I support conscription - but not for the reasons you cite. It will
ramp up the pressure to end the war as every GOP chickenhawk will
suddenly look at this war differently.
But better still to pull up stakes on this whole Middle East adventure.
Do you seriously think the American government can lay the foundation
for an enlightened arab civilization? Who ever thought up this crazy
idea? Belongs alongside the dumbest ideas of all time, right next to
the efforts to 400 years ago to Christianize the Congo.
And don't just take my word for it. Read this:
Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq
War radicalized most, probes find
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | July 17, 2005
WASHINGTON -- New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an
Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the
backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to
fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these
foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by
the war itself.
The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture
available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's
claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are
terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central
front" in a battle against the United States.
''The terrorists know that the outcome [in Iraq] will leave them
emboldened or defeated," Bush said in his nationally televised address
on the war at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month. ''So they are
waging a campaign of murder and destruction." The US military is
fighting the terrorists in Iraq, he repeated this month, ''so we do not
have to face them here at home."
However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to
sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who
blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the
calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land,
according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained
analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access
to Saudi officials and intelligence.
A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a
leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some
senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the
vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part
in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."
''Only a few were involved in past Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan,
Bosnia, or Chechnya," the Israeli study says. Out of the 154 fighters
analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism,
including six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan, said the report, compiled by the Global Research in
International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel.
American intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of
anonymity, and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the
suicide bombers wreaking havoc in Iraq: Prior to the Iraq war, they
were not Islamic extremists seeking to attack the United States, as Al
Qaeda did four years ago, but are part of a new generation of
terrorists responding to calls to defend their fellow Muslims from
''crusaders" and ''infidels."
''The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on
terrorism, but this is a front we created," said Peter Bergen, a
terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a
Washington think tank.
Foreign militants make up only a small percentage of the insurgents
fighting in Iraq, as little as 10 percent, according to US military and
intelligence officials. The top general in Iraq said late last month
that about 600 foreign fighters have been captured or killed by
coalition forces since the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. The wider
insurgency, numbering in the tens of thousands, is believed to consist
of former Iraqi soldiers, Saddam Hussein loyalists, and members of
Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
But the impact of the foreign fighters has been enormous. They are
blamed for the almost daily suicide attacks against US and Iraqi forces
and have killed thousands of civilians, mostly members of Iraq's Shia
Muslim majority. Their exploits have been responsible for much of the
headline-grabbing carnage recently, contributing to the slide in
American public support for the war.
There have been nearly 500 car bombings since the US-led coalition
handed over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government one year ago, US
military statistics indicate. In the last two months, car bombs and
suicide attacks have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the
Associated Press.
Bush has cited foreign fighters as a reason for continued US military
operations in Iraq. His argument, repeated often, is that ''the world's
terrorists" have chosen to make their stand in Iraq.
''Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from
power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now
made Iraq a central front in the war on terror," Bush said in a radio
address last month.
Foreign fighters were found to be like Saud Bin Muhammad Bin Saud
Al-Fuhaid, according to Obaid's research, to be published by the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington this summer.
Described as in his early 20s, Fuhaid blew himself up March 24, three
days after he entered Iraq from Syria, according to newspaper accounts
and interviews with his family.
Obaid found little evidence Fuhaid was an extremist before the 2003
invasion of Iraq. Like many of the young men from Saudi Arabia who make
up the majority of the foreign fighters, the student at Imam University
in western Riyadh was not initially a radical jihadist, according to
information gleaned from Saudi newspaper accounts and intelligence
operations. In fact, he apparently almost changed his mind.
Fuhaid is believed to have traveled through Syria to fight in Iraq, but
once he arrived told his family he would be coming home instead,
according to a death notice published in Saudi newspapers and posted on
the Internet. ''However, during that time he met some friends of his
who were going to Iraq and told him they were going to declare Jihad
with their brothers in Iraq," the celebratory announcement said. ''It
was at that moment that our martyr changed his mind and told them that
he will go back to Iraq with them and called his parents to tell him he
won't be going home."
Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that
''the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV
and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a
cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a
responsibility to go."
Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and
North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families,
according to the two investigations. ''The vast majority of them had
nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do
with Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. ''I
am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous
influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab
world."
Case studies of foreign fighters indicated they considered the Iraq war
an attack on the Muslim religion and Arab culture, Paz said.
For example, while the unprovoked attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were
largely condemned by clerics as violations of Muslim law, many
religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have
promulgated fatwas, or religious edicts, saying that waging jihad in
Iraq is justified by the Koran because it is defensive in nature. Last
October, 26 clerics in Saudi Arabia said it was the duty of every
Muslim to go and fight in Iraq.
''These are people who did not get training in Pakistan or Chechnya,
[and they] ended up going to Iraq because they considered defending
Iraq a must for every Muslim to go and fight," said Rita Katz, director
of the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute in
Washington and an Iraq native.
One indication that a heightened degree of Arab solidarity is a leading
factor is that they are almost entirely Arabs and not Muslims from
other countries, such as those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan,
Bosnia, and Chechnya. Another motivation, the studies and analysts
contend, is the centuries-old struggle between the Sunni and Shia
branches of Islam. All the foreign fighters are Sunnis, according to
the analyses, and many of their targets are Iraq's majority Shia
Muslims, who have gained political power in Baghdad for the first time
in hundreds of years.
Ali Alyami, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in
Saudi Arabia, said he believes the deep-seated Sunni-Shia rift among
the world's 1.2 billion Muslims -- about 1 billion of them Sunni --
best explains the foreign-fighter phenomenon. He noted in an interview
that US policy makers do not seem to grasp the historic conflicts
within Islam that are playing out in the war in Iraq.
''To say we must fight them in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them
in Boston implies there is a finite number of people, and if you pen
them up in Iraq you can kill them all," said Bergen. ''The truth is we
increased the pool by what we did in Iraq."
Intelligence officials worry that some of ''Iraq alumni" will use the
relationships they build on the battlefields of Iraq and return to
their home countries as hardened Islamic terrorists.
The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier
this year that ''Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could
provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language
proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized'
and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."