Analysis of the Global War on Terror: Contentious Ground

4. Ground the possession of which imports great advantage to either side, is contentious ground.
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11. On dispersive ground, therefore, fight not. On facile ground, halt not. On contentious ground, attack not. - Sun Tzu, XI

[Part I: Turning the Devious into the Direct]

The question: Why did Al Qaeda fight in Iraq? 

For many, the simplest answer is that the United States was there so Al Qaeda would go there, too.  It is perceived wisdom, largely among those who opposed the US invasion of Iraq, that terrorists would not have taken shape in Iraq if the United States had not invaded.  Ergo, it is the United States' fault that Al Qaeda and various other terrorist related organizations went to Iraq and killed so many Iraqis. 

If it is true that Al Qaeda only went to Iraq because the United States was there, implying that it was absolute and obvious, then why is it that only civilians knew this obvious knowledge?  And, by implication, neither the military nor civilian government agencies planning the invasion knew?  Nor planned for it? 

Some who supported the invasion either deny that it was obvious or are silent on the matter; in some ways validating the perceived wisdom that Al Qaeda was destined to go to Iraq.  Neither position is willing to accept that it is both true that Al Qaeda would go to Iraq to fight the United States and it is true that Al Qaeda did not have to go to Iraq to fight the United States.  At the same time, the United States did not have to invade Iraq, but, it did if it wanted to do more than simply kill members of Al Qaeda.  To destroy Islamic extremism, the idea must die and it was not going to die in the Western Hemisphere nor would it die in Afghanistan. 

This central position is rejected because, for either position to accept it, they would have to abandon the succeeding theorems and, largely political, narratives that were shaped from those positions.  Those two positions being that it was either a "war of choice" or a "war of necessity".  Further, that the resulting insurgency could not be forecasted nor planned against or that there was something that the United States could have done, or should have done, to stop it.  Namely, not to have invaded at all. 

Ground the possession of which imports great advantage to either side, is contentious ground.

Iraq represented the true nadir of both the United States' and Al Qaeda's stated goals.  Sun Tzu called it, "contentious ground."  The United States was seeking to "drain the swamp" and Al Qaeda was seeking, is still seeking, to recreate the Islamic caliphate; a pure Islamic Utopia, strong in its own right and holding the wealth of empires as a tool to impose their ideas globally. 

Whatever the reasons that the United States invaded Iraq, it had an immediate effect on the plans of bin Laden and Al Qaeda.  Prior to the invasion, for nearly a year, the President and various other members of government, had been talking about Iraq.  It had a long history of violating UN agreements.  It had fired at United States and allied air craft.  It was known to have provided money and sanctuary to known terrorists.  It was known to have several times attempted to re-start and disguise chemical weapons plants.  One, al Hakim, was as recent as 1995.  The Iraqi government was full of corruption, stealing money meant to support Iraqi people.  Sanctions were routinely circumvented and the largest scandal in the UN's recent history was about to break: Oil For Food. 

In short, there was a lot of talk going on and very little cooperation by Iraq.  They were resisting UN inpsections and would eventually bar them from the country.  But, in late 2001, Iraq was a political blip on the map.  The United States, having invaded Afghanistan and quickly deposed the Taliban, was still seeking bin Laden and a few hardcore commanders.  It was also still trying to develop its response to the attacks of September 11.  Taking the ramshackle and barely functioning government of Afghanistan did not seem to be a satisfactory response to the attacks.  The men who came to attack the United States were not Afghanis.   They were in Afghanistan  as "guests" where they trained and planned, but such organizations do not exist in a vaccuum.  Neither could Afghanistan, with its decimated economy, infrastructure and government, support these organizations alone. 

Terrorism had been a tool of state craft in the Middle East for centuries.  In the last 100 years, the west had experienced that terrorism in a myriad of ways.  Sometimes to its benefit, but largely against the US and its interests.  Nations had alternately provided money, weapons and protection to terrorist organizations or spurned those same depending on the state's needs.  Al Qaeda was no exception.   They received money from private and government organizations since the Afghan/Russo War, though they were repudiated in public by the Saudi Regime for their actions, in private, even royal family members, government agents and civilians through charitable organizations continued to provide funds.  Even to that date, September 11, the ambiguous nature of this support, sometimes considered charity or a form of tithing to help spread the central  version of  Islam and sometimes to use as a secret state bludgeon, made the United States believe that a strong statement must be made to these regimes and would be supporters.  If they support organizations that attack the United States, they will be held accountable for those actions. 

Who would be the sacrificial lamb to convey the message?  Iraq presented the perfect foil.  Saudi Arabia was a nominal ally, but, most important, it holds a third of the world's oil reserves that flows to many nations.  An attack there could be politically supported at home, but would be untenable globally.  It would likely precipitate a world crisis, if not world war.  The Gulf states were also American allies and had little in way of strategic value.  In fact, positioning troops on these small spits of land as an invasion force, instead of hosted allies, would be suicide.  Iran is a largely Shia nation and known to be an adversary of Saudi Arabia.  Public mood then, as now, did not relate Iran to these attacks and would have seen an invasion of Iran as even more hubris than Iraq.  Further, Iran's defenses and internal politics, while not formidable, would be difficult to overcome with high cost and high casualties.  Syria, also, presented a political minefield.  An attack on Syria would look like an act to relieve Israel directly and likely drove the vaunted "Arab Street" to press for war, cut off US oil supply and attack Israel with forces that the US had provided equipment and training to. 

In the end, there was only one nation in the Middle East that presented a politically and militarily viable reason to attack.  That country was Iraq.  It also had another important feature: it was geographically the heart of the Arab nations.  Whether anyone took notice that it was also the historical heart of the caliphate is completely speculative.  No one of an official capacity in the planning of the invasion has mentioned it as an opening reason or benefit for invasion, though it has sometimes been referenced as a later comment on the rise of Al Qaeda after the invasion.  That Saddam was considered by all the nations around him to be a threat and somewhat insane helped that decision along.  The nations in the Middle East would be hard pressed to call for military or even political support for the Butcher of Baghdad.  They had just spent over a decade presenting Saddam as a reason to have United States forces in their nations.  To say otherwise now, that he had to be protected, would make their past decisions incongruous with perceived wisdom and make their future equally shakey.

To Al Qaeda, every reason that the United States had for looking at Iraq as the battle in the heart of Arabia, mirrored their own.  No organization that has painted itself as the savior of Islam and the protectors of the true faith and faithful, could allow an invasion of the heart of Arabia, without response.  Even if the leader of that nation was essentially one of the "corrupt".  Equally important, beyond historical, religious and geographic, is Al Qaeda's appearance of a strong, transnational movement.  When the United States left a token force in Afghanistan to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban and invaded Iraq, it immediately put Al Qaeda's power and importance on the world stage in question.

Al Qaeda had been working for several years towards gaining attention and status.  Ideological compatriots had tried to bring down the WTC in 1993.  Al Qaeda sought to bring this idea, the ability to fight "the far enemy", to fruition, but many of their attempts had simply not made the necessary impression.  They bombed two embassies nearly simultaneous yet they were dismissed as penny ante terrorists that had been seen before and disregarded.  They announced a global compact, a global jihad, against "Crusaders and Jews", yet the response was a lone missile into camp.  They attacked a US Navy ship in the Yemeni harbor, killing members of the United States' military.   Still, no one took them seriously as a global movement.  These were one off attacks.  Potent and destructive, still not a global Islamic movement.  September 11, 2001 was meant to change that and did to some degree.  The most powerful nation in the world sent an army to confront them, but, now, that army easily kept Al Qaeda penned down in Afghanistan while it invaded another country with an actual army.  Right in the middle of the Middle East.  A thirty day campaign was about to make bin Laden, Zawahiri and Al Qaeda globally irrelevant; again. 

It also put in question the very base of their ideology.  Sayid Qutb had written nearly fifty years before that the western influence in the Islamic Umma was destroying Islam.  Freedom was not the ultimate virtue; it let to sin.  Democracy was the rule of man with manmade laws, there was nothing divine in those laws, only the law of Allah was right and proper.  To have democracy in an Islamic, Arab nation, accepted and promoted by Muslim Arabs, would be the exact anecdote to their ideology.  Or, at least, the horror they feared the most:

Irrelevance.

However, if Al Qaeda could win in Iraq, if they could even have one part of the country that would provide them with a protected enclave, where they could convert the citizens and instill their idea of Islamic rule, in the center of the Middle East and the Islamic Umma, they would have the prestige, the power and the time to work against all of those regimes they felt were corrupt and un-Islamic.  If they could dislodge the United States, the military and political defeat would have kept the United States on its heels, unable and unwilling to interfere.  The governments in that region would have had to deal with bin Laden or fear the consequences.

Iraq was, indeed, "contentious ground".  It held "great advantage" to whoever held that ground.  Al Qaeda could not be assured of victory, but neither could it abandon it.  They had one major problem: the United States had taken the ground first. 

As Sun Tzu would have advised: attack not.