Maybe Iraq War Has Hurt Al Qaeda

This column from the Weekly Standard was written by Reuel Marc Gerecht.

Senator John Kerry certainly believes that the war in Iraq has made us less safe by augmenting the numbers of Islam's killer-extremists. Echoing the sentiments, and often the language, of the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, the senator sees us waging a war in Iraq that is "a profound diversion" from the war on terror and "the battle against our greatest enemy: Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network." According to the senator, "the president's failures in Iraq have made us weaker, not stronger, in the war on terrorism. That is the hard truth. The president refuses to acknowledge it. But terrorism experts around the world do." In Kerry's eyes, President Bush's ineptitude in Afghanistan and Iraq has allowed al Qaeda to spread, "with thousands of militants plotting and planning in 60 countries, forging new relationships with at least 20 extremist groups in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia."

Now, leaving aside whether the war in Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror, are Kerry, Clarke, and it appears many, if not most, of the journalists on the terrorism beat and their official sources correct in their now-reflexive assumption that the war in Iraq has spurred a new generation of Islamic extremists to attack the United States? Probably not. One has to say "probably" since the answer is empirical: Not enough time has passed since March 2003 for scholars, journalists, and writers to travel among Islamic militants to get an accurate idea of what is actually happening in mosques and religious schools in the greater Middle East and Europe -- the two primary breeding grounds for the jihadism of 9/11.

Remarkably little field work in the stamping grounds and intellectual factories of Islamic militancy has been published since the invasion of Iraq. Just think back to Jeffrey Goldberg's illuminating pre-9/11 essay in the New York Times magazine on the Haqqania madrassa outside of Peshawar. The director of central intelligence George Tenet loved this piece -- which ran under the headline "Inside Jihad U.: The Education of a Holy Warrior" -- and he strongly recommended it, say CIA officers, to the staff at Langley. The Haqqania madrassa was the primary incubator for Afghanistan's Taliban elite.

Can anyone recall a comparable piece about Pakistan's militant madrassas since March 2003? Now, these institutions may be churning out a new, more virulent generation of Afghan-Pakistani holy warriors, but at this time, we just don't know. Information from Pakistani intelligence and the Pakistani press has been historically unreliable. Our knowledge of the official and unofficial madrassa system in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen is even more sparse. And in Western Europe, we are probably only a little better off.

Even in France, where there are multiple layers of potentially very intrusive and competent police and domestic intelligence, the knowledge of what is transpiring in the country's numerous semi-official mosques probably isn't comforting to the Interior Ministry. One of the principal reasons why interior ministers have for years pushed for the local education of French-born imams is that they fear the influence of imported militant clerics. They also know that once extremists enter the bloodstream of the French Muslim community, it's difficult to monitor, and very difficult to circumscribe, their influence. Despite the omnipresent police, France is a free society, and most mosques and Muslim religious associations are pretty tight-knit communities, often opaque to even the inquisitive efforts of the internal-security service, the DST.

Our lack of knowledge is particularly unsettling when we look at groups that have operationally and philosophically melded into al Qaeda. These are groups whose members see themselves first in a holy war against the United States, and only secondarily, if at all, in a war against the Westernizing Muslim dictators, who are often U.S.-supported. The fundamentalist struggle against local despots -- the anathematizing of Muslims as infidels because of their political allegiances and actions -- is decades old, and predates contemporary Middle Eastern anti-Americanism and its usual corollary, anti-Zionism. We don't really have a good idea of whether the extremist Algerian group the GSPC (from the French Groupe salafiste pour la prédication et le combat) has become a more vibrant, seductive organization since it joined forces with al Qaeda in the mid- to late 1990s. Even the hyper-energetic French counterterrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière couldn't tell you whether GSPC members had a good recruiting month in France in September 2004. As he probably couldn't tell you how they fared in September 1998 or September 2001. Any DST officer who tells you he has a baseline for GSPC or al Qaeda recruiting in France for any year since al Qaeda established a meaningful presence in Western Europe sometime in the late 1990s is either pulling your leg, fibbing, or both. In all probability, the numbers are so small that the only way you could know is for the principal GSPC or al Qaeda representative in a given European country to tell you. (It is possible that the arrests of Muslim militants made in Europe since 9/11 have given European security services a better idea of the numbers involved, but given the nature of the Muslim community in Europe -- a community living largely apart from their non-Muslim compatriots -- the element of doubt remains large.)

Which of course provokes the question: How in the world can so many American officials and journalists be so certain that the Iraq war has made al Qaeda a stronger, more deadly, more seductive organization?

To repeat: It's possible. There are numerous factors that go into the brew that makes Muslim jihadists. These factors are not the same for everyone. The intellectual matrix of young Muslim men who live to die to express their own devotion to God and his community is surely one of the most dark, fascinating, and urgent questions before us. The role of ghulat -- those who go beyond the accepted customs and practices of the Muslim community -- is not new in Islamic history, though the component parts of today's al Qaeda holy-warrior mind are different in many ways from what we've seen among radical Shiite jihadists and the Sunni holy warriors of just a generation ago. But the suggestion that the Iraq war is the driving force in creating a new generation of faithful terrorists belittles all of the domestic factors that have been fueling Sunni fundamentalism since World War I.

Past and present Westernizing Middle Eastern dictatorships, and the cultural dynamics they unleashed, have been the catalyst for Islamic militancy in the Middle East (the situation is a bit more complicated in the Muslim communities of Europe, which increasingly generate their militants from strictly European causes). Could the Iraq war be the one factor that tips a prospective holy warrior into a committed jihadist, willing to abandon his family and die for the cause? Sure. But a vast array of other factors also come into play, causes that Egypt's president-for-life Hosni Mubarak or France's Jacques Chirac might prefer not to discuss.

What we do know: Al Qaeda was born and grew rapidly in a time when the United States was ignoring Afghanistan, wasn't occupying Iraq, and was committed to negotiating Palestinian nationalist and religious aspirations through the Oslo Accords. We know that Osama bin Laden used as a tocsin call American retreats from the Middle East; that the defining moment for him, and perhaps for his movement, was President Clinton's "Black Hawk Down" withdrawal from Somalia.

We know that Osama bin Laden, his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other much more respectable members of the Sunni Muslim community have called for the streets to rise in the Middle East against the infidel American invaders. Yet the streets have been, once again, mostly quiet (despite the Westerner-paid opinion polls that tell us how much the average Muslim man hates the United States). In a newspaper or magazine article we get a quick quote from some European intelligence official telling us that al Qaeda has been revitalized by the American invasion, but what we don't see or hear, at least not yet, are European officials and responsible academics who actually visit the Muslim communities they write about, screaming over the postwar radical deluge. (And we would hear the Europeans, particularly the French and the Germans, frantically pressing this with U.S. officials and reporters, yet all seems rather quiet.)

Now for what we are beginning to see in the Middle East: The Iraq war has intellectually convulsed the region. The war and President Bush's statements about the need for greater democracy in the Middle East have provoked a vibrant conversation about democracy in the region and in the influential Arabic press published in London. This conversation is still in its infancy, but the range of the discussion, and the extent to which even the controlled presses in dictatorships have been forced to engage it, are impressive.

Anyone who has spent much time watching Arabic television knows how hard the satellite channels have tried to depict the Iraqi resistance as a national, fraternal affair even though the vast majority of Iraqis -- the Kurds and the Arab Shia -- have not joined in action or sympathy the Arab Sunni insurgents. This line doesn't quite ring true, and the Arab journalists and guests often have a hard time tiptoeing around the obvious -- that the vast majority of Iraqis do not look upon the war as illegal, immoral, or a great geostrategic blunder. Serious discussions have started in the Arab press about the savagery of some of the Iraqi insurgents, about how they kill more Iraqis than they do Americans. Bombings of Arab Christian churches and all of the beheadings have caused some soul-searching, even among Islamic activists.

Granted, it is too soon to know how this will play out. In the end, particularly if the United States precipitously withdraws from Iraq, we may discover that al Qaeda has been born again, vastly stronger than it was before. We may discover that the Iraq war was a fillip to al Qaeda -- but also to the spread of democracy throughout the region, which will kill off the fundamentalist mainspring for bin Ladenism, provided fundamentalists are allowed to compete at the urns. We may find out that Arab Muslims are not as monolithic as John Kerry and Richard Clarke think they are, and that Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Crown Prince Abdullah's Saudi Arabia remain the real magnets for holy warriors in the Muslim world. We may discover that the Iraq war, much more than the vanquishing of the Taliban, was the beginning of the end of the regimes that gave us 9/11. We need to be patient. It's just too soon to tell.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht
©