Do We Play into the Terrorists’ Hands by Remaining in Iraq? I’m Starting to Think So.

American intelligence officials have issued a report saying that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent conflict there have actually made us less safe from terrorism. This definitively contradicts the administration’s claim that we’re, “fightin’ ‘em over there so we don’t hafta fight ‘em over here.” I had an inkling that this was the case all along, but I preferred to wait for independent reports instead of jumping to conclusions based on my disgust with Bush and his ilk.

Basically, the report tells us what we have always feared. The invasion has pissed off a lot of formerly moderate Muslims and push them straight into the hands of the militant extremists, or as Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi calls them “Salafi jihadis.” This term refers to their militant adherence to Salafism, a puritanical, fundamentalist strain of Islam.

When it came to Iraq, I used to operate under a, “we broke it, we bought it” mentality. I felt like pulling out before the establishment of a stable, permanent democratic government would deliver a generation of young Iraqi men straight into the hands of Al Qaeda. But this most recent report makes me wonder if we can prevent that outcome at all. Perhaps we really ought not to pull out now, or soon.

A withdrawal from Iraq would also be a blow to Al Qaeda’s overarching strategy, which is ultimately to draw us into more military engagement with their fighters. According to a recent article in the New Yorker, “[Bin Laden's] goal, for at least five years, had been to goad America into invading Afghanistan, an ambition that had caused him to continually raise the stakes.” The 9/11 attacks were his final, successful attempt to draw us into the first of many armed conflicts.

According to American Journalist Lawrence Wright’s interpretation of the writings of radical Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, Al Qaeda’s plan goes something like this:

Al Qaeda’s twenty-year plan began on September 11th, with a stage that Hussein calls ‘The Awakening.’ The ideologues within Al Qaeda believed that “the Islamic nation was in a state of hibernation,” because of repeated catastrophes inflicted upon Muslims by the West. By striking America–”the head of the serpent”–Al Qaeda caused the United States to “lose consciousness and act chaotically against those who attacked it. This entitled the party that hit the serpent to lead the Islamic nation.”

The second, “Eye-Opening” stage will last until the end of 2006, Hussein writes. Iraq will become the recruiting ground for young men eager to attack America. In this phase, he argues perhaps wishfully, Al Qaeda will move from being an organization to “a mushrooming invincible and popular trend.” The electronic jihad on the Internet will propagate Al Qaeda’s ideas, and Muslims will be pressed to donate funds to make up for the seizure of terrorist assets by the West. The third stage, “Arising and Standing Up,” will last from 2007 to 2010. Al Qaeda’s focus will be on Syria and Turkey, but it will also begin to directly confront Israel in order to gain more credibility among the Muslim population.

The rest of the plan calls for the instatement of a caliphate by the year 2013, and a broadening war that draws the United States into a phase of “total confrontation” by 2016. The strategy is to raise an Islamic army that will fight the nonbelievers and establish a worldwide Islamic state that will, “lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.”

Now, I’m not saying that the Islamists are unstoppable, or that they’ll ever be able to carry out their plan. For one thing, this roadmap to the caliphate is highly dependent on the behavior of the United States and other nations. But based on the recent report about Iraq and its relationship to the growing terrorist threat–to say nothing of Al Qaeda’s growing presence in Iraq–I’d say that we need to reverse course pretty damn soon, because right now we are playing directly into the Salafi jihadis’ hands.

How would it be if instead of allowing the terrorists and their allies–like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran–to draw us into armed conflict after armed conflict throughout the Middle East, we were to drop most of the Middle East like a hot potato? We could rely on the oil within our own borders, like the reserves in ANWAR and the tar sands of Wyoming until we can build more sustainable fuel sources. Perhaps we could even repeal that idiotic 54 cent tarrif (TimesSelect) on imported sugar ethanol from South America.