Al-Qaeda has come roaring back in Iraq since U.S. troops left in late 2011, reports the AP Monday morning, saying the international terrorism network now looks stronger than it has done in years. Once again, they are capable of carrying out several mass-casualty attacks a month, managing to drive the death toll in Iraq up to its highest level in five years.
As usual, Terror Inc. sees each attack as a way to “cultivate an atmosphere of chaos that weakens the Shiite-led government’s authority.”
Those words should be music to the ears of every American. They basically mean that while President Obama, despite all his good intentions, has been utterly unable to fix the multi-trillion dollar catastrophe of his Republican predecessor, nature—Arab nature, that is—which appears to abhor vacuum like any good nature does, is on the go to set things right in the Cradle of Civilization.
President George W. Bush, after our country had been attacked in 2001 by 19 Saudis based in Afghanistan, decided in 2003 to retaliate in Iraq. That terrible bastion of tyranny was governed by a Sunni minority, which was in the habit of doing awful things to the Shiite majority. One of the really bad things the Sunnis in Iraq were doing was keeping the scariest Shiite country on the planet, Iran, from spreading down the Gulf coast and over to the Saudi border.
But a lavish investment of several trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives has put a stop to that, and the Shiites were permitted to rule Iraq and immediately form a bond with Iran that must have encouraged the Arab Emirates and the Saudis to switch to short-term savings accounts.
It’s impossible to tell apart the damage inflicted on the U.S. by President Bush 2 in Iraq from the damage being inflicted on us by President Obama in Afghanistan. I expect that by the time we leave Afghanistan next year, the Taliban will be back in full force, burning down girl schools, executing beardless men in the streets and running up the opium market. But while the Islamist takeover should be complete, erasing any trace of the presence and the sacrifices made by misled Americans – in Iraq U.S. foreign policy being given a new lease on life.
Al Qaeda is a great force of history, moving across the casbahs and suks of major Arab cities in waves of destruction and gore. It is at once splintered and unified, intellectually astute, mystical and blood thirsty. If they were in my country, I’d fully expect my security forces to execute all of them as enemy combatants, no Miranda needed. but, thank God, they’re not in my country but, rather, in the four or so countries that worry me the most.
“Nobody is able to control this situation,” a local grave keeper told the AP. “We are not safe in the coffee shops or mosques, not even in soccer fields.” The rate of killings in Iraq these days is around a thousand a month. Fewer than in neighboring Syria, but rising all the time.
Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate waves of car bombs and suicide attacks in civilian areas has been creating the bulk of the bloodshed, as at least 42 people were killed in bombings in mostly Shiite-majority Iraqi cities on Sunday.
“Al-Qaeda can blow up whatever number of car bombs they want whenever they choose,” Ali Nasser, a Shiite government employee from Baghdad, told the AP. “It seems like al-Qaeda is running the country, not the government in Baghdad.”
The United States believes Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi al-Qaeda franchise leader, is now operating from Syria.
“Given the security vacuum, it makes sense for him to do that,” Paul Floyd, a military analyst, told the AP. He said the “unrest” in Syria could be making it even easier for al-Qaeda to get its hands on explosives for use in Iraq.
“We know Syrian military stocks have fallen into the hands of rebels. There’s nothing to preclude some of that stuff flowing across the border,” he said.
From Israel’s view point, this development in nearly ideal, coming as it has done dovetailed with the statements made last week by the al-Qaeda number one figure, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging destruction and mayhem in Egypt and Syria, to promote the universal values of Suni Islam, top one of which is: we hate Shiites. Second value: we hate everybody else.