Did We Create An Al Qaeda State?

[Gromit]

Large parts of Iraq are now controlled by al qaeda. Bush and Blair's legacy is that al qaeda have taken their first country.


// Ten years after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is at risk of becoming a failed state again as al-Qaeda reclaims vast swathes of the country.

Backed by jihadists fighting the civil war in neighbouring Syria, the group is trying to create an “emirate” straddling the two countries, taking advantage of the collapse in security across the border.

Bridges linking four key border towns on the Iraqi side have been dynamited, making it difficult for security forces to operate in the area.
Road signs have even been put up proclaiming it to be the turf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the name for the joint Syrian-Iraqi al-Qaeda franchise.

Further north in the city of Mosul, another al-Qaeda stronghold, the group is boosting its war chest by raking in up to £5 million a month in “tithes” from local businesses.

Using their new safe haven as an operating base, al-Qaeda has mounted repeated strikes across the country, with an average of 68 car bombs a month this year. 

The death toll for 2013 has already topped 7,000, with the United Nations saying that 979 died in October alone, the latest month for which figures are available.
That is roughly twice the Iraqi death rate when US forces plucked Saddam from his “spider hole” in Tikrit in December 2003, an arrest hailed at the time as spelling the end of Iraq’s insurgency problems. //

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10514145/Iraq-is-still-bleeding-10-years-after-Saddam-Husseins-capture.html

Did al qaeda win the war?

[bazwillrun]

nothing that wasnt predicted by the majority of people at the time

[emmie]

they didn't win the war, however we should never have been involved there, none of our business, ever.

[emmie]

and who is we, are you involved, am i, this is Blair and his governments fault, and the same can be said for the US.

[andy-hughes]

Sadly, baz is entirely right.

If AB'ers like us could see from Day One that the 'war on terror' was never going to work, then why could not those paid vast sums of money to see the obvious, see it as we did?

The answer can only be that they have a vested interest in pursuing a futile objective which ranged from 'regime change' to 'destroying opium poppy crops' (that all went very quiet very quickly!) to enforcing democracy on a territory that still lives by control systems we last saw eight hundred years ago.

I like to give them the benefit of the doubt, and think that their sense of self-aggrandisement blinded them to the sheer impracticailities of their chosen actions, and the tragic loss of life that would count for nothing when history looks back - as history will.

I have banged on many times on associate threads that Al Qaeda had only to sit and wait - as history has shown that this is all they need to do. They are already home, offering stability to a series of tribes that will welcome it.

It's really not hard to paint yourself as the good guys when you speak the same language, live in the same vilages, and are equally willing to die for your tribe, and against you is a paid high-tech army of invading foreigners who will eventually go home - because they always have in the past.

I can work that out as I type it - which is what I have done.

I like to think i see less of the big picture that Messrs. Blair and Bush, but i know I don't see so much less that it makes them right and me wrong.

All we are lookig for now is an exit strategy that can assume enough of a level of dignity for the current government not to be dragged from the Commons and hung from lamposts.

Yhey can only use the excuse the the originators of this hell-on-earth have long since tefloned away into lucrative retirement, and that may save them.

Petty it won't save the soldiers and civilians who have died needlessly while all this was going on.

It's enough to make you weep.

[emmie]

predicated again and again, don't get involved in these conflicts, we always come off worse and the populations will be hurt, killed, and they won't thank us in the long term, all these countries should sort out their own mess. Some on AB seem to think that when we see places like Syria imploding and the children dying, being displaced, we should do something, but they won't thank us, and we will have more fanatics in UK ready to die for the cause, or country they have never known, yet their families might well have originated from.

[jomifl]

It is the law of unintended (but not unpredicted) consequences working with it's usual high effeiciency.

[bazwillrun]

"I have banged on many times on associate threads that Al Qaeda had only to sit and wait"

you have money we have time !
its their tag line

[andy-hughes]

Then Al Qaeda have seen my point, no doubt a lot faster and more forcefully that I did - or more accurately, I have seen their point - it matters not, what matters is that the point is as crystal clear as it has always been.

If they can out-wait an army far far larger and more motivated than the current invaders - as they did when Russia got their backsides walloped - then it will seem of little consequence to do the same again.

[emmie]

AH i thought this was about Iraq, were the Russians in Iraq, or Afghanistan.

[andy-hughes]

emmie - it matters little where Al Qaeda are operating, their modus operandai is the same - sit and wait.

Money - millions of pounds and dollars, will buy you a highly mechanised and fully equipped army, but it will never buy you the will to live with political freedom as you see it - that is free, and millions of people have, do and will die for it.

You can't fight that.

[TTG]

Should have stayed out of the middle east.

[jomifl]

The apparently un-noticed flaw in Al-Quaeda philosophy is that it needs money and kit to operate. The bigger it gets the less efficient it's backers become, just like any cancer it will kill it's host.

[Hypognosis]

I don't think the 'regime change' merchants fully appreciated that, for example, the very nearly 200 years' of British presence in India meant having troops deployed there for all of that time. (Generations of them were even born there).

Modern day society is, if you'll forgive the expression, a lot more 'girly' and there is that sentimental "bring our boys home" urge (it's even more strongly expressed in the USA, ever since Vietnam, I think).

So, if we don't have the stomach for generations of involvement in the world's trouble spots, waiting for the female half of these societies to gain the same level of influence as they have with us, playing the "time" side of the game, then we simply should not get involved in these places. (Accusations of imperialism will come if we hang around but that's a separate issue). In the meantime, the ones with the AKs will dominate the ones who expect to rule via the ballot box.

We have no right to assume that their culture wants to become anything like ours. In fact, they spend quite a bit of energy on banning most of the stuff we like. The miserable fasters even banned music. Leave them to their own devices and stop buying their oil.

The sooner we adopt solar-electric vehicles, on a massive scale, the better. They'd be reduced to goat farming, if it weren't for the west's thirst for fuel.

[Hypognosis]

@jomifl,

no funding worries for AlQ, it seems... :-/

"Kidnap ransoms 'fuelling terrorism' - UK Foreign Office
By Frank Gardner"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25359636

[jomifl]

Hypo, they will still need stuff to kill people and someone to print money. They can only exist as a 'flea on an elephant'.

[Hypognosis]

I guess it suits the macho 13th century lifestyle and they don't care about being outnumbered and/or out-weaponed. If they ever run out of ammo they'd start coming at us with swords, or biting us on the features.

If I was shooting my mouth off in a bar in the States, I'd get shot for saying this but Al Qaeda are "The Rebel Alliance" and the West are "The Empire"

Except that, in real life, the Empire troops can shoot straight enough to hit things a lot smaller than a barn door, 20 paces away. ;-)

[jno]

someone to print money: opium.

Stuff to kill people: visit any UK arms fair. (You'll need to pretend to be a Saudi.)

[whiskeryron]

I agree that we should never have become involved in ''Other people's troubles'' but I have this niggly feeling that for instance had we decided not to help Poland in 1939 we would have ended up eventually under the Nazi jackboot as slaves with the rest of Europe in the new German empire.

WR.

[Hypognosis]

Too true, Ron.

Although by "helping Poland" did you actually mean "attempt to open a second front, only to be driven off the continent by unexpected tactics and more heavily armoured tanks"?

Of course, the Americans are keen to remind us how they stepped in and restored peace in Europe twice over. In much the same way as we are keen to remind them that, both times, they had serious doubts about intervention, thousands of miles from home. They didn't have sizeable military forces at the time and they hated the idea of paying taxes to support militarism.

The eastern states had quite a considerable population who were of German extraction and, whilst I'd hate to lay the blame for war-wariness entirely at their door, they obviously had a voice in the debates and may have swayed others. In the end, it was only an intercepted German telegram to the Mexican embassy that clinched which side they were to join with, to end WW1. (As if the Lusitania incident had been no more than a mistake!)

In summary, intervention is sometimes a mistake but non-intervention sometimes looks bad, from a historical perspective. Also, when it's a near-neighbour, such as Poland, it's practically obligatory, if you want to be trusted by other neighbour countries, or helped by them when it's your country's turn.

How far away is too far away? I'm not sure - all I know is that the Suez Canal and the Gulf are important enough to world trade for everyone to have an interest in middle east stability.