I have long argued that the worldwide jihadist movement is not restricted to any single organization. Now, after virtually everything has been blamed on Al-Qaeda for awhile, this is being acknowledged. From AP, with thanks to EPG:
Al-Qaida is damaged seriously, but it has spread its radical agenda to other groups that now pose the leading threat to the United States, CIA Director George Tenet and other intelligence chiefs said.Tenet described a terrorist organization lacking central leadership and squeezed financially. Al-Qaida remains determined to attack U.S. interests, however, and still is capable of carrying out assaults on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001, he said Tuesday.
In addition, dozens of smaller Islamic extremist organizations with ties to al-Qaida have emerged, in places like Libya, Iraq and Uzbekistan, to constitute the next wave of terrorist threats, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee in an annual public session on national security threats.
"The steady growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-American sentiment through the wider Sunni extremist movement and the broad dissemination of al-Qaida's destructive expertise ensure that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future, with or without al-Qaida in the picture," Tenet said.
At Tuesday's politically charged hearing, given recent debate over the intelligence community's prewar assessments on Iraq's weapons, Tenet and other officials walked gingerly through questions on the intelligence agencies' cooperation and effectiveness. They touched on instability in countries from Haiti to Afghanistan, although Iraq dominated much of the discussion.
On Iraq, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said allies of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein are thought to be responsible for most anti-U.S. attacks. Foreign fighters, including those from al-Qaida, have carried out some of the most significant attacks and may be behind the high-casualty suicide bombings largely against Iraqi targets, he said.
"Left unchecked," Jacoby said, "Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists."
Further, many in the country's Sunni minority, which prospered during Saddam's Baath party control, have yet to decide whether to support the U.S. coalition or the resistance, Jacoby said. "The key factors in this decision are stability and a future that presents viable alternatives to the Baathists or Islamists," he said.
Largely ignoring an appeal from the committee chairman, Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to focus on current threats, Republican and Democratic lawmakers questioned the intelligence chiefs about intelligence mistakes before the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq. The agencies' performance in those crises has called into question the reliability of intelligence and the Bush administration's pre-emptive strike doctrine.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, asked Tenet how, since a National Security Strategy promulgated in September 2002 set up a strategy of pre-emption, Bush and other administration officials used words like "grave and gathering threat" to describe the level of Saddam's danger to the United States. International law traditionally requires that a threat be "imminent" before a nation can defend against it.
"If it wasn't an imminent threat in your mind, how would you have characterized or assessed the threat?" Snowe asked.
Tenet said intelligence analysts were "quite worried " about surprise attacks and what they didn't know, given Saddam's history of deception. Estimates also indicated he had biological and chemical weapons, and other programs. "Whether it stands up or it doesn't stand up over the course of time is something we're going to look at quite carefully," he said.
"People voted to authorize the use of force based on what we read in these reports," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "It's a pretty bitter pill to swallow, particularly with a pre-emptive war."
After the hearing, Roberts told reporters that "everybody would have some second thoughts" about the rationalization for war, but he believes that Saddam posed a national security threat, "in some ways even more dangerous" than expected, due to the deterioration of his leadership.
Also at the hearing:
-Tenet said officials have uncovered plans to recruit pilots and evade security measures in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe. In the last year, officials also have seen an increase in threats from more sophisticated chemical, biological and radiological weapons. They've learned of widely disseminated instructions for an improvised chemical weapon, he said.
-When asked if the country is safer today than a year ago, Tenet, Jacoby and FBI Director Robert Mueller all said yes. Mueller later cautioned that threats may be more significant because of the decentralization that followed the undoing of many terrorist leaders and their sanctuaries in Afghanistan. He said the country is safer, however, because of government protection.
-Tenet rejected suggestions that the CIA did not follow up on a 1999 German intelligence tip about one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, a first name and a phone number. "You got a name, named Joe, and here's the phone number," Tenet said. "We didn't have enough, but we didn't sit around."
-Tenet praised "great cooperation" from Muslim leaders, including Pakistani Gen. President Pervez Musharraf, who "remains a courageous and indispensable ally who has become the target of assassins for the help he's given us."
What will it take for Tenet, Jacoby, Mueller, or for that matter others in the Administration, or in the Congress, to begin to articulate the real problem: the tenets of orthodox Islam. What will it take for the lapidary formula of Ibn Warraq -- "There are moderate Muslims. Islam itself is not moderate" to be fixed in the public's memory. What are the central tenets of Islam? What do scholars mean when they note that the Qur'an and hadith are everywhere infused with a contempt and hatred for Infidels? What does the tenet of Islam which divides the world between dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, between the lands where Islam rules, and the lands that remain as yet unsubjugated, imply for relations between the Islamic world and not just America, nor the West, but the 85% of the world that is non-Muslim? Why are Buddhist monks killed in Thailand by Muslims, or Christian peasants in the Moluccas, East Timor, Pakistan? Why are Hindu peasants and Sikhs killed in Kashmir, and Hindus killed in Bangladesh? Why are Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians living in constant insecurity and fear in Pakistan? Why were Hindus forced to wear yellow clothing in Afghanistan unbder the Taliban, and why were thousand-year-old Buddhist statues dynamited? Why are Mandeans being forcibly converted in Iraq today, and their ancient libraries destroyed, and why are Christians being attacked in Basra? What lead Khomeini to order the killings of Baha'a, Jewish, and Chrsitian community leaders when he first came to power? Why does the Egyptian army, the recipient of American aid, attack Coptic institutions, including homes for handicapped children? Why do the Muslim Arabs murder, and starve into submission the Christians and animists of the southern -- and now the western Sudan -- as well? Why did the Ottomans seize Christian children for the devshirme? Why did the Turks, along with Kurdish and Arab participants, massacre 1.5 million Christian Armenians? Why do Muslims in France shout "Death to France"? Why in the Finsbury Mosque has Imam Hamza allowed to call for death to Hindus, Jews, and Christians within Britain?
A right understanding of the tenets of Islam would help the United States to better conduct its own campaign of self-defense, to understand the pointlessness of certain other efforts such as trying to keep peace between Arabs and Israelis through "treaties" when the Islamic law of war and peace clearly states, and history shows, that NO treaty with an Infidel state can be honored for more than 10 years (with occasional renewals, but only as long as that Infidel state remains too strong to attack), on the model of Muhammad's agreement with the Meccans, the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya in 628. Further, an understanding of the attitudes that Islam generates would help the American soldiers not to be demoralized at the palpable hostility they face from those whom, in their eyes, they have liberated -- if they understood Islam, they would come to realize that there is nothing they can do to win the "hearts and minds" of the locals, and not regard it as a failure when they do not. Of course those locals will pocket the $20 billion in aid, the schools and hospitals and roads built, the uniforms and soccer balls handed out -- and no doubt would like the American largesse to keep coming, and coming. But nothing permanent will come of it, only complaints by the Iraqi, and further demands, and a blaming of the Americans when things go wrong, as they will because in a society bassed on tribalism and sectarianism, as well as on Islam, democracy in anything like the Western sense, with respect for individual and human rights, is a chimera.
The example of the only quasi-democratic state among the 57 Muslim states -- that of Turkey -- needs to be studied (it is strange that Bernard Lewis, who finaly saw the folly of his support for the Oslo Accords, is reported to be among those who promoted the "democracy" project in Iraq; he has always been tortuous and measured in his discussion of Islam, and keenly aware of the tender sensibilities not only of Muslim audiences, for whom he formulaically drops in a few phrases about the past greatnesses of Muslim civilization as if Muslim self-esteem had always to be assuaged to make his other prescriptions go down ("the most advanced, the most...the most..." -- a reference to what some argue may possibly have been true more than a thousand years ago), but of scholarly colleagues and friends (especially in Turkey), and patrons such as the plummy-voiced, but pious fraud Prince Hassan ibn Talal, whose own rosy view of Islam can only be based on wilful ignorance, for Hassan has had every opportunity, in his gilded existence, to consult the extensive Western scholarship -- Armand Abel, Vajda, Levi-Provencal, and so on -- in which such pernicious myths as that of the "Andalucian Golden Age" were put permanently to rest.
One longs for an understanding that post-war Iraq is not, and cannot be, likened to post-war Germany or Japan. First, Tokyo, Berlin, and a dozen other cities in both countries had been flattened; millions of German and Japanese had been killed. Nazism and Kodo (the militaristic Emperor-worship) had been completely discredited, even if some true believers remained. But in Iraq, Islam -- which is the real menace -- has not been discredited. In fact, it remains triumphant over the vaguely secular Ba'athism. Whatever Ambassador Bremer thinks he will veto, as soon as the Americans leave, and perhaps before, Iraq will revert to type -- three mutually mistrustful and hostile regions, each a former Ottoman vilayet, and all of them motivated by an Islam that, whether practiced by Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the middle, or Shi'a in the south, will inevitably lead to greater hostility to the Americans and a gratitude for the removal of Saddam Hussein, even by those who had most to resent and hate him, that will prove remarkably fleeting.
The planning for post-war Iraq forgot about the main actor: Islam. It was Hamlet without the Prince. It is at the heart of the prodigal expenditure of money, of soldiers' lives, of Western attention, and of American political capital, that is being squandered for a will-o'-the-wisp. It is not only that this "democracy" can not possibly come about in anything like a decent form, but that a real democracy would, far from furthering the aims of the anti-Jihad, likely do nothing to help in that effort. The American effort ought to be differently directed: to appeal to, and buttress, among non-Muslims everywhere, not least in Europe, who are beginning to understand, whatever their still-inhibited rhetoric and however imperfectly they comprehend the matter, that there is something within Islma itself that makes the Muslim peoples in the dar al-Harb not merely demonstrably suspect, but dangerous in their general refusal to distance themselves squarely from the so-called "extremists" and from continuing to present a sanitized view of Islam that serves to promote the Jihad. Real study of the tenets of Islam, and of Muslim history, especially in its treatment of non-Muslims within its domain, are necessary, and a cadre of scholars, not the army of apologists (from the Espositos and the Beinins), need to be funded by the government.
What would American foreign policy have been if, in the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet reality, and Soviet intentions, had been taught throughout the Western world not by exiles from the Soviet regime and from Eastern Europe, not by defectors from the KGB, but by agents of the KGB? One can shudder. But that, or something very like that, is happening in Middle Eastern studies, where plausible, "moderate" and altogether meretricious apologists -- both Muslim and non-Muslim -- move heaven and earth to present a history of the Middle East that virtually ignores its central reality -- the teachings of Islam itself.
You mean there are OTHER terrorist organizations?!? /sarcasm