Al Qaeda is not al Qaeda in Iraq - Bush wants them confused

James Wimberly reports on the way the testimony from Petreaus and Crocker dropped the phrase "al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) in favor of the less accurate "al Qaeda."

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is an organization created in Northern Iraq by the Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The organization was originally named Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Group of Monotheism and the Holy Struggle). There has never been a close association between AQI and al Qaeda. AQI has no record of attempting to attack Americans in America and no known capability or motivation to do so.

Confusing the two groups serves only to justify the lies used to drag America into the unnecessary war in Iraq. It is a Republican ploy to attempt to avoid responsibility for the greatest single foreign policy blunder ever made by an American President.

So what? Here's what, from TPM:

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents have accounted for most of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq. There likely has been some reduction in Sunni insurgent violence against U.S. troops in Anbar this year, and in fact the U.S. strategy of joining with the Anbar Sunnis against al Qaeda in Iraq is probably part of the reason Petraeus is downplayng the Sunni insurgency at the moment.

But whatever the short-term exigency, this has been a conflict marked by our inability, unwillingness, or idealogical aversion toward accurately identifying our enemies. Even the use of the blanket term "enemy" is misleading in a conflict with multiple competing interests, where alliances come and go, and in which the enemy of thy enemy is not necessarily thy friend. [Snip}

...the strategic and tactical miscalculations arising from the misidentification, to put it charitably, of the competing groups there crippled whatever chance there was of the U.S. effort succeeding.

An strong argument can be made that the confusion of various enemy groups and conflation of them into al Qaeda is (and has been) a propaganda tool used by the Bush administration to fool the American public into believing that there was a legitimate 9/11-related reason for invading Iraq in the first place and then for convincing the American public to keep troops in Iraq when the mismanagement of the occupation by Jerry Bremer and the CPA allowed the insurgency to develop. But there is more.

This administration is filled with decision-makers who believe their own propaganda, chief among them being Bush himself.

Don Rumsfeld felt that the American military was the most powerful in the world because it could deliver combat power anywhere in the world and take out targets almost anywhere. Unfortunately, combat power does not win a counter-insurgency. In fact, the inappropriate use of that combat power has the effect of alienating the population who has to be convinced to oppose the insurgents. That means that a counter-insurgency is at its base dependent on large quantities of accurate and honest Intelligence.

When the decision-makers doesn't understand the nature of the war they are fighting and depend on what their own propaganda says to make decisions in the war, then the insurgents can be expected to win.

That's why it is critically important to distinguish between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. The Bush administration has shown repeatedly that it cannot make those fine distinctions. That is why Petreaus and Crocker were on Capital hill the last two days trying to dress up conflicting statistics to show that there is "Light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq. But it's a road show selling a charade.

With someone else as President besides Bush and with Dick Cheney absent, the occupation of Iraq might possibly have muddled through to a result that would not be so starkly a total failure as the occupation of Iraq has shown itself to be. We'll never know. With them there, there is no possibility of anything that can even be papered over to resemble success.

Terrorism: massive existential threat or just a few very nasty bandits?

Can we trust the conservatives to be honest about how many terrorists are out there and how effective they are? Or are they in business to exaggerate those numbers to maintain political power here in the U.S.?

Consider. The Republican Party needs a massive threat to America so that they can be elected to defend this nation. 1989 was the second worst year of the twentieth century for them (after 1929.) When the USSR collapsed and Communism disappeared, the reason for electing Republicans disappeared with the Communists.

In 1997 the (NeoConservative) Project for the New American Century showed the searching for a new reason for conservatives to run for election in their complaint that "American foreign and defense policy is adrift." Twelve years after the collapse of Communism they were saved by Osama bin Laden's attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Suddenly Middle Eastern terrorists became the new threat to the existence of America and the American Way of Life (as defined by Republicans.)

The Bush administration was already even in 2001 recognized as somewhere between marginal and failing. They had canceled the ABM Treaty, established the Anti-Ballistic Missile System and gotten their tax cut, and the disinterested Bush who was their leader decided to take the month of August off. They had nothing left to do. September 11 changed that, permitting Bush - Cheney to ram through the long-desired dream of the NeoConservatives, a military attack on Iraq.

The attack would be quick, American troops in and out in a few months, and the grand principles of the free market with minimal government interference would create a highly productive free market democracy that would be a beacon to all the Middle East, inviting them to join in the great conservative revolution that was going to sweep the world.

Didn't work, of course.

After the conservatives under Paul Bremer dismantled the government, military and police forces of the autocratic state-economic system that controlled Iraq, there was nothing left to build on. Since anyone who had been part of the previous government (and remember - that includes the economy) had the "Wrong Attitudes" for a free market small government society, such previous government members were not allowed to participate in the new Iraq that the American conservatives were creating.

American conservatives consider a person's belief in conservatism to be more important as a job qualification than demonstrated knowledge and experience on the job. So in America we got Michael Brown, a good conservative known by another high-ranking conservative to be head of FEMA. The staffing policies of conservatives destroyed FEMA and they destroyed Iraq.

Is it any surprise that the unemployed and unpaid previous members of the government and military of Iraq would try to force the American troops out of their nation? And if someone is going to force the most powerful military force in the world out of a nation they have invaded, then the only way to do it is asymmetric Warfare. Asymmetric warfare is another term for what the news media call "Terrorism."

The short story is that the U.S. created the Iraqi Insurgency by both invading Iraq and by the mismanagement of the occupation under Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and NeoCon members of the American Enterprise Institute.

An insurgency needs support from outside the nation it is operating in, so the Iraqi Insurgents were not going to turn down training, equipment and foreign fighters offered by another enemy of America, al Qaeda. The question is, has al Qaeda taken over the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq?

They certainly have not taken control of the Shiite Insurgents. One tactic the al Qaeda members have used is to bomb Shiite mosques to try to get the Shiites to attack Sunnis, because this would make the Sunni Insurgents more dependent on al Qaeda as well as jack up the overall level of violence in Iraq.

This has led both Shiites and Sunnis to attack American forced to try to get them to withdraw from Iraq. The Bush administration, however, has defined leaving Iraq as "Losing Iraq" and as being defeated by al Qaeda. To support this they offer what appear to be highly inflated numbers of the number of al Qaeda fighters operating in Iraq. It is only by inflating the numbers of actual al Qaeda fighters operating in Iraq that the Bush administration is able to justify keeping U.S. troops there in a nation where we are attacked daily and where we have no real objective to fight for except to just keep our troops there in the Middle East!

Washington Monthly has just published an article by Andrew Tilghman entitled The Myth of AQI . [AQI is al Qaeda in Iraq, which is not the same as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Using the same name allows AQI to seem larger and more fearful than they really are.] Here is Tilghman's story on the numbers of al Qaeda fighters that actually exist in Iraq:

What if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda's presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated. [Snip]

In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq....Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view....spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent....But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement. [Snip]

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization." [Snip]

The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate?
[Also quoted in Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog]

It is rather clear that the Bush administration is lying about the size of the actual al Qaeda force operating in Iraq. But they have to, since otherwise it becomes clear that the major cause of the insurgency in Iraq is the presence of American occupying troops.

The Shiites (20% of the population) and the Sunnis (60% of the population) almost entirely want the U.S. troops out of Iraq. The Kurds (20% of the population), who are not involved in the insurgency - counter-insurgency fighting that is tearing Iraq up would rather we did not leave, as we are their protection from the rest of the Iraqi's, Iran and Turkey.

But if AQI is actually only about 850 full-time fighters, and we have 160,000 troops and nearly as many contractors tied down in Iraq just to deal with them, then the Taliban and the al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan and Afghanistan are getting a free ride from us. The Bush administration is fighting the insurgency they created in Iraq themselves and letting the rest of the terrorists in the world go merrily along their way with no interference.

This is just more Bush administration - conservative Republican incompetence at work, concealed by more lies. Lies and incompetence are the hallmarks of the Bush administration. And every time it looks like they are hitting rock bottom, they find new ways to go even deeper to new levels of incompetence covered by lies.

This administration has to go. Soon.