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2 Bin Laden talks of victory, not
defeat By Michael Scheuer
virtue" - Islamist scholars not in
the Arab rulers' pay and control - to help the
mujahideen to rectify their "faults and lapses",
and to "engender reconciliation between every two
parties in dispute, and they must judge between
them according to the law of Allah."
Bin
Laden also instructs the Iraqi insurgents to seek
the masses' support and active assistance,
implicitly reminding the mujahideen of Zawahiri's
2005 warning to Zarqawi that "in the
absence of this popular
support, the Islamic mujahid movement would be
crushed in the shadows ... our planning must
strive to involve the Muslim masses in the battle,
and to bring the mujahid movement to the masses
and not to conduct the struggle far from them."
Finally, bin Laden warns the Iraqi
fighters to "beware of your enemies, especially
the hypocrites who infiltrate your ranks to stir
up trouble among mujahid groups". Bin Laden is
here referring to Saudi officials or agents who
deliver advice, money and weapons to the Iraqi
mujahideen in a way that favors the groups that
are most Wahhabist in their orientation and
therefore most disruptive of efforts to promote
insurgent unity. Bin Laden has long believed that
this kind of Saudi activity prevented the
formation of an Afghan mujahid regime after the
Soviets' defeat.
The tone of bin Laden's
appeal to the Iraqi mujahideen is beseeching and
fretful; there is little in it to suggest he
believes unity is forthcoming. As noted, bin Laden
believes the support of Saudi Arabia, other Arab
regimes and Iran for their Iraqi favorites works
against unity. He also believes that those he
calls the "rulers' clerics" will deceive the
mujahideen as to their religious obligations and
thereby obstruct unity. He may also believe that
there has been too little preparatory work in
laying the groundwork for a post-US Islamic state.
My Jamestown colleague Lydia Khalil
recently and cogently argued that al-Qaeda's
pivotal part in forming a wartime Islamic
government in Iraq was a "blunder", and she may
well be right. Al-Qaeda's decision to do so,
however, was a calculated gamble based, as
Zawahiri explained to Zarqawi, on the fear that
without political "fieldwork starting now [2005],
alongside the combat and war" there would be no
chance of quickly installing a post-occupation
shura council ... elected by the people of the
country to represent them and overlook the work of
the authorities in accordance with the rules of
the glorious sharia". The wartime government may
now seem a blunder, but it was not a capricious
act. It was an effort to avoid the disastrous
Afghan experiences of 1989 and 1996.
Bin
Laden's near-pessimism regarding the post-US unity
of the Iraqi mujahideen also derives from his
realization that some substantial portion of their
disunity is the result of the actions and
attitudes of Zarqawi, who is now thankfully - from
al-Qaeda's perspective - a dead hero. Zarqawi's
attempt to force himself into the leadership of
the Iraqi insurgency, his zeal in taking credit
for most resistance activities, his decision to
televise the beheading of captives and his
indiscriminate slaughter of Shi'ites, whether or
not they were working for the US-backed regime,
all undercut what must be regarded as the always
limited potential for Shi'ite-Sunni cooperation
after the occupation ends.
Zarqawi's
actions also alienated many neutral and
anti-American Sunnis and led to the transitory
success of the so-called "Awakening" programs in
al-Anbar province and elsewhere; at day's end,
Iraqi Sunnis will reconcile with al-Qaeda and
other foreign fighters because they will need
non-Iraqi Sunni assistance to avoid annihilation
by the Shi'ites.
Thus, the negative
aftershocks of Zarqawi's tenure as al-Qaeda's
chief in Iraq have begun to be tempered, but still
pose high hurdles in the path of both intra-Sunni
and Sunni-Shi'ite unity; indeed, had Zarqawi lived
longer his impact may have been more harmful to
al-Qaeda than that of the Pakistani army, which
Zawahiri claims has done the most damage to
al-Qaeda since 2001.
While al-Qaeda
appears to be playing its more traditional role in
supporting but not dominating the Iraqi insurgency
since Zarqawi's death, the wounds he opened in the
mujahideen ranks continue to bleed. Bin Laden
seems to recognize this and the best he can do in
response is exhort his fighters to avoid
Zarqawi-like behavior that widens rifts in
insurgent ranks.
And before concluding, I advise
myself and the Muslims in general, and the
brothers in [the] al-Qaeda organization
everywhere in particular, to beware of fanatical
partiality to men, groups and homelands. The
truth is what Allah (the Most High) said and
what the Messenger (peace and blessings of Allah
be upon him) said, and everyone's statement is
to be accepted or rejected except the
Messenger's (peace and blessings of Allah be
upon him): his order is to be accepted with
pleasure.
Although left unsaid, bin
Laden clearly is worried that once again the
mujahideen and Muslims generally will, in
Zawahiri's words, allow themselves to be "robbed
of the spoils" because of disunity, and be unable
to prevent others from moving in to "reap the
fruits of their labor".
Note 1. Several US
officials have forthrightly said that the
declining number of attacks should not yet be
considered indicative of permanent success. For
example, Major General Mark P Hertling, commander
of the coalition's multi-national division in
northern Iraq, told the media on November 19 that
northern Iraq was now experiencing the highest
level of violence in Iraq and that "the enemy is
shifting there" because of the "surge" forces
present in Anbar province and the Baghdad area.
Hertling added that "there are certainly
[insurgent] cells remaining in all the key cities"
in the north. In addition, retired General
Montgomery Meigs, director of the US
counter-improvised explosive device (IED) program,
said that IED attacks were falling faster than US
casualties from such attacks because the
insurgents have grown proficient in the use of
IEDs against US forces (Agence France Presse,
November 19; USA Today, November 20).
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
and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin
Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
Dr Scheuer is a senior fellow with The
Jamestown Foundation.
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