We're Still Being Played by Osama bin Laden -- Let's Stop

Envision the perfect enemy: someone menacing enough to rally your supporters, but blundering enough to be manipulated into fighting on your terms. If Osama bin Laden went through this thought experiment, his prayers were answered when George W. Bush was elected President of the United States.

Let's say that you are an ambitious jihadist looking to wage a holy war. You've got a bit of money, but you need recruits. What to do? Well, first show that you are capable of striking the powerful to establish your bona fides, but then comes the tricky part.

The strike needs to provoke a particular response -- namely an invasion that will mobilize outrage, and that means that you have to hit a country that you can manipulate. The nation has to be powerful enough to invade any country, but have leaders either dumb enough not to realize that they are being manipulated or arrogant enough not to care. As the superpower blunders about in your neighborhood, radicalizing the locals, you can then offer a credible way to channel the desire for revenge. For the inconvenience of living on the run, bin Laden has thus amplified his global impact a million fold.

Of course, just because the Iraq war has worked out this way, it doesn't mean that Osama planned it this way (although Lawrence Wright argues precisely this point in The Looming Tower). What seems beyond dispute, however, is that since the war began, the Bush administration has continued to follow a script that beautifully serves the ambitions of al-Qaida.

The administration, for instance, seems more interested in mobilizing public support for continuing the mission than defining what the mission is. Take, for instance, the slogan-like response the administration offers in response to calls to set a timetable for withdrawal: that withdrawing from Iraq will embolden our enemies?

At first that seems to make sense, but let's ponder this for a minute. Even hawks now acknowledge that most of the violence in Iraq now comes from sectarian clashes and not insurgent attacks. If Iraq is a civil war, then who is this enemy that will be emboldened? Is it the Shiites or the Sunnis? Wait, aren't those the factions we're cooperating with? Isn't the first rule of warfare to know who you are fighting?

Isn't it also probable that the relatively small numbers of al-Qaida fighters (Iraqi or foreign) exploiting the American presence in Iraq would find themselves less welcome if they couldn't pose as the resistance to an occupying force? Might not al-Qaida be the biggest loser if Americans pulled back because it would lose its recruiting poster? Moreover, withdrawal doesn't mean abandonment. The U.S. could maintain forces close at hand, and serve as a deterrent to neighboring states that might want to exploit the situation. If so, a more accurate term than withdrawal might be strategic redeployment.

Or, take another bumper sticker justification offered by President Bush: that we are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. I'm assuming that he's not suggesting that some crazed Islamic army would invade America if we didn't draw a line in the sand. Rather, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he must be saying that we'd have more terrorist attacks in the U.S. if we forced the Iraqis sort out their mess themselves.

Is this the case? Has there ever been any credible evidence of Iraqi terrorist threats against the U.S., either before or after Saddam Hussein? None have ever made it to the media, and this is an administration that shows little hesitancy in declassifying information if it serves a political purpose.

OK, so maybe the idea is that if we withdrew from Iraq, all those foreign insurgents would be free to attack the U.S. That makes no sense either. It's not like foreign fighters are pinned down in Iraq. Rather, they had to take extraordinary measures to get in to the country. It's quite a stretch to assume these Arabic speaking fighters would head for the U.S. if we redeployed our troops. The Iraq war only bears on terrorist attacks on the U.S. in the sense that it offers a theater where it is possible for Arab fanatics to kill Americans even if they don't speak English and can't get into the United States.

The most plausible argument against pulling back is that other nations will see this as a sign of U.S. weakness. That begs the question of whether any nation, friend or foe, sees the limits of American military power exposed by this continuing debacle as a sign of U.S. strength.

The first step in extricating ourselves from this misbegotten and ill-managed war is recognizing that we've been played.