We should all agree to fight Al Qaeda
The resurgent menace of Al Qaeda should unify Democrats and Republicans against a common threat, not serve as another example of partisan rancor.
It would be enormously beneficial to his credibility if President Bush admitted to the public that his mistakes — including the decision to go to war in Iraq — stimulated Al Qaeda’s recovery.
Americans also have every right to expect a coherent strategy for fighting Al Qaeda (including its branch in Iraq, AQI) from Democrats, especially presidential candidates. Pummeling Bush on the issue is not a strategy.
A joint strategy should consist of keeping U.S. forces in Iraq until: the Al Qaeda threat there is eliminated; a more notable push is made to create a democratic transition in Pakistan, Al Qaeda’s present stronghold; and a stepped-up effort is engaged to bolster the weak pro-Western regime in Afghanistan.
But instead of treating the latest National Intelligence Estimate (concluding that Al Qaeda is again a growing threat to U.S. security) as a dire warning and a clarion for unified action, it was used as a trigger for more partisan wrangling.
As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius observed shortly before the report came out, there’s every reason to fear that if another successful terrorist attack occurred on U.S. soil., Democrats and Republicans would use it as an excuse for recrimination.
Democrats likely would charge, as they repeatedly have, that Bush: diverted resources from fighting Al Qaeda to invading Iraq; created a terrorist rallying point and recruiting ground there where none existed beforehand; and inflamed Muslim sentiment around the world.
They would be correct, of course. According to Lawrence Wright, whose masterful history of Al Qaeda, “The Looming Tower” (Knopf, 2006), reportedly is Bush’s favorite book on terrorism, “Al Qaeda was essentially dead” in 2002 after its ouster from Afghanistan.
In a September 2006 New Yorker article, Wright cited a leading jihadist theoretician, Abu Musab al-Suri, as saying that “the American occupation of Iraq inaugurated a ‘historical new period’ that almost single-handedly rescued the jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.”
As Wright says, “Jihadists fighting in the conflict in Iraq have been trained in vicious urban warfare against the most formidable army in history. They will return to their home countries and add their experience to new cells springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and many European nations.”
And, as the NIE warns, Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leaders “will probably seek to leverage the contracts and capabilities of AQI, its most visible and capable affiliate, and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the (U.S.) homeland.”
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that there may well be Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States, and a chilling report released last week by the Middle East Media Research Institute said that jihadist Web sites operate out of America.
As Democrats assert, Bush bears a lot of responsibility for heightening the threat. On the other hand, Bush is right to say that the AQI now is a menace, that it is tightly connected to Al Qaeda in Pakistan — and that a precipitous U.S. pullout from Iraq would empower America’s enemies.
They also dismiss undeniable progress that Bush’s “surge” policy has achieved against the AQI in Anbar and Diyala provinces. Sunni tribal leaders now cooperating with the United States might well stop if they thought this country would abandon them.
The likelihood is that Bush cannot sustain the surge deep into next year because it would involve lengthening troop tours from 15 months to 18 months, triggering a revolt at the Pentagon.
There is an opportunity here for unified, bipartisan action. After all, Osama bin Laden wouldn’t ask whether Americans were Republican or Democrat before beheading them.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.