’s record peddling bad intelligence and worse innuendo, you’ve got to wonder if this letter is a total fake. How do we know the text is genuine? How was it obtained? By whom? And when? How do we know it’s from Zarqawi?
We don’t. We’re expected to take the administration’s word for it. “How it was found is not as important as the fact that we have it, we’ve reviewed it, we understand what it is saying, and we can use it … to understand the thought process behind the terrorists,” explains Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military briefer at the five-o’clock follies in Baghdad.
You’re forgiven if you have your doubts. I certainly have mine. But after going over a translation of the complete document by NEWSWEEK’s staff, I’m inclined to agree with the general. Unlike the politically correct excerpts, which left out the first nine of 17 pages, the unsanitized Arabic text rings true to the tone of many Al Qaeda manifestoes:
“I say, and may Allah help me, that the Americans entered Iraq aiming at establishing the state of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates, and that this American Zionist administration believes that by speeding up the establishment of [this] state of Israel it will itself speed up the return of Christ.”
Most of the document is actually a screed against Shiites, who make up the majority of Iraq’s Arabs but are regarded by bin Laden’s crowd as traitorous heretics and a fifth column in the ancient struggle against the West. Fomenting sectarian war with these apostates is not just a tactic, but a strategy and, indeed, a righteous cause as the letter-writer sees it. The author brags of organizing some 25 “martyrdom operations,” meaning suicide bombings, many of them targeting Shiites as well as Americans, police and other Coalition forces. All that’s true to form. Maybe this is Zarqawi, maybe not, but whoever is writing has an accurate sense of Al Qaeda’s thinking and a feel for the situation on the ground here.
Woven through this diatribe is a cold-eyed appraisal of other major players in Iraq today, their weaknesses and the possibilities they offer for the Islamic revolutionaries’ strategy. Such frank analysis is also typical of Al Qaeda-ish ideologues.
The majority of Sunni Iraqis, says the letter-writer, “dislike the Americans and wish for their withdrawal, yet they look for a bright shining future and they are very easy prey for the cunning media and deceptive politics.” Their tribal leaders and religious scholars are not interested in holy war, preferring instead “to dance [ceremonial dances] and finish with a big meal.” The Muslim Brothers, who belong to one of the oldest international Islamist political movements, now “bargain with the martyrs’ blood and build their fake glory over the skulls of the faithful.” They compromise with the Americans, seeking seats in the new government, while trying to control the jihad by pulling the purse strings.
As for the Americans themselves, “the Crusaders,” they’re easy targets because they’re spread so thin and don’t understand anything about the country. The writer proposes not only to kill them when possible, but to abduct them “so that we can exchange them for our arrested sheikhs and brothers.” Not a happy thought.
The strategic challenge for the letter’s author is what to do when the American troops have pulled back to the relative safety of their garrisons and handed off most of the fighting to Iraqi police and soldiers who actually know the terrain, the language, the people, and in many cases have deep family ties in the community.
On the one hand, that will make it a lot harder to fight “the foreign occupation,” especially if you’re a foreigner yourself. But the challenge the author sees is not the power of some new “democracy” (which is mentioned ironically), it’s the bastardized security apparatus drawn from the old ranks of the dictator’s forces: “an army and police force that will bring back the time of Saddam Hussein and his cohorts.” When Saddam actually was in power, contrary to the Bush administration’s spin, there was no place in his Iraq for Islamic revolutionaries.
So, yes indeed, the “Zarqawi Memo” could be taken as tacit admission of defeat by one foreign fighter who hoped to set Iraq ablaze and make it a new base of operations for Al Qaeda. And for those of us interested in the minutiae of terrorist thinking, as well as the mostly forgotten hunt for Osama bin Laden, it really is fascinating. But as an American here in Iraq, I don’t find the letter much consolation.
The writer, sinister idealist that he is, complains that too many of the home-grown fighters in Iraq are reluctant to be suicidal martyrs. Instead, he says, these Iraqis lay landmines, launch missiles, fire mortars and then go home to their wives and kids. He doesn’t really want to have anything to do with them, nor they with him.
Unfortunately for us, these are the guys, precisely, who are attacking American forces every hour, killing an American every day, and costing us a billion a week. And so far, there’s no sign at all that they’re giving up.
