San Francisco Chronicle
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Calling on the Bush administration again to withdraw troops from Iraq, Democratic lawmakers and critics of the war have seized on the bleak findings of a partially declassified intelligence report that concluded the war is helping cultivate new supporters for Islamist militants across the globe.
But experts on terrorism warn that extricating the United States from the increasingly unpopular war will not be enough to stop jihadists.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Experts say an Iraq pullout not enough to stop jihadists Both staying, leaving seen as problematic -
"It was a great mistake to go to Iraq," said Syed Hasnat, an expert on terrorism at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. But a sudden withdrawal, he added, would both greatly damage the United States and "affect the cycle of international extremism."
The roots of international Islamic militancy go far deeper than the U.S. military presence in Iraq, and their goals extend beyond forcing out 147,000 U.S. troops, experts say. And although the Iraq war has helped radicalize thousands of Muslims, without it, jihadists -- militants who seek to turn conviction in their faith into the grounds for a holy war against people of other religions -- can use other long-standing grievances to recruit new fighters: Muslim discontent over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the widespread belief that the United States intends to colonize the Middle East.
At the same time, most experts agree with the national intelligence estimate, an assessment by America's 16 intelligence agencies, that leaving Iraq in turmoil would embolden Islamic terrorists, giving them a foothold and a victory in the short run.
"The predicament the United States faces right now is that we are basically bogged down in the shifting sand of Iraq, and the longer we stay, the more we provide ammunition to the jihadist leaders," said Fawaz Gerges, a visiting scholar at the University of Cairo and the author of "Journey of the Jihadist." "But if we ... retreat from Iraq, the militants will be empowered," he said.
Many Democratic lawmakers, and a number of Republicans, have challenged President Bush's "stay the course" approach to the war in Iraq. On Wednesday, 10 Democratic military veterans running for House seats in the Nov. 7 election said the Pentagon should withdraw its troops from Iraq by 2008. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and other House and Senate Democrats have called on Bush to begin bringing U.S. forces home before the end of this year.
Islamic extremism "existed before Iraq and they will be after Iraq," said Joseph Cirincione, a terrorism expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington. "But Iraq is hurting our efforts to battle this group. What you want to do is to move our troops from somewhere where they're doing no good to somewhere where they're doing more good."
Yet if the United States were to pull out of Iraq now, it would leave behind a chaotic nation with a weak government unable to contain jihadists, who have set up training camps there, said Christopher Hamilton, an expert on terrorism at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"We have created a training ground in Iraq. We can't leave it till we've stabilized Iraq, and that's not gonna be anytime soon," said Hamilton, a former supervisor at the FBI's Counterterrorism Division.
Islamic militants would not cease to exist after American forces leave Iraq, but would "look for another front to fight on," said Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel. "They might engage in revolutionary activity in their home countries, go to fight the West, or seek involvement in Arab-Israeli battles," Rubin said.
Radical Islamist leaders would try to recruit these fighters for their ultimate goal: the overthrow of existing governments across the Muslim world and the creation in their place of a pan-Islamic caliphate, a Shariah-based governing structure with its center in Saudi Arabia, the site of the most revered Muslim shrine, said Edward Walker, an assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs under former President Bill Clinton. Some extremist jihadists want to extend the caliphate well beyond the borders of today's Muslim countries, eventually establishing Shariah law all over the world.
In their view of the world, "America is an insular target, but the principal target is the (creation of the) caliphate," said Walker, a former ambassador to Israel, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. The idea of a caliphate is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims. It would be hard for radical Muslims to convince others to join a cross-border war with the purpose of establishing a single, Shariah-based state, Walker said.
But they could recruit fighters for more commonly accepted purposes, such as attacking Americans, capitalizing on the widespread anti-American sentiment and the fear of U.S. domination -- both of which the national intelligence estimate mentioned as underlying factors that are "fueling the spread of the jihadist movement."
In the eyes of many Muslims, the United States will remain a target even if it pulls out of Iraq, said Hasnat. Muslims across the Middle East see the United States as "foreigners (who) have come here ... to establish some kind of colony," Hasnat said. "They see it as their duty to take up arms against foreign occupation."
Such views have become increasingly widespread since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, said Gerges, who studies the opinion of young Muslim men who join the militancy.
"The American-led invasion ... has not just radicalized anti-American voices in the Middle East, it has radicalized mainstream Arab and Muslim opinion," he said.
The national intelligence estimate, partially declassified on Tuesday, cited "the emergence of respected voices of moderation" as one of the vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement, but Gerges disagreed.
"Surely from where I sit, I see that we have lost mainstream Arab and Muslim public opinion," he said.
The Bush administration's support of authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world that collaborate on its war against terror, such as Pakistan and Egypt, and what many Muslims see as its selective approach to democracy -- supporting pro-Western democratically elected governments, but not those like the Palestinian group Hamas, which the State Department classifies as a terrorist organization -- further alienate moderate Muslims, Gerges said.
Another popular grievance that jihadist leaders would exploit if U.S. forces left Iraq would be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said David Cook, an expert on Islam at Rice University.
"The Palestinian-Israeli (conflict) is powerful enough to ignite just about anybody," said Cook, the author of "Understanding Jihad."
"The settlement of Israel and the Palestinians would be a step in the right direction," Hamilton said. "Somehow the Muslim world has to believe that we are not a threat to them."
But at the moment, he said, the United States appears to be moving in the opposite direction. "We have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're threatening to invade Iran, we are making bad statements toward Syria."
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