Zarqawi's death an opportunity for
al-Qaeda By Michael Scheuer
While it would be best to ignore
Washington's unwarranted "we have al-Qaeda in Iraq
on the run" bombast, there should be no skimping
on the praise and thanks awarded to the US Air
Force pilots, Special Forces and intelligence
officers who pinpointed and then killed al-Qaeda's
chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. These young
Americans did their job quietly and
professionally. They not only killed an enemy who
was a skilled tactician, organizer and media
manipulator, but also ended the life of a uniquely
brutal and vicious man.
On the US side,
the good news ends about there. As has become the
lamentable custom in Washington, spokesmen for the
US government, and especially for the Department
of Defense, could
not
wait to grab the microphone to strut and brag.
They quickly boasted of Zarqawi's death - no harm
there, it boosted US morale - but then went on
negate the part of the raid that was more
important than killing Zarqawi by explaining to
the world the "treasure trove" of documents they
recovered from Zarqawi, his aides and their
computers.
I watched this near-treasonous,
self-defeating behavior for 20-plus years from
inside the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and
for 18 months since I resigned, and I do not
understand it. Instead of leaving al-Qaeda
uncertain about what might or might not have been
recovered from the scene of Zarqawi's death, US
officials obligingly came forward and described
what was seized and even released some of the
captured materials to the press.
In
effect, Washington gave al-Qaeda an after-action
report long before Osama bin Laden's lieutenants
could have prepared one for their boss.
How to account for such abject amateurism
or justify sending soldiers and marines in harm's
way so a general in Washington can compromise
follow-on attack opportunities against al-Qaeda by
telling the media we know what Zarqawi knew? It
would be comforting to chalk up such behavior to
stupidity, but it can be more accurately
attributed to a lack of respect for the enemy's
brain power.
These al-Qaeda guys, after
all, wear robes and turbans, have long and
scraggly beards and like to kill themselves for
God - how smart can they be? Well, they certainly
are smart enough immediately to suspend or cancel
any plans that were on the computer, as well as
change any addresses and telephone numbers that
were in Zarqawi's file.
Being
professionals, al-Qaeda's counterintelligence
officers would have moved in this direction as
soon as they could get a handle on what was lost
in the raid, but Washington speeded the process
for them and shut the window of al-Qaeda's
vulnerability. Much to the detriment of their
countrymen, US officials have long since forgotten
that silence has the power to keep the enemy
guessing.
On bin Laden's side, al-Qaeda
publicly will mourn Zarqawi's death, recall him as
a noble and selfless mujahid, and cite him as a
brave comrade-in-arms killed by the crusaders'
high-tech aircraft while he was armed only with
faith and an AK-47. This is likely the way many
Muslims outside Iraq recall him, thanks in large
measure to the post-attack photograph US public
relations officers distributed of Zarqawi's face.
Mujahideen who are accepted by Allah as martyrs
are said to die with a calm and content look on
their face, and that is surely the way Zarqawi
appeared in the photo. It would have been better
to show no photo of Zarqawi, rather than display
one that has the tendency to convince Muslims that
he died in God's favor.
Privately, bin
Laden and his lieutenants will be pleased not only
that Zarqawi died as he wished - as a martyr - but
also that he is now out of al-Qaeda's way. At
day's end, Zarqawi was a disaster waiting to
happen for bin Laden et al. After nearly two years
of effort, al-Qaeda was finding that it could not
control Zarqawi and that his actions and rhetoric
were pushing Iraq ever closer to a Sunni-Shi'ite
civil war.
Last July, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
al-Qaeda's No 2, lectured Zarqawi on the need to
stop indiscriminate attacks on Shi'ites because it
was diverting the group's focus away from
attacking US forces and their coalition and Iraqi
allies. Zarqawi abided by the advice for most of a
year, but several weeks before his death he again
unleashed a call for unrelenting violence against
what he called the "Shi'a snakes".
It
should be noted that there is nothing ecumenical
about bin Laden and al-Qaeda; they loathe the
Shi'ites as earnestly as did Zarqawi. For bin
Laden, however, now is not the time to settle
accounts with the Shi'ites. In al-Qaeda's
three-part strategy, the United States first must
be driven as far out of the Middle East and the
Islamic world as possible, then Israel and the
apostate Arab police states must be destroyed, and
only thereafter will the Sunnis put paid to the
Shi'ites.
For bin Laden, a Sunni-Shi'ite
civil war at this point is al-Qaeda's worst
nightmare: it would erode the group's ability to
focus Muslims on driving the US from the region
and ensure the survival of Israel and the Arab
tyrannies. Zarqawi's death may have come too late
to avert a Sunni-Shi'ite war in Iraq, but for
al-Qaeda there is reason to rejoice that its
Zarqawi-less Iraq force will no longer be a major
catalyst for such a conflict.
In the
appointment of Abu Ayyub al-Masri in Zarqawi's
stead, bin Laden has sent a clear signal that he
and Zawahiri are still in charge, that al-Qaeda's
forces in Iraq will behave in a manner that
advances the strategy outlined above, and that
al-Qaeda considers the Iraqi insurgency a priority
second only the one in Afghanistan.
From
what has been published so far, Masri is an
Egyptian and a former member of Zawahiri's
Egyptian Islamic Jihad; like many EIJ members, he
may be a former officer of the Egyptian military,
security forces or police. In making the
appointment, bin Laden continues a consistent
pattern of relying on Egyptian fighters as
military commanders: three of al-Qaeda's top
military commanders have been Egyptians - Abu
Ubaydah al-Panshiri, Mohammad Atef, and Said
al-Adl - and the Egyptian Mohammad Atta was the
on-the-ground commander for the attack of
September 11, 2001.
Masri's leadership
style and decisions are likely to conform closely
to the instructions that Zawahiri laid down for
Zarqawi last July. Masri, for example, will serve
as the chief of al-Qaeda forces in Iraq, but will
not seek to lead the Sunni Iraqi insurgency. For
15 years, al-Qaeda has been welcomed in Islamic
insurgencies from Kashmir to Mindanao because it
has been willing to offer assistance and advice
while deferring to local insurgent chiefs for
overall leadership, thereby ensuring that
al-Qaeda's participation does not become a source
of intra-insurgency dissatisfaction and
divisiveness. Masri, for the same reasons, is
likely to work more closely with the Iraqi
mujahideen shura council than did Zarqawi.
As noted above, Masri's operational agenda
will be less focused on killing Shi'ites just
because they are Shi'ites and more focused on
attacking US forces, coalition units and the Iraqi
government's police, security and military forces.
This mode of operation leaves plenty of scope for
killing Shi'ites - the prewar fatwas
approved the killing of any Iraqi working with the
Americans or Iraqi regime - but will remove some
of the stigma occasioned by Zarqawi's vendetta.
Masri, moreover, will seek to work more
closely with Iraqi insurgents to find targets that
serve the aims of both al-Qaeda and the Iraqis. In
this regard, it seems likely that Iraq's oil
infrastructure will be high on Masri's target
list. Al-Qaeda's goal in its war with the United
States is to drive the US economy toward
bankruptcy, and with the price of oil near US$70 a
barrel, a steady campaign against Iraq's oil
infrastructure will both drive up the cost of oil
and force Washington to make good the revenues
lost by the Iraqi government from such attacks.
Masri also is likely to be less
Iraq-centric than Zarqawi. For al-Qaeda,
US-occupied Iraq always has been a land of
multiple opportunities, a place where Americans
can be killed and economically bled but, just as
important, a place from which al-Qaeda's forces
can be based and launched into the Levant and the
Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden's military thinking
was formed during the Afghan-Soviet war, and he
always has placed a premium on the acquisition of
a contiguous safe haven similar to Pakistan from
which to operate. The main reason, for example,
that he committed relatively few fighters to the
war in the Balkans was that there was no such
contiguous safe haven available.
Al-Qaeda's acquisition of secure bases in
Iraq, however, gives it several first-time
opportunities. The long, unsecured border of
southern Iraq, for example, affords al-Qaeda
largely unimpeded access for the infiltration of
men and material into Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and
through those countries to the rest of the
peninsula. With bin Laden and Zawahiri having
recently called for increased attacks on the Saudi
and Kuwaiti oil industries, al-Qaeda seems certain
to exploit its new access routes from Iraq to
facilitate such attacks.
On Iraq's western
border, al-Qaeda now has the chance to accelerate
its infiltration of Syria and Jordan and through
them into Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine. This
reality, over time, will assist al-Qaeda's
long-standing aim of putting itself in position to
attack Israel directly, instead of having to
settle for hitting Israeli and Jewish targets in
such places as Tunisia, Kenya and Turkey. For now,
Masri is likely to focus infiltration and sabotage
efforts in Jordan, where the population is
intensely anti-American and where the already
unpopular government of King Abdullah has been
lavishly praised by US officials for helping to
kill Zarqawi, a Jordanian and a hero in the
heavily Islamist and anti-regime cities of Ma'an
and Zarqa.
Overall, then, the killing of
Zarqawi should be regarded as an excellent and
telling tactical victory for the United States and
as a strategic opportunity for al-Qaeda. For at
least the short term, Zarqawi's death will disrupt
and delay al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, and some of
his men may be captured or killed as a consequence
of the documents that were captured. The recent
capture of two US soldiers in Iraq, however, shows
the insurgents' continued potency, and serves as a
mocking coda to the inflated claims made by
Washington's uniformed bureaucrats that Zarqawi's
death was anything more than a fine tactical
victory.
For al-Qaeda, however, Zarqawi's
death allows the organization's Iraq slate to be
wiped clean and rewritten. If Masri can
consolidate his control of al-Qaeda's forces in
Iraq - and there seems no reason he cannot do so -
he is likely to hew much closer to bin Laden's
grand strategy than did Zarqawi. In doing so, he
will fulfill al-Qaeda's dual goal in Iraq of
increasing the blood-and-treasure costs to the
United States and its coalition partners and
moving the base of operations against Arab
apostate regimes and their oil industries from
Afghanistan to the heartland of the Arab world.
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
Counter Terrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is
the once-anonymous author of Imperial Hubris:
Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin
Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
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