Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (19 page)

As Thomas Paine noted in his more lucid moment above, history is important. This lesson was drilled into me as an undergraduate by Jesuit and lay professors in the department of history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. Those good men taught, and I accepted, that we get wisdom and an ability to realistically analyze our lives and our world from studying history. When I began researching my first book on bin Laden, my hold on the general history of the Islamic world was pretty superficial and needed to be greatly expanded. I hope it has improved, although some would argue it has regressed. Be that as it may, I initially turned to the works of Bernard Lewis, a scholar regularly ranked as the West’s finest interpreter and analyst of the Muslim world. And indeed Dr. Lewis did not disappoint; his work is voluminous, imaginative, detailed, and provocative. In an article he published in November 1998, for example, I learned a fact about which I was theretofore at best dimly aware. I was educated in an era that left many Americans believing that Jerusalem was the most important holy site for both Muslims and Jews, but Dr. Lewis corrected that perception, writing that while Arabia, Iraq, and Jerusalem were the most sacred sites in Islam, Westerners were not familiar with “the sequence and emphasis” Muslims attached to the three sites. “For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget but those familiar with Islamic history and literature know,” Dr. Lewis explained,

I thus learned from Dr. Lewis the overwhelming historical and religious importance of Iraq in the Islamic worldview. Later, the ever-reliable guide Osama bin Laden buttressed my understanding through his many statements and interviews on the subject of Iraq’s vital importance to Islam.
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In an indirect way, Americans and Westerners also were warned about the dangers of occupying Iraq by the intensely negative Muslim reaction to the 1990 introduction of U.S.-led military forces into the Arabian Peninsula. That event was the last straw for bin Laden and to this day is a red flag for Islamists worldwide.
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If the West’s perceived violation of what Lewis called Arabia—now the multiple nation-states on the Arabian Peninsula—caused a state of war between the United States and the Islamist forces led by bin Laden, was it not reasonable to assume that the invasion and occupation of Iraq—second in importance only to Arabia—might well also cause a bloody fracas?

Nearly five years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it seems clear that not only did U.S. political and military leaders fail to read and understand Islamic history before they decided to invade Iraq, but also may not yet have done so. Writing in
The New York Times
on October 18, 2006, the
Congressional Quarterly
’s Jeff Stein discussed his several-month examination of U.S. counterterrorism capabilities and the extent to which official Washington understands America’s Islamist enemies. One of Mr. Stein’s basic questions for U.S. officials was “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” Why was he asking? Explaining that this was not a “gotcha question” meant to embarrass the official being interviewed, and that he was not seeking detailed descriptions of the sects’ theological differences, Stein said he was only looking for an answer that provided the basics: “Who’s on what side today and what does each want?” Stein thought the following statement of reality justified an expectation that U.S. officialdom ought to know the rudiments of an enemy that currently is beating America in two insurgencies.

Certainly this was a fair enough reason to ask the Shia-or-Sunni question. And what were the results? Per Mr. Stein, “So far most Americans I have interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not only intelligence and law-enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing U.S. spy agencies.”
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Stein relates that the FBI is a hub of ignorance about Islam (no surprise there—senior FBI officers have long been resolutely proud of being clueless about all things Muslim), but the breadth of ignorance found by Stein betrays several factors that are more troubling than simple ignorance. First, the thousands of volumes about Islamic history, theology, and politics that the federal government bought after 9/11 appear to have not been cracked open and studied by many of America’s civil servants. The saying “That’s history, why waste time on it?” still seems to hold sway across the bureaucracy. Worse, the fact that these volumes lay unread suggests that U.S. officialdom still does not take the threat posed by nonstate actors—like al-Qaeda, its allies, and the Iraqi resistance—as seriously as it does the threat from nation-states. From my own experience, I never heard a senior U.S. official say that “I deal with the Soviet Union, but I do not need to know anything about Marx, Engels, Lenin, the Soviet order-of-battle, or Communist ideology.” The USSR was a traditional nation-state, and officials, academics, and pundits were eager to learn all they could about its lineage, philosophy, motivations, armaments, and methods of operation. That Stein has found such enduring, post-9/11 ignorance augurs a continued series of bleedings and lethal surprises for America at the hands of Islamist nonstate actors. And in another irony for Americans, their leaders have abandoned one of the few Cold War behaviors that should have been properly retained—the ethos of knowing your enemy.

The reality is that if U.S. leaders had done their Islamic homework prior to invading Iraq, they would have known what a huge hornet’s nest they were ordering the U.S. military to kick over. Perhaps the Bush team might even have decided not to invade once it had digested the stark, near-certainty of disaster that such a review of history would have exposed. “What ifs,” of course, are fascinating to debate, but ultimately we have to deal with reality as it is, not as it might have been. That fact does not, however, diminish the importance of a government knowing the historical context in which its actions are about to be taken. Representative Terry Everett (R-Alabama), the vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence, eloquently noted the importance of historical context after Mr. Stein explained to him the differences between Shiites and Sunnis. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” Mr. Everett told Stein with a truly disarming candidness, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing out there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but in the whole area.”
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Stein’s experience certainly was shared by many intelligence officers over the past several decades. In my own experience, I encountered U.S. senators who were surprised to learn that Muslims were going to govern Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, and we all saw and heard leading neoconservatives, like Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, argue that so deep was the hatred of Sunnis and Shias for America that they had set aside sectarian differences and were cooperating in attacks against the United States. One wonders if those gentlemen and their jejune neoconservative colleagues have noticed how closely Shias and Sunnis are cooperating in the wake of the Iraq war that the neocons wanted and that their country is now losing. Taken together, the experiences that Mr. Stein and many U.S. intelligence officers have had with Islam-ignorant U.S. officials underscore the validity of the judgment of the
Atlantic
’s Robert D. Kaplan that “the greater the disregard of history, the greater the delusions regarding the future.”
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Such is not the stuff from which an effective U.S. national security policy can be made.

Going to War

In discussing America’s war in Iraq, I must make two personal points. First, I am not an expert on Saddam Hussein, his regime, or the nation of Iraq and its people. My knowledge of Saddam and Iraq derives from having worked on identifying the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s responsibility for trying to murder the first president Bush in 1993 and a much longer stint (1986–2004) watching how Saddam reacted to and dealt with Sunni extremist leaders and groups. I am therefore not an expert on the threat that Saddam’s Iraq posed to the United States in the spring of 2003, but I am absolutely confident that there was a near-zero threat from the terrorism subset of the overall Iraqi threat. Most of the public’s perception of a terrorist threat from Iraq came from a tendency among U.S. officials and media to conflate terrorist threats to Israel and those to America, and the prolonged and fortunately unsuccessful attempt by neoconservatives and their echoes at
The Weekly Standard
—especially Stephen Hayes
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—to persuade Americans that there was a close working relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

The second point is that it has always seemed unfair to me to accuse the George W. Bush administration of “lying” about the existence of a WMD arsenal in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion. In 2002–3 most of the world’s countries, not just the United States, believed that Saddam had WMD; the disagreement was over what should be done about them—more inspections or direct military action. The Bush team’s mistake, it seems to me, is that it waited far too long before confessing that there were no mass-destruction weapons in Iraq; but again, the entire world anticipated finding such weapons there. Had I been asked about the threat from Iraq, I would have argued that even if Saddam had such weapons, he had no means of getting them to North America; again, Saddam’s potential WMD threat to his Arab neighbors and Israel was equated—with the indispensable and deceitful neoconservative assistance—with a WMD threat to America. It also is a near certainty that Saddam never would have used WMD against Israel or Saudi Arabia, knowing that he would earn a catastrophic nuclear response from the former and devastating retaliation from the U.S. protectors of the latter. Saddam, moreover, would never have given WMD—weapons or technology—to al-Qaeda or other Islamists because he knew that the Islamists hated him nearly as much as they did Washington and Tel Aviv. In short, Washington failed to use the one Cold War strategy that was perfectly applicable to Iraq: it was a nation-state that could be neutered by continuing to apply the Cold War doctrine of containment. The Bush administration now has a second chance to use containment vis-à-vis the more dangerous but still eminently containable Iran, another state that may pose a threat to Israel while posing none to the United States, unless provoked.
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We will see if they are smart enough to do so.

The real criticism of the Iraq war, it seems to me, should focus on the Bush administration’s decision to start a second war before it had come anywhere close to annihilating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the spring of 2002 the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) realized that the administration had decided to go to war with Iraq. There was no announcement to that effect, of course, but the intent was evident as the flow of officers sent to beef up the post-9/11 war against al-Qaeda ended and experienced Arabic-speaking officers were reassigned from CTC to Middle East posts and to the task forces at CIA headquarters charged with preparing for the Iraq war. While this shift was occurring, the pace of operations against al-Qaeda continued to accelerate, and successful captures of senior al-Qaeda leaders and their associates kept accumulating. Those involved with attacking al-Qaeda—unlike the White House, the Joint Chiefs, and both parties in Congress—recognized that the war in Afghanistan was just beginning and that it was premature to draw human resources away from the effort against al-Qaeda. The White House and Congress should also have recognized that it was daft to start a second infidels-attack-Islam war that would ensure that the first would be irretrievably lost, and that would speed the transformation of bin Laden and al-Qaeda from a man and an organization into a philosophy and a worldwide movement.

Intelligence officers who had been working against Sunni extremism since the early 1990s understood that the looming Iraq war was certain to destroy two of our most important and reliable de facto allies in that anti-Islamist struggle, Iraq and Syria. And they were the best kind of allies, in that Washington did not have to arm, coerce, bribe, or cajole them into acting in the most murderous manner against most Islamists. While our purportedly dear and loyal friends in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates cared little about what Islamist militants did in the world beyond the Arabian Peninsula—letting aid and would-be fighters flow to them, and funding the education of young Muslims worldwide in the jihadists’ creed—Saddam’s Iraq and Hafez and then Bashir al-Assad’s Syria were on a permanent war footing against them.