Today you don’t see many American flags in Iraq, except on soldiers’ uniforms. (From the very beginning of the invasion, in fact, U.S. commanders decided the Stars and Stripes might offend local sensibilities.) And last week a mob in the dusty Iraqi town of Fallujah gave us a new and horrifying image to remember this war by, murdering four American civilian security men, burning them, butchering them, dragging them through the streets, then hanging pieces of them from power lines and the girders of a bridge.
That single gruesome incident, recorded in ghastly photographs and videos, crystallized the misgivings many Americans have about the war in Iraq–and their fears about the inhuman brutality of a worldwide terrorist campaign that seems to be spreading. U.S. soldiers are attacked, on average, every hour in Iraq; at least one dies every day; the American people are spending more than $1 billion a week to keep those embattled troops there. In Europe, Africa and Asia, spinoffs of Al Qaeda are on the offensive. Last month saw horrific attacks in Spain that took almost 200 lives. Last week Homeland Security officials warned something similar could happen in the United States. A major terrorist plot was uncovered in the Philippines, another in Britain. After all the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq these last two and a half years, it needs to be asked: are we any safer?
In some ways, yes. The toppling of the Taliban, the destruction of Al Qaeda’s Afghan base and the capture of several of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants in 2001 and 2002 probably prevented many atrocities. The group has not been able to mount any new operation remotely on the scale of 9/11. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s regime was decrepit, but cruel and vengeful. He coveted weapons of mass destruction, and if he’d been allowed to stay in power, conceivably he might have found a way to build them and use them against the United States. Yet the risks posed by Iraq under Saddam, it now appears, were mostly hypothetical. He had nothing to do with 9/11.
Iraq under American and Coalition occupation, on the other hand, has become a savage battleground in what Steven Metz, of the U.S. Army War College, calls “the world’s first global insurgency, led by Al Qaeda.” The fact that American troops in Iraq are under attack by Arab and Muslim fighters is “an inspiration” to Islamic radicals everywhere, says Metz, even if they have no direct ties with each other. So an incident like the one in Fallujah, and the way the U.S. military responds, takes on worldwide implications. “We will be back in Fallujah,” vowed Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, briefing reporters in Baghdad last week. “We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them.” Yet at the same briefing Kimmitt admitted the obvious: there can be no guarantee the violence will end.
The Bush administration’s grand plan for peace and prosperity in the region, with Iraq as a model of democracy and free enterprise, is a decade-long undertaking–at the least. Yet the violence on the ground challenges the occupation forces to act now, and forcefully. “The traditional tribal values of the Middle East despise somebody who does not avenge the blood of his kin,” says Amatzia Baram, Israel’s foremost expert on Iraq. “American honor has been trashed in Fallujah. Now the Americans have to restore their honor in the eyes of the Iraqis.” But the law of vendetta is not the rule of law the United States had hoped to impose, and the emotional spectacle of strike and counterstrike echoes around the world.
The United States is not up against one unified enemy, in fact, but a mutating virus of anti-American hatred. Al Qaeda “has been forced to evolve in ways not entirely of its own choosing,” says the State Department’s top counterterror official, J. Cofer Black. “As Al Qaeda’s known senior leadership, planners, facilitators and operators are brought to justice, a new cadre of leaders is being forced to step up,” Black told Congress last week. “These relatively untested terrorists are assuming far greater responsibilities.”
Controversial former counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke likens the aftermath of the Afghan war to “smashing a pod of seeds that spread round the world,” allowing bin Laden and his deputies “to step back out of the picture and have the regional organizations they created take their generation-long struggle to the next level.” The Iraq war, Clarke insists, was an enormous distraction and a drain on resources. Worse, “we delivered to Al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable,” Clarke writes.
This is the essence of the problem. Would-be holy warriors are brought into the global insurgency by rabble-rousing Muslim preachers who teach the glories of martyrdom in the face of infidel violence and repression. The sermons are reinforced by satellite television, videotapes and CD-ROMs that show foreign forces brutalizing Muslims. Once recruited, some militants may rush to Iraq to commit suicide. But they are likely to be even more dangerous if they stay where they are, in Europe or Canada or the United States, as well as the Muslim world, looking for ways to bring the war home.
The war against these terrorists is ultimately a test of wills. “O ye who believe, endure, outdo all others in endurance,” Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri exhorts his followers, quoting the Qur’an. The United States, having put its prestige on the line in Iraq, and having destroyed the Iraqi state in the process, now is well and truly stuck there.
Are we safer? As the war in Iraq intensifies, and so do global reactions to it, that’s a question that has to be answered one day at a time.
