Redstate

the hardline left is so eager for us to flee iraq that it has wrongly convinced itself that al qaeda is not a factor

By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If there were truth-in-advertising regs for the naming of liberal activist groups, ThinkProgress would be renamed ThinkLiberal. There should also be a basic Internet guideline that if you accuse someone of dishonesty, then you should refrain from being dishonest yourself. ThinkProgress failed to follow that simple advice in their latest irony-meter-busting entry, and their obfuscation begins with the very first sentence:

Attempting to drum up public support for the war in Iraq in July, President Bush referred to al Qaeda 95 times in a single speech, claiming the war in Iraq has become the central front in the fight against al Qaeda (AQI).

Read on...

ThinkProgress is only half right when they say that President Bush has claimed that Iraq has become the central front in its war against us.* What this Soros-financed group refuses to acknowledge is that the enemy gets a vote, and it is al Qaeda that has chosen Iraq as its main front in this war.

ThinkProgress approvingly linked to a Washington Monthly article by Andrew Tilghman titled The Myth of AQI, which disengenuously tries to cast doubt on al Qaeda's role and influence, starting with the first two paragraphs:

In March 2007, a pair of truck bombs tore through the Shiite marketplace in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing more than 150 people. The blast reduced the ancient city center to rubble, leaving body parts and charred vegetables scattered amid pools of blood. It was among the most lethal attacks to date in the five-year-old Iraq War. Within hours, Iraqi officials in Baghdad had pinned the bombing on al-Qaeda, and news reports from Reuters, the BBC, MSNBC, and others carried those remarks around the world. An Internet posting by the terrorist group known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) took credit for the destruction. Within a few days, U.S. Army General David Petraeus publicly blamed AQI for the carnage, accusing the group of trying to foment sectarian violence and ignite a civil war. Back in Washington, pundits latched on to the attack with special interest, as President Bush had previously touted a period of calm in Tal Afar as evidence that the military's retooled counterinsurgency doctrine was working. For days, reporters and bloggers debated whether the attacks signaled a "resurgence" of al-Qaeda in the city.

Yet there's reason to doubt that AQI had any role in the bombing. In the weeks before the attack, sectarian tensions had been simmering after a local Sunni woman told Al Jazeera television that she had been gang-raped by a group of Shiite Iraqi army soldiers. Multiple insurgent groups called for violence to avenge the woman's honor. Immediately after the blast, some in uniform expressed doubts about al-Qaeda's alleged role and suggested that homegrown sectarian strife was more likely at work. "It's really not al-Qaeda who has infiltrated so much as the fact [of] what happened in 2003," said Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the Naval War College who served as an Army political adviser to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar until shortly before the bombing. "The formerly dominant Sunni Turkmen majority there," he told PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer soon after the bombing, "suddenly ... felt themselves having been thrown out of power. And this is essentially their revenge."

Tilghman tries to paint this atrocity as another Sunni v. Shiite battle in an endless and hopeless civil war. Sectarian tensions may well have been simmering in Tal Afar, but Tilghman leaves out one critical detail which changes everything: The grisly attacks were suicide bombings.

So the question is, which group in Iraq is responsible for suicide terrorist attacks? I've seen no evidence that Sunni insurgents do it, nor found any indication that Shiite paramilitants are involved. Hezbollah has been known to strap a suicide vest onto a martyr or two, but there are no reports of it in Iraq. There is no record of Qods forces or other Iranian Revolutionary Guards detonating themselves. In Iraq, the only group that sends its members on one-way bombing missions is al Qaeda and its like-minded affiliates. That is their trademark. Even Human Rights Watch gets it:

The groups that are most responsible for the abuse, namely al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna and the Islamic Army in Iraq, have all targeted civilians for abductions and executions. The first two groups have repeatedly boasted about massive car bombs and suicide bombs in mosques, markets, bus stations and other civilian areas.

Because Tilghman fails to differentiate suicide bombings from other kinds of attacks, his "analysis" is intellectually dishonest. But no matter. After casting doubt as to who is responsible for the bombings, Tilghman then tries to minimize al Qaeda's influence further:

In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq. That figure was also cited in the military intelligence report during final preparations for a National Intelligence Estimate in July.

This may very be true, but Tilghman says nothing about the lethality of those attacks. On September 11th, it only took 19 men to murder 3,000 in four strikes. The number of attacks was small and so were the number of assailants, so what's the big deal? To be a bit charitable about it, there may some overstating of al Qaeda's role in Iraq, but the facts of the suicide bombings still remain, and they are significant. John Wixted has more.

Going back to ThinkProgress. The author links to a recent Congressional Research Service report on Iraq, and excerpts the following:

Increasingly in 2007, U.S. commanders have seemed to equate AQ-I with the insurgency, even though most of the daily attacks are carried out by Iraqi Sunni insurgents.

Taken on its own, the excerpt is highly selective and misleading, especially in light of the preceding sentence:

A numerically small but politically significant component of the insurgency is non-Iraqi, mostly in a faction called Al Qaeda-Iraq (AQ-I).

Segueing a bit, the report Congressional Research Service helpfully identifies those responsible for the Golden Mosque bombing:

U.S. officials date the escalation of sectarian violence to the February 22, 2006, Al Qaeda-Iraq bombing of the Askariya Shiite mosque in Samarra.

In both the Congressional Research Service and Gen. Jones publications, the reports state that al Qaeda is credited with 15% of the attacks since last January. But ThinkProgress takes it even further:

Similarly, ret. Gen. James Jones, author of a major report on Iraqi security forces, acknowledged to Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) this week that 98 percent of violence in Iraq is "Iraqis fighting amongst Iraqis":

BAYH: [T]wo percent or fewer of the adversaries that we’re facing in Iraq and that the Iraqis are facing in Iraq are foreign jihadis or AQI affiliates, [and] 98 percent or more are Iraqis fighting amongst Iraqis for the future of Iraq. Is that consistent with your understanding?

JONES: I think we would agree with that. Yes.

Even if that 2% figure were accurate, here's why the ThinkProgress analysis is bogus. First, the graph below shows civilian casualties in Iraq through August 2007, based on numbers from the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count:

In August, 1,598 civilians were killed (cite). If al Qaeda were responsible for 2% of those deaths, then that would mean they killed 32 Iraqi civilians. If that were true, I could see why folks would say that we're overstating al Qaeda's role and influence. But here's the reality:

Last month, al Qaeda murdered 603 civilians, which is almost 38% of total civilian deaths. To me, it's pretty clear why the ThinkProgress liberals are playing this game. They've convinced themselves that Iraq is in an unsolveable civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, and al Qaeda is just a tiny blip on the radar screen. Also, even though "think" is in their very name, ThinkProgress breathes not one word about Iran and its role in the violence. It's all about fleeing Iraq and fighting the "real war" in Afghanistan. As I see it, they're spinning the numbers so that their ideological framework doesn't collapse like a house of cards. The real war is in both places, and we're right where we need to be.

* Sentence edited to remove factual error.