mark k

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/20/opinion/20STER.html
How America Created a Terrorist Haven
By JESSICA STERN

<excerpts>

esterday's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the
latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist
threat and turned it into one.

America has created - not through malevolence but through negligence -
precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding
ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for
its citizens' rudimentary needs.

As the administration made clear in its national security strategy released
last September, weak states are as threatening to American security as
strong ones.

Yet its inability to get basic services and legitimate governments up and
running in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq - and its pursuant reluctance to
see a connection between those failures and escalating anti-American
violence - leave one wondering if it read its own report.

For example, the American commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, has
described the almost daily attacks on his troops as guerrilla campaigns
carried out by Baathist remnants with little public support.

Yet an increasing number of Iraqis disagree: they believe that the attacks
are being carried out by organized forces - motivated by nationalism, Islam
and revenge - that feed off public unhappiness.

According to a survey this month by the Iraq Center for Research and
Strategic Studies, nearly half of the Iraqis polled attribute the violence
to provocation by American forces or resistance to the occupation (even more
worrisome, the Arabic word for "resistance" used in the poll implies a
certain amount of sympathy for the perpetrators).

In the towns of Ramadi and Falluja, where many of the recent attacks have
taken place, nearly 90 percent of respondents attributed the attacks to
these causes.

Why would ordinary Iraqis not rush to condemn violence against the soldiers
who liberated them from Saddam Hussein? Mustapha Alani, an Iraqi scholar
with the Royal United Services Institute in London, gave me a possible
explanation: even in the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq war, most Iraqis
(other than Kurds and Marsh Arabs) did not have to worry about personal
security.

They could not speak their minds, but they could count on electricity, water
and telephone service for at least part of the day. Today they fear being
attacked in their bedrooms; power, water and telephones are routinely
unavailable.

As Mr. Alani put it, Iraqis today could could care less about democracy,
they just want assurance that their daughters won't be ****d or their sons
kidnapped en route to the grocery store.

In addition, in the run-up to the war, most Iraqis viewed the foreign
volunteers who were rushing in to fight against America as troublemakers,
and Saddam Hussein's forces reportedly killed many of them.

Today, according to Mr. Alani, these foreigners are increasingly welcomed by
the public, especially in the former Baathist strongholds north of Baghdad.

As bad as the situation inside Iraq may be, the effect that the war has had
on terrorist recruitment around the globe may be even more worrisome.

Even before the coalition troops invaded, a senior United States
counterterrorism official told reporters that "an American invasion of Iraq
is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups."
Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe and Africa say that the
recruits they are seeing now are younger than in the past.

Television images of American soldiers and tanks in Baghdad are deeply
humiliating to Muslims, even those who didn't like Saddam Hussein, explained
Saad al-Faqih, head of Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a Saudi
dissident group in London.

He told me that some 3,000 young Saudis have entered Iraq in recent months,
and called the war "a gift to Osama bin Laden."

While there is no single root cause of terrorism, my interviews with
terrorists over the past five years suggest that alienation, perceived
humiliation and lack of political and economic opportunities make young men
susceptible to extremism.

Thus the best way to fight them is to ensure that they are rejected by the
broader population. Terrorists and guerrillas rely on getting at least some
popular support.

America's task will be to restore public safety in Iraq and put in place
effective governing institutions that are run by Iraqis.

It would also help if we involved more troops from other countries, to make
clear that the war wasn't an American plot to steal Iraq's oil and denigrate
Islam, as the extremists argue.

The goal of creating a better Iraq is a noble one, but a first step will be
making sure that ordinary Iraqis find America's ideals and assistance more
appealing than Al Qaeda's.


Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is
author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill."

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the voice of reason

It may become one, but I expect that the U.S. engineered the U.N. bombing.
It was too well orchestrated, using old arms from the Iraqi regime ( and who
exactly has been guarding most of those lately... right, the U.S. ), knew
too much ( either the guys in charge or an increadibly efficient spy agency
working right under the noses of the American..), and timed the attack
perfectly to support GWB politically and in terms of his self declared 'war
on terrorism'. The use of a cadaver to provide the 'body parts' would not
have been much of a stretch, with the CIA operative getting well away before
the timed explosion.

The credibility of this interpretation is much enhanced both by the sudden
'appeal' to the U.N. and by the 'declaration of resposibility' by a totally
unknown ( hardly the well financed and polished operation suggested by the
operation ) organisation called "Armed Vanguards of a Second Mohammed
Army".. I mean just how stupid do they think people are???

http://www.news-leader.com/today/0822-Groupclaim-142314.html


They even had to take a Kurdish militant group ( usually allies to the
U.S. ) and turn them into a 'dreaded terrorist organisation' by adding them
to the list of terrorist organisations, and THEN pointing to their exisiting
in Iraq ( never mentioning the area ) for years. Wow! Just when you thought
nobody could buy this..

And they seem to have killed ( or captured? ) Ali Hassan al-Majid ( Misnamed
'chemical ali' as an insult) again. Darn. How many times to they have to get
the SAME guy? Haven't they killed Saddam enough already too? Ten times,
twenty times? How many times does it take?

I expect that a lot of this 'wag the dog' is occuring because there just
isn't enough militancy in Iraq to create the terrorism they need as
(feeble)justification for their illegal occupation.