<http://www.uexpress.com/georgieannegeyer/?uc_full_date=20031202>
IRAQ WAR'S DANGEROUS TENTACLES REACH BEYOND COUNTRY'S BORDERS [by Georgie Anne Geyer]
WASHINGTON -- American war-planners believe they are managing a conflict that is largely contained within Iraq, one that will end when we have defeated a finite number of enemy combatants there. They also think we are drawing into Iraq foreign terrorists whose cause can be defeated there.
But more and more evidence, as many of us feared, indicates that instead the flow is going the other way -- that occupied Iraq has become the exporter and inspiration of terrorism to neighboring countries and beyond.
Take the recent bombings in Istanbul of the Jewish synagogues and the British consulate general and bank. At first, it was reasonable to speculate that the acts were a continuation of the internal Kurdish terrorism that has so long rent Turkey. But the Turkish government has clearly said no; these violent truck bombings were indeed related to al-Qaida, and most of the terrorists involved in the attacks had traveled at some time to Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran for training.
Moreover, CNN just reported from Turkish intelligence agency sources that they considered the attacks "an extension of the war in Iraq into Turkey."
Those sources also said there has been a proliferation of weapons being smuggled from Iraq into neighboring countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, including surface-to-air missiles that could be used against airliners in those countries.
The American position on the war has been that Iraq is "the front line in the war against terrorism," but the real configuration of the struggle is far more diffuse and complicated. A front line presupposes a traditional war in which enemies face one another and one side will eventually vanquish the other; but the war in Iraq takes on a more cellular structure, in which cells form, re-form, break up and then re-form again, often in protective coloring.
Even a bloody confrontation like the one this week in Samarra, where highly armed and mobilized American troops defeated an Iraqi enemy that came out into the open more than ever before, does not disprove these observations. In the aftermath of Samarra, journalists and other observers were told by Iraqis that the mission had only created more anti-Americanism.
The real danger is that Iraq, rather than being the cemetery for terrorism, has become, as those of us who know the area long predicted, the incubator of it. There had been no al-Qaida-linked terrorism in Turkey before these attacks; if you look around the world, you see either Islamic fundamentalist or al-Qaida gains in political contests, whether in Pakistan, Malaysia, Jordan or Kuwait. Anti-Americanism is peaking in the Islamic world.
Meanwhile, inside Iraq, the political situation seems as far from solution as ever. Only last week, the Bush administration thought it had the answer -- handing over power to the Iraqis through councils the American coalition would nominate and control. But the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in the country, bollixed the whole plan (occupied peoples seem to figure out quickly how to sabotage the confident occupiers) by issuing a "fatwa" saying that any new government must be the result of direct elections. This would give the majority Shiites the power they have long wanted.
In Iraq, the enemy combatants' patterns of attack are increasingly clear. They have moved, as if following a guerrilla warfare handbook, from attacks on coalition military targets, to attacks on coalition-friendly foreign governments such as Italy and Spain, to attacks on humanitarian institutions like the United Nations, to attacks on Iraqis who are working with the invaders to warn against "collaboration."
Each step tries to destroy another arm of the occupation. And the attacks are increasing, with American deaths this last month double those of previous months.
Some of our best analysts are becoming concerned that, no matter what the U.S. or anyone else does now, the Iraq state simply cannot be reconstituted. This has nothing to do with how awful Saddam Hussein's state was, but everything to do with the fact that we have broken down the structures that did exist (in a country of tortuous differences) and unleashed the destructive dogs of guerrilla war, often called "fourth-generation warfare."
"In Iraq," military historian William Lind says, "the two fatal early errors were outlawing the Baath Party and disbanding the Iraqi army. Outlawing the Baath deprived the Sunni community of its only political vehicle, which meant it had no choice but to fight us. Disbanding the Iraqi army left us with no native force that could maintain order, and also provided the resistance with a large pool of armed and trained fighters.
"We fought to destroy two regimes, but what we ended up doing was destroying two states. Neither in Afghanistan nor in Iraq are we able to re-create the state, which means that fourth-generation, non-state forces will come to dominate both places. And," he summed up, "neither we nor any other state knows how to defeat fourth-generation enemies."