TigerHawk

Bill Roggio has an interesting post discussing the "foreign fighters" who have come to Iraq to fight for al Qaeda. Perhaps I liked the post so much because he sounds many of the themes that I have been tirelessly (and tiresomely) repeating these many months, including the core point that in Iraq we have a wonderful chance to humiliate al Qaeda and discredit its ideology.

The influx of jihadis into Iraq is both a blessing and a curse. The positives: the influx of terrorists into Iraq has given the United States access to kill or capture experienced terrorists and jihadi sympathizers, where they were previously lying dormant in their home countries, beyond the reach of the U.S. military. This has given the U.S. intelligence on al-Qaeda’s networks and exposed the terrorist group’s support mechanisms and lines of communications. U.S. and Iraqi military and intelligence services are gaining valuable experience in identifying and fighting terrorists.

The negatives: there is the very real concern about ‘bleedback’, where jihadis gain experience on the battlefields of Iraq and return to their home countries to train others and conduct terror attacks. Coalition soldiers and the Iraqi people are paying with their lives, and the future of Iraq remains in doubt as the terror campaign continues.

But the terror campaign has served to alienate al-Qaeda in the heart of the Middle East. As al-Qaeda continues to indiscriminately target Shiites and Sunnis alike, along with their religious symbols, al-Qaeda becomes quite unattractive to even the most sympathetic element of the Iraqi public - the Sunnis. If the Coalition can complete the training of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the Iraqi government gains a footing and is able to continue holding successful democratic elections, al-Qaeda will have been dealt a serious blow on the ideological front.

Political significance

The question of the "foreign fighters" has become -- like so much about the Iraq war -- intensely politicized. The Bush administration's critics have variously claimed that the problem of foreign incursion into Iraq has been grossly overstated and dangerously minimized. The left objects to the Bush administration's claims that foreign fighters are in Iraq for at least three reasons. First, they see it as post hoc attempt to link the Iraq war to the war against al Qaeda, and therefore assign it approximately the same disrespect that they afford anything else that the administration says. Second, the "anti-imperialist" left wants to declare the United States to be an unlawful occupier, which claim is at least a little easier to sustain if the resistance in Iraq is entirely indigenous. George Galloway made essentially this argument in his debate with Christopher Hitchens back in September. Third, some commentators (Juan Cole, for example) claimed that the "falsehoods" embedded in the "foreign fighters myth" were cooked up by the Bush administration "to lay the groundwork for US wars against, and occupations of, Syria and Iran."

The ambivalent hawks from the last administration and elsewhere in Washington's permanent establishment, most of whom are stridently anti-Bush, argue the opposite point: that the Iraq war is a disaster precisely because it has lured so many foreign fighters to Iraq. See, for example, The Next Attack : The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two former Clinton administration officials.

Before U.S. forces even rolled into Iraq, a senior American intelligence officer observed that "an American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by al Qaeda and other groups ... And it is a very effective tool." By the end of 2003, the flow of fighters was already considerable. Before the outbreak of hostilities, an underground railway had helped al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives get out of Afghanistan to relative safety in Europe. As the insurgency began, the train went into reverse, sending fighters to the new Iraqi field of jihad. Recruiters in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Britain, and Norway provided false documentation, training, and travel funds, and pointed the routes into Iraq. About a dozen arrests were made in 2003 of these "travel agents." It may be that some of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's success in the Sunni resistance owes to his entrepreneurship in moving fighters to the battle. Investigations have shown that he was in contact with an operative in Milan who had helped coordinate the movement of kamikazes, as some radicals referred to them, to Syria and then on to Iraq. One of those who got into Iraq in this way was Morchidi Kamal, who came from Italy and reportedly helped launch the October 2003 rocket attack aimed at the Baghdad hotel where Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was staying. As CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate in February 2005, "Those who survive will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks." (notes omitted)

There it is. The Democratic-left opposition to the administration's policies is quite split on the extent of the infiltration of "foreign fighters" into Iraq, and the meaning of whatever infiltration has occurred. This specific division is symptomatic of the analytical confusion that afflicts the opposition, and it probably explains why it has been so difficult for Democrats to form a coherent prescription for American policy in Iraq. It is not simply that Democrats are whipsawed between the anti-imperialist left and the few remaining America-firsters in their party. Their own intellectuals simply cannot agree on whether foreign jihadis have infiltrated Iraq, and if they have, the significance of that infiltration.

The supporters of the foreign policy of the Bush administration, for their part, have not been divided among themselves on the facts of the foreign fighters -- they have always said that there are a lot of them -- but they have been closed-mouthed about their significance. The Pentagon did not obviously prepare for a post-war insurgency, and there is no small evidence that it affirmatively rejected that preparation (see, for example, George Packer's excellent but painful book, The Assassins' Gate, in which he writes "[t]he guerrilla war that followed the invasion of Iraq caught the U.S. military by surprise," and then details quite exhaustively the many ways in which the military was, er, surprised). The failure to plan for an insurgency suggests that the leadership at the top -- including General Franks and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon -- did not for whatever reason understand Iraq to be the strategic trap for al Qaeda that it subsequently became.¹

Since the end of Saddam's regime, the Bush administration and its supporters haven't been able to decide whether the foreign fighters are a good thing or a bad thing politically, largely for reasons that mirror the opposition's criticisms. On the one hand, the foreign fighters provided an alternative explanation for the instability in Iraq -- it wasn't that the Bush administration failed to understand Iraq, but we have al Qaeda to contend with (begging the question why they did not anticipate that). That argument has failed as it became clear to virtually everybody that the largest part of the insurgency, in terms of numbers, was in fact indigenous. While the first argument never held any appeal for me, the next argument -- that we are better off fighting al Qaeda in Iraq with our army than in New York with firefighters -- does, for reasons I will elaborate on below. And, finally, the infiltration of foreign fighters gives the administration something to complain about with respect to Syria and Iran².

On the other hand, the presence of the foreign fighters rather starkly illuminates the weaknesses in planning that pervaded the run-up to the invasion, and it sustains the claim -- probably true at a superficial level -- that the Iraq war has helped al Qaeda recruit money and men. Both of these problems dispirit even strong supporters of the war (although I am far more unhappy about the former than the latter).

Geopolitical significance

The foreign fighters, whom both Both administration officials and "realist" critics, both Democratic and Republican, take to be al Qaeda's demon spawn, are relevant geopolitically for at least two reasons.

First, they are both a military asset of al Qaeda in a battle it has chosen to wage, and a target of opportunity for the counterinsurgency. Second, they are one of the several actors influencing Iraq's "communal" civil conflict, of which more later.

Foreign fighters as an asset and a target

At this point, virtually everybody other than the anti-imperialist left -- which processes everything in anti-American terms -- agrees that al Qaeda decidedly quite consciously to make a stand in Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war, a fact that was both known and misinterpreted contemporaneously by the United States. Benjamin and Simon:

The radical Islamists' prominence in the insurgency may owe in part to their early start. Before the U.S. invasion, much was made of the presence in Iraq of the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- Secretary of State Colin Powell and others pointed to Zarqawi as evidence of cooperation between al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein.... [A]s a former military officer who served as one of the Pentagon's top intelligence officials now notes, it appears that Zarqawi was in Iraq assembling a force to attack U.S. invaders. "One thing we didn't read right," he says, "was Zarqawi being in the country before the fight." The Jordanian was traveling the length and width of Iraq, and "the reporting I was reading at the time was consistent -- he was going to be there fighting Americans once we got there." This former officer admits, "We knew he was a big guy," in the jihadist world, but no one believed that the radicals would get much of a foothold in Iraq, which was considered to be too secularized, a "country of accountants" as some said before the war. "In terms of predicting a jihadist insurgency, we flat out missed that," he adds. "We thought it would be a Baathist/Sunni [nationalist] insurgency that would be easily contained."

Benjamin and Simon go on to argue -- with some supporting evidence -- that the Iraq war has motivated some Muslims to join the jihad who would otherwise not have been so motivated, in Iraq, elsewhere in the Muslim world, and in Europe.³ They are far from alone in this view -- it is virtually received wisdom.

Ultimately, however, the power of Iraq as a symbol or cause that can be recruited against turns on the outcome of Iraq as a battle. Al Qaeda, which is implacably opposed to any form of popular sovereignty as a matter of ideology (see, e.g., Mary Habeck's excellent Knowing the Enemy : Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror) has staked its prestige on defeating a pluralistic, representative government in that country. If it fails, both al Qaeda as a movement and the ideology that is its motivating force will have suffered an enormous blow. It will be far more difficult for al Qaeda to push the dream of victory against apostate regimes and Crusader states if Iraqi soldiers and police and Marines from Wichita successfully defend the government that is growing in Baghdad. Al Qaeda may yet prevail in Mesopotamia, but until it does we can honestly say that its prestige and credibility are as hostage as the poor men and women captured and executed by Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. (On the slim chance that you have not seen it, you can read my post on the importance of discrediting al Qaeda's ideology here.)

Foreign fighters as actors in the communal war

Stephen Biddle has a "must read" article in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, "Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon." Biddle reframes the debate about the counterinsurgency in Iraq by taking apart the idea that we can apply lessons that we learned, or should have learned, in Vietnam to Iraq (although from a perspective that does not hold out much help for parts of the Bush administration's articulated strategy).

Biddle argues that Iraq is not a "people's war" in the tradition of Mao, but a "communal war" that turns on tribal and ethnic divisions that will not resolve themselves in the absence of American pressure. After reviewing all the attempts from within the military and from outside to analogize Iraq to Vietnam, Biddle declares it all for naught:

Unfortunately, the parallel does not hold. A Maoist people's war is, at bottom, a struggle for good governance between a class-based insurgency claiming to represent the interests of the oppressed public and a ruling regime portrayed by the insurgents as defending entrenched privilege. Using a mix of coercion and inducements, the insurgents and the regime compete for the allegiance of a common pool of citizens, who could, in principle, take either side. A key requirement for the insurgents' success, arguably, is an ideological program -- people's wars are wars of ideas as much as they are killing competitions -- and nationalism is often at the heart of this program. Insurgents frame their resistance as an expression of the people's sovereign will to overthrow an illegitimate regime that represents only narrow class interests or is backed by a foreign government.

Communal civil wars, in contrast, feature opposing subnational groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others. These conflicts do not revolve around ideas, because no pool of uncommitted citizens is waiting to be swayed by ideology. (Albanian Kosovars, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis knew whose side they were on.) The fight is about group survival, not about the superiority of one party's ideology or one side's ability to deliver better governance.

The underlying dynamic of many communal wars is a security problem driven by mutual fear. Especially in states lacking strong central governments, communal groups worry that other groups with historical grievances will try to settle scores. The stakes can be existential, and genocide is a real possibility. Ideologues or nationalists can also be brutal toward their enemies -- Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge come to mind -- but in communal conflicts the risk of mass slaughter is especially high.

Whereas the Vietnam War was a Maoist people's war, Iraq is a communal civil war. This can be seen in the pattern of violence in Iraq, which is strongly correlated with communal affiliation. The four provinces that make up the country's Sunni heartland account for fully 85 percent of all insurgent attacks; Iraq's other 14 provinces, where almost 60 percent of the Iraqi population lives, account for only 15 percent of the violence. The overwhelming majority of the insurgents in Iraq are indigenous Sunnis, and the small minority who are non-Iraqi members of al Qaeda or its affiliates are able to operate only because Iraqi Sunnis provide them with safe houses, intelligence, and supplies. Much of the violence is aimed at the Iraqi police and military, which recruit disproportionately from among Shiites and Kurds. And most suicide car bombings are directed at Shiite neighborhoods, especially in ethnically mixed areas such as Baghdad, Diyala, or northern Babil, where Sunni bombers have relatively easy access to non-Sunni targets.

If the war in Iraq were chiefly a class-based or nationalist war, the violence would run along national, class, or ideological lines. It does not. Many commentators consider the insurgents to be nationalists opposing the U.S. occupation. Yet there is almost no antioccupation violence in Shiite or Kurdish provinces; only in the Sunni Triangle are some Sunni "nationalists" raising arms against U.S. troops, whom they see as defenders of a Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government. Defense of sect and ethnic group, not resistance to foreign occupation, accounts for most of the anti-American violence. Class and ideology do not matter much either: little of the violence pits poor Shiites or poor Sunnis against their richer brethren, and there is little evidence that theocrats are killing secularists of their own ethnic group. Nor has the type of ideological battle typical of a nationalist war emerged in Iraq. This should come as no surprise: the insurgents are not competing for Shiite hearts and minds; they are fighting for Sunni self-interest, and hardly need a manifesto to rally supporters.

In Biddle's conception, al Qaeda's foreign fighters are pawns of the Sunnis, there to strike the terror in Shiite hearts that the Sunnis feel in their own. If Biddle is right, there are only two possible outcomes in Iraq: Continuing, long-term communal conflict, which will work to al Qaeda's benefit, or a negotiated sharing of power and a managed reduction in communal suspicion.

Biddle's paper includes a lengthy section with recommendations to foster the second result, many of which are sharply at odds with current American policy. They could be, and should be, fodder for widespread discussion. Interestingly, though, one of his key prescriptions is already American policy:

Some elements of the current U.S. strategy are worth keeping. The efforts of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to broker a constitutional deal between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, for example, are crucial for success; his interventionist approach is a major improvement over the strategy of quiet behind-the-scenes encouragement favored by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority from May 2003 to June 2004. Economic assistance is a moral imperative; it should be continued and reinforced whatever its marginal strategic value.

Which leads us to an interesting passage from one of George's Friedman's Stratfor advisories($) earlier in the week, which looks at the intersection of al Qaeda and Iraq's "communal war" (without using those terms). The essential, yet still "fair use," excerpt:

After the failures of U.S. intelligence and operations in Iraq in spring 2003, the United States adopted a long-term strategy of using the natural split between the country's Shiite and Sunni populations to first stabilize its own position, and then improve it. During the first phase, Washington tilted heavily toward the Shia, doing everything possible to assure that there would be no Shiite rising to accompany that of the Sunnis. Since the Shia had no love for the Sunni minority, given their experiences under Saddam Hussein's anti-Shiite regime, this was not overly difficult. In addition, the Shia were able to take advantage of the U.S.-Sunni war to shape and dominate post-Hussein politics. The Shia and Americans suited each other.

In the second phase of this policy, the United States reached out to the Sunnis, trying to draw them into a Shiite-Kurdish government. Washington had two goals: One was a Sunni counterweight to the Shia. Whatever it had promised the Shia, Washington did not simply want to hand Iraq over to them, out of fear that the country would become an Iranian satellite state. The second goal was to exploit fault lines within the Sunni community itself, in order to manipulate the balance of power in favor of the United States.

By the time this phase of the policy was being implemented -- at the end of the first battle of Al Fallujah, in 2004 -- the U.S.-Sunni war had developed a new dimension, consisting of jihadists. These were Sunnis, but differed from the Iraqi Sunnis in a number of critical ways. First, many were foreigners who lacked roots in Iraq. Second, the Sunni community in Iraq was multidimensional; Sunnis had been the backbone of support for Hussein's regime, which had been far more secular than Islamist. The jihadists, of course, were radical Islamists. Thus, there was the potential for yet another rift; the stronger the jihadists grew, the greater the risk to the traditional leadership of Iraq's Sunnis. The jihadists might increase their influence within the community, marginalizing the old leadership.

The U.S. success in manipulating this split reached a high point in December 2005, with Iraq's national elections. The jihadists opposed Sunni participation in the election, but the Sunni leadership participated anyway. The jihadists threatened the leadership but could not strike; as foreigners, they depended on local Sunni communities to sustain and protect them. If they alienated the Sunni leadership without destroying them, the jihadists would in turn be destroyed.

Thus, after the disaster in December, the jihadists embarked on a different course. Rather than focusing on American forces or Shiite collaborators, the goal was to trigger a civil war between the Shia and Sunnis. The brilliantly timed attack on the Golden Mosque, much like the 9/11 attacks, was intended to ignite a war. There would be an event that the Shia could not ignore and to which they would respond with maximum violence, preferably against the Sunnis as a whole. In an all-out civil war, the Sunni leadership would not be able to dispense with the jihadists, or so the jihadists hoped. Their own position would be cemented and the Americans would be trapped in a country torn by civil war.

The Sunni leadership, of course, understands the situation. If the Sunnis protect the jihadists who carried out the attack -- and we are convinced they were jihadists -- they will be in a civil war they cannot win. Given their numbers compared to the Shiite majority, the Sunnis -- if they were to break with the Shia -- eventually would have to come back to the table and make some sort of a deal. The jihadists are betting that the terms the Shia would impose would be so harsh that the Sunnis would prefer civil war. The United States has an interest in limiting what terms the Shia can impose, and the Iraqi Shia themselves understand that if there is civil war, they will need Iran's help. Getting caught between the United States and Iran is not in their interest.

There is, interestingly, the possibility of what passes for peace in Iraq embedded in all of this. The jihadists, marginalized and desperate due to American maneuvers, have tossed up a "Hail Mary" in the hope of disrupting the works. It is certainly possible that the maneuver will work. But a more reasonable assumption is that the bombing of the Golden Mosque achieves merely a shift in the time frame the Sunnis thought they had for negotiations. What might have taken months now could take much less. Certainly, the Sunnis have been forced to a decision point.

If George Friedman's speculations are valid, then the Bush administration has been playing a much deeper game in Iraq than his critics, or even most of his fans, give him credit for.

As with all of our speculative posts, we rely on our readers to straighten us out so that we can improve our contribution to the debate. Please share your comments below.
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1. Some soldiers saw this possibility, but they were obviously not driving the planning for the occupation.
2. Unlike Juan Cole, I believe that this is an advantage only in the case of Syria, and a tremendous disadvantage in our dealings with Iran. More to the point, the advantage it confers in the confrontation with Syria will not justify an invasion and occupation, as Cole suggests, but it may will help legitimize stiff sanctions on Syria. Syria's recent commitment to recognize the government of Iraq is evidence that Damascus is worried about this, which is only good.
3. As far as it goes, this is a virtually indisputable point. However, there are three big problems with it. First, because we do not have an order of battle of al Qaeda or a census of radicalized Muslims, we really do not know the extent to which Iraq has motivated Muslims to take up arms or strap on a bomb belt (this is the indisputable flipside of the critics' argument that Bush's claims of having killed or captured a significant part of al Qaeda's leadership are not valid because we do not have al Qaeda's membership list). Second, we do not know how many Muslims would have been radicalized if America had retreated in the face of Saddam's intransigence, which was the only sustainable policy prescription of the opponents of the invasion. This is not a small point, insofar as we have lots of evidence that American weakness in the teeth of radical terrorism since 1979 encouraged more radicalism and more terrorism. Third, we do not know how much counter recruiting there has been during the same period. It is entirely possible that during the same period the enemies of the jihad have grown in numbers even more quickly than the jihad. After all, the Iraq war and other American initiatives have polarized the Muslim world, inspiring countless thousands of people, particularly in Iraq but elsehwere as well, to take up arms against the radicals.