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The Jihad on Iraq

January 26, 2004
National Review Online
Michael Ledeen

Bad analysis and bad policy.

In the months leading up to the liberation of Iraq, I wrote that our great national debate was on the wrong subject, because we were obsessively focused on Iraq alone, rather than on the group of countries that sponsored terrorism. I warned that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria were plotting with Saddam Hussein to organize a combination of terrorist actions and political uprisings to drive us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. And I insisted that Iran was the keystone of the terror network — as the State Department had documented for many years — and was therefore the logical first target in our response to the Axis of Evil.

We are still engaged in that misleading debate. We are still focused on Iraq alone, although the president continues to say that the war involves a group of countries that support a network of terror organizations.

Bad analysis leads inevitably to bad policy, and our narrow focus on Iraq costs lives. Widespread terrorism and political demonstrations are not organized solely, or even primarily, by the shattered remnants of Saddam's Baathist regime, nor by the splintered pieces of al Qaeda. The war against us in Iraq and Afghanistan is an existential struggle guided, funded, and armed by tyrannical regimes in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, because they are convinced — rightly enough — that if we succeed, they are doomed to fall in a regional democratic revolution. Their plan, modeled on the strategy that drove us out of Lebanon in the 1980s, was prepared long before we attacked.

They made no secret of their intentions. Prior to the liberation, Syrian President Bashar Assad publicly called for a "Lebanon strategy," and in August, the head of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called for the entire Muslim world to join in a jihad against Americans in Iraq. Throughout, Iranian leaders and Saudi clerics have denounced the American actions in Iraq and joined the call for jihad.

The cooperative strategy evidently included the secret transfer of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to neighboring countries. According to a recent statement by Nizar Nayouf, a brave Syrian journalist who was arrested and tortured for a decade after criticizing Hafez al Assad's brutalities, Iraqi WMDs were hidden in three primary locations in Syria. He has provided maps of the secret locations, which he says came from dissident elements at high levels of the Syrian military and intelligence services. (He has also claimed that billions of dollars from Saddam's personal stash were smuggled into Syrian and Lebanese banks, and these claims have been substantially verified). And last October, the CIA was indirectly approached by a man who claimed to have carried a quantity of enriched uranium from Iraq to Iran four years ago. He offered to take American inspectors to the secret underground laboratory from which the uranium was taken, but the CIA declined the offer. Someone might ask David Kay why, after initial enthusiasm, he changed his mind and decided not to look.

Shortly after the dreadful earthquake in Bam, Iran, the Syrians pretended to deliver emergency aid, but actually loaded their transport planes with Iranian money and weapons for Hezbollah, to be used against us in Iraq and against Israel from bases in Syrian-occupied south Lebanon. And earlier this month, evidence was presented in an Israeli court that showed that the Iranian regime routinely transfers large sums of money through puppet organizations into Syrian and Palestinian banks. The money is then rerouted to Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and other terror groups. Another case of Iranian money moving through Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority to terror groups was announced on January 15 by Israeli security officials in Nablus, where three brothers involved in the scheme had recently been arrested.

Last November, Saddam's top missile expert, Modhr Sadeq-Saba, ran from Iraq to Iran, which is actively pursuing the development of nuclear weapons and intermediate-range delivery systems. And American officials on the ground in Iraq have seen abundant evidence of Iranian support for terrorist operations. The Associated Press reported on January 19 that "U.S. soldiers found a homemade bomb that they believe was left inside an unfinished house by a group of Iranians in Samarra." When Mujahid Ghul, the top al Qaeda thug in Iraq, was arrested last Friday, it was further confirmation of Iran's role. Ghul reported directly to Zarkawi, who has long operated out of Tehran (abundant evidence of which has been publicly presented in both German and Italian court proceedings against other members of Zarkawi's gang).

Meanwhile, the menace to the free world grows. Saudi Arabia is reportedly seeking nuclear weapons, and the AP tells us (January 20) that "Iran has reneged on a promise to fully suspend uranium enrichment."

In short, while Iraq is the current battlefield, the real war extends far beyond its borders, and we will remain under attack in Iraq so long as the tyrannical regimes in Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran are left free to kill us and the embattled Iraqis. There is more at stake than human casualties, for it is unreasonable to expect Iraqi Shiite leaders to fully cooperate with Coalition forces until and unless they see that we are fighting the jihadists and protecting Iraqis from them. If you were the Ayatollah Sistani, and saw that the Iranians had arranged for the murder of two of your most distinguished colleagues (Ayatollahs Khoi and Hakim), would you not cater to Iranian desires in the political debates in Baghdad, especially if the Iranians promised (as I have been told) millions of dollars for your religious community? If you saw thousands of Iranian-sponsored operatives all over your country, and listened to more than a dozen Iranian-operated radio and television stations in Iraq, while the Americans had yet to provide a single effective channel for the country, would you not take out insurance and call for a quick transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis? Jerry Bremer is a very convincing man, but he is leaving in a few months, and Sistani and the others will have to deal with murderous mullahs and ambitious Syrian Baathists next door.

The terror masters do not limit their jihad to Iraq. Late last month, the Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami published an open call to the Egyptian people to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak, whom the paper — which speaks for "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei — called "the butcher of Cairo." Turkish authorities captured one of the organizers of the suicide bombings in Istanbul last December as he was trying to cross the border into Iran, and it is now generally acknowledged that top al Qaeda figures, including bin Laden, Zawahiri, and the usual Zarkawi, have long stayed in and operated from Iranian territory.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush promised to relentlessly pursue the war against terror. He has proven to be a man of his word, and the Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians are no doubt praying for his defeat in November. This suspicion was reinforced over the weekend in Davos, where Senator Joe Biden was granted a conversation with the Iranian foreign minister, while Senator Elizabeth Dole had earlier been told to stay out of Iran, even though she was carrying medicine and food for earthquake victims and Biden had received tens of thousands of dollars from a pro-Iranian lobby. They are happy to talk to a Democrat, but locked out a Republican.

The mullahs know their best chance for survival is to defeat us in Iraq before we vigorously support their own people against them. Both our national interest and our national values demand that we give that support — political support, not further military action — now, before Iraq gets much worse.

http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200401260854.asp