CourcyInt

COURCYINT SPECIAL BULLETIN

To: All Courcy's Intelligence Service members

Date: 12 AUGUST 2006

From: JKC de Courcy, Chief Executive, Courcy's Intelligence Service

Subject: BOMB PLOTS & MIDEAST MAYHEM: THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT

Since the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, blaming President George Bush and the UK's Prime Minister Tony Blair for the parlous state of relations between the Western world and the Muslim world has become so commonplace as to have attained the status of unquestionable received opinion. The present combination of a major terror plot in the UK and the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon (which is supported by Bush and Blair) has added a touch of panic to the charge. Where are these two taking us, is the question on most people's minds.

But it is the very seriousness of the present situation that demands a return to the basic facts. The war between Islamic jihadists and the Western powers did not begin as a consequence of the invasion of Iraq, let alone Israel's assault on Hezbollah. What is true is that the West's treatment of post-Kuwait Iraq has always been used as a pretext by the jihadists for their militancy, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was an enemy not a friend of Islamism, as has the very existence of Israel.

The definitive statement on jihadists motives and goals was made on 23 February 1998. The founding statement of Osama bin Laden's World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders (published in the Arab nationalist al-Quds al-Arabi) listed America's three crimes as the occupation of the lands of Islam in the Arabian peninsula, the devastation inflicted upon the Iraqi people (through sanctions) by "the Crusader-Jewish alliance", and its support for the Jews' "petty state" and the occupation of Jerusalem.

The statement said that these crimes amounted to "a clear declaration of war by the Americans against God, his prophet, and the Muslims". It then went on to declare, in the form of a fatwa attributed to Osama bin Laden, that "to kill Americans and their allies, both civilian and military, [is] and individual duty of every Muslim" anywhere and at anytime.

Backing these words with actions, a simultaneous terrorist attack was launched on 7 August 1998 on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar al-Salam, killing 258 people and wounding 5,000 others.

It was only after these attacks, on 21 August 1998, that the then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright declared a "war on terrorism". Even then, it was not until more than three years later, following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, that the US invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq.

The attacks on America came after it had helped oust the Soviets from Afghanistan (1989) and after it had supported the Muslim cause in the Balkans against the Serbs (1992-1999), and they came after the Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995) peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians (not to mention the 1978 Camp David accords with Egypt) and the slow but steady retreat by Israel from its 1967 conquests that they represented.  And they came before the US invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and before its move to oust Saddam Hussein from power (2003).

The point is this: jihadism is not a response to current events; it is a deep-seated phenomenon resulting from the failure of the Arab and wider Muslim world to keep pace with the West and other rival civilizations such as India and China.

The evidence suggests that restraint on the part of the Western powers or Israel will have no discernible impact on jihadism. But that is not the same as saying that unrestrained counter-aggression is therefore justified. Each action needs to be weighed on its merits, and in our assessment, the following are the key points at this stage in the war against jihadism. They are:

1. Al-Qaida remains incapable of mounting a sustained terror campaign in the West. This point is reinforced by the failure of the recent terror plot in the UK. Unfortunately it is not possible to move from that assumption to the conclusion that threat perceptions should be downgraded. The possibility that jihadists could acquire the capability (they certainly have the will) to use weapons of mass destruction against Western civilian targets ensures that they retain a strategic significance far beyond their conventional capabilities.

2. Al-Qaida's weakness is in part a consequence of no longer having a safe-haven within a friendly sovereign power. The invasion of Afghanistan was fully justified on these grounds, and vigilance over Somalia and other potential future havens (including Afghanistan again) is necessary.

3. The question of Iran needs to be divorced from the war on terror and al-Qaida. The contest with Iran is one against an inimical sovereign power determined to increase its influence in the Middle East at the expense of its Arab neighbours. Conflating it with the war on terrorism is a mistake. The Israeli assault on Hezbollah has to be seen in the context of containing Iran (and justified or not on those grounds) not in the context of the war on terror.

4. Ousting Saddam Hussein might have been justified on humanitarian grounds, but it was irrational to see Saddam Hussein as an enemy in the war on terrorism. And the ousting of Saddam Hussein led to two unfortunate consequences. The first was that, rather than advancing the fight against jihadism, it brought jihadism to the heart of the Middle East, providing al-Qaida with a significant boost and a popular cause for which to recruit.

The second was that it significantly improved the strategic position of Iran, compounding the already existing problem of how to contain an expansionist-minded power. It brought Iranian influence deep into Iraq, strengthening its linkages with Syria and southern Lebanon to the extent that Jordan's King Abdullah could warn accurately of the creation of a threatening "Shia crescent".

5. Iran is pursuing a two-pronged strategy. First, it is developing nuclear weapons to provide it with a deterrence against the US and Israel (and with which to threaten its Arab neighbours). Secondly, it is using militant support for the Palestinian cause (through Hezbollah and the Palestinian radical groups) as a means of courting street-level Arab opinion and thus neutralising establishment-level Arab enmity.

6. If the ousting of Saddam Hussein (arguably a humanitarian necessity) was a strategic catastrophe, it cannot now be undone. Even if it were desirable (which it isn't), the reimposition of a Sunni-Arab dictatorship is not possible. The emergence of a Shia-Arab ascendancy, on the other hand, is possible, but with Iran in its current mood it would be an extremely undesirable outcome. The United States has tried - is still trying - to achieve a civilized rapprochement between the rival parties and a stable democratic outcome, but this was always the longest of long shots and now seems utterly unattainable.

The end result is likely to be a growing acceptance of the views expressed by former US ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith. In an article explaining his views in the New York Times on 25 July, he wrote:

"Since it [the US] cannot unify Iraq or stop the civil war, it should work with the regions that have emerged. Where no purpose is served by a continuing military presence - in the Shiite south and in Baghdad - America and its allies should withdraw.

"As an alternative to using Shiite and American troops to fight the insurgency in Iraq’s Sunni centre, the administration should encourage the formation of several provinces into a Sunni Arab region with its own army, as allowed by Iraq’s Constitution. Then the Pentagon should pull its troops from this Sunni territory and allow the new leaders to establish their authority without being seen as collaborators.

"Seeing as we cannot maintain the peace in Iraq, we have but one overriding interest there today - to keep al-Qaida from creating a base from which it can plot attacks on the United States. Thus we need to have troops nearby prepared to re-engage in case the Sunni Arabs prove unable to provide for their own security against the foreign jihadists.

"This would be best accomplished by placing a small "over the horizon" force in Kurdistan…"

Galbraith is nearly right. But there are two overwhelming goals, not one. If the first is to prevent al-Qaida establishing a base in Iraq, the second is to curtail Iran's advance. Skirting over the fact that neither issue was a problem before the ousting of Saddam Hussein, both goals can be served by his proposal.

7. Which brings us back to Israel's assault on Hezbollah. As a means of curbing Iran's expanding influence in the region (which, given the current mood in Tehran, is a necessary and desirable policy objective), it will be successful only if it leads to two developments. The first is the establishment of the Lebanese government's writ throughout Lebanon (albeit with substantial assistance from outside powers); the second is a re-engagement with Syria - leading in the most-positive scenario to a severing of Damascus's alliance with Iran and a dropping of its support for Hezbollah in return for a role for Syria in Lebanon's reconstruction and renewed negotiations with Israel over the Golan Heights and a peace agreement. If that were to happen, then the price in Lebanese blood (whilst forever beyond justification to those personally involved) might just begin to look a little bit more proportionate.

CONCLUSIONS

We have four main conclusions. They are:

First, the al-Qaida jihadist phenomenon is exacerbated only at the margins by Western policies. Its causes go much deeper.

Second, al-Qaida's weaknesses (illustrated by its inability to mount a sustained bombing campaign in the West) is compensated for by one overwhelming strategic advantage: its perceived willingness to kill as many Western civilians as its capabilities permit, allied to the possibility that these capabilities could soon encompass biological and chemical terror weapons.

Third, the invasion of Iraq led to a strategic own goal, but there are now signs that the US is beginning to work towards a way of neutralising, if not reversing, the consequences of that own goal.

Fourth, it is necessarily to divorce the struggle to contain Iran from the fight against al-Qaida-led jihadism. The assault on Hezbollah is part of the former not the latter, and there is still a chance that a successful outcome could mitigate the disastrous immediate consequences of that assault - but this will happen only if Damascus (with a lot of help from Israel) can be persuaded to come in from the cold.

END