# Posted 10:36 PM by Taylor Owen  

THE LOOMING TOWER: I just saw a wonderful talk by Lawrence Wright who was in Toronto accepting the Gelber Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11. It is refreshing to see such a soft spoken yet tremendously authoritative treatment of this topic. An exemplar of the type of analysis fundamentally required if we are going to defeat the scourge of Al-Qaeda.

The lecture can be watched here, it will be an hour well spent.

Some interesting comments made by Wright:

According to internal Al-Qaeda documents, 80% of the organization in Afghanistan were killed or captured in the first major phase of Operation Enduring Freedom. At this point, the War on Terror was won, and it should have continued as a police/intelligence operation. Between December 2001 and 2003, the organization existed in a "zombie state". Since the invasion of Iraq, they have experienced an astonishing rebirth, now having a base of operation and a recruitment tool.

Al-Qaeda has a 6 stage 20 year plan, written before 9/11:

1. 2001-2003 - Hit the US and create a chaotic reaction.
2. 2003-2006 - Recruit and build support based on the US reaction
3. 2006-2013 - Move conflict into Syria, Turkey and Isreal
4. 2013-2015 - Bring down governments in Arab countries
5. 2015-2016 - Israel collapses
6. 2017-2020 - Apocalyptic battle between Islamic Armies and the West
7. 2020 - Victory. "falsehood" ends and Islamic governments rule the world.

Delusion, certainly. But at which stage does it move from the possible to the fantastical? 3, 4, 5?

He argued that there are three critical things that can be done immediately:

1. The most important thing that can be done to defeat Al-Qaeda is to develop real intelligence capacity, something that hasn't yet been done. Only 25 people in the FBI speak Arabic, and most of them not well enough to interrogate. CIA made up of Irish and Italians, good for fighting the mafia and he mob, useless for Al-Qaeda. "We need skilled people on the ground. Until this happens, we are blindfolded."

2. Develop allies, seriously. This fundamentally cannot be done with either a war mentality, or alone.

3. Real engagement with Israel-Palestine, including immediate refutation of the settlements. While Bin Laden doesn't care very much about the conflict, like Iraq, it is a significant recruitment tool.

These are just a few notes, check out the lecture.

Labels: Al Qaeda, Lawrence Wright

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# Posted 10:11 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WHAT HAPPENED TO QAEDA'S "AL"? Maybe I don't read enough newspapers, but I thought it was very strange to see how "Qaeda" has become a stand-alone adjective in the NY Times. For example, a story on Saturday described reports that:

American AC-130 gunships had conducted strikes on Qaeda suspects using an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.

As most people know, "Al" just means "the" in Arabic. There is no capitalization in Arabic, so one can't really say, I think, if "Al" is part of the name of Osama bin Laden's organization, or just a grammatical happenstance.

Think of it this way. George Bush is president of the United States, but one can refer to him as "United States President George Bush".

What's really strange is something I discovered while reading news reports from the 1980s, also in the Times. Regularly, the reports would refer to the USSR not as "the Soviet Union" but as just "the Soviet" or even just "Soviet", as in "Soviet imprisons well-known dissident."

Now that makes no sense. It's sort of like writing that "the United invaded Afghanistan in 2001. In 2003, United also invaded Iraq."

Labels: Al Qaeda, Arabic, grammar

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# Posted 9:46 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

"THERE'S ABOUT 5,000 Al-QAIDA [FIGHTERS] IN IRAQ." Not exactly what you expect to hear from a Democratic senator, now is it? And I don't mean Joe Lieberman. He doesn't count.

Those are actually the words of Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who voted against the war in 2003.

The second time that Levin mentioned Al Qaeda in Iraq during his interview on NBC, he made sure to explain that they were there because of Bush:

There are now 5,000 to 6,000 al-Qaida people in Iraq. There weren’t any, or there were just a handful, prior to the war. Now they’re there because of the policies of this administration.

I'd say that's about right, and it isn't often you hear a Democratic senator even say that there were a handful of Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq before the war. But the real question is where do we go from here?

Levin says he wants to leave a small number of US troops in Iraq after March 2008 in order to train the Iraqis and fight Al Qaeda. But if you told the average American that there were five or six thousand Al Qaeda fighters in Iraq, how many troops do you think they would want to send in? I'm guessing not a few.

The significant presence of Al Qaida also raises two other issues: How would the Arab world interpret a US withdrawal (or drawdown to a Levin-sized contingent)? And what would happen to Iraq after that withdrawal/down?

Levin is adamant that things won't -- or couldn't get worse:

MR. RUSSERT: If, in fact, we withdrew most of the troops out by March of 2008, your goal, and all-out civil war broke out, complete, total chaos in Iraq, what do you do then?

SEN. LEVIN: Well, that’s where we’re heading now.

As far as Sunday morning rhetoric goes, Levin's is the expected response. But it still shows that smart, influential Democrats still aren't grappling with the implications of their proposals. In fact, Levin even insisted twice that "Our proposal is an effort to try to succeed in Iraq."

I guess the easy response to this objection is that it wouldn't be hard to turn up a long list of far more disingenuous or misguided statements made especially by the Vice President and also the President. Levin himself pointed to the infamous "last throes" remark.

But I made it through the first two decades of my life and then some believing wholeheartedly that Democrats were too honest and too intelligent for their own good. Much of my identity as a liberal Democrat was based on the premise that if I wanted to be honest and intelligent, then there was only one party for me.

That same logic remains powerful to this today, with Democrats proudly proclaiming themselves to be part of the "reality-based community". It is that kind of pretension that makes my ears prick up when I hear one Democrat after another insist that there won't be any ethnic cleansing if we pull out of Iraq.

Well, maybe there won't be. I hope there won't be. But I wouldn't count on it.

Labels: Al Qaeda, Carl Levin, Democrats

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