Al Qaeda in Iraq and its presumed leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, have conceded strategic defeat and are on their way out of the country, a top U.S. military official contended yesterday.
More text below. Don't laugh. It could well be. The people we are fighting there do not move together with military precision. And this shouldn't be construed to mean that terrorist bombings in Iraq are simply going to end over night. The GWOT is a strategic war and with Iran coming into focus as our main Middle Eastern threat, it is likely Al Qaeda will seek to either align itself more directly with Iran, or at least play on the margins of that conflict, as oppose to Iraq. It's more timely and terrorists want to be in the news and America's face.
It's called the Global War On Terror precisely because the battlefield is global. And leaders of the terrorist movement can jump from location to location if they perceive an opportunity to capitalize on Geo-political situations.
They might also be needing some time to re-group and re-think as regards strategy and planning because, whether the news reads like it or not, they have suffered a devastating defeat in Iraq. Their tactics demanded that we cut and run and there is no sign of that within the sitting administration. Which is all that matters when you boil it down. That's partly why the Bush administration must remain almost defiant in the face of criticism. To show the terrorists anything else would be opening the door to defeat.
The madness will continue in spots around the world, But Al Qaeda either has to mass a major isolated attack, in the US or elsewhere, or re-group and re-deploy. And there hasn't exactly been a great deal of great recruiting news for radical Islam, what with many high profile operatives being killed, one at a time.
Gen. Vines' statement came as news broke that coalition and Iraqi forces had killed an associate of Osama bin Laden's during an early morning raid near Abu Ghraib about two weeks ago.
The ones and two's like the above mean a lot more to the terrorists than the headlines portray. And the battle against their finances goes on everyday under the radar of the press. They have to eat and arm themselves constantly.
If this analysis is correct, we'll likely see a slow down of violence in Iraq, leveling off over a time period and gradually fading away. But there will never be some precisely identifiable end date to the types of conflicts required to win the GWOT. We just have to keep winning the small fights everyday.
The group's failure to disrupt national elections and a constitutional referendum last year "was a tactical admission by Zarqawi that their strategy had failed," said Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who commands the XVIII Airborne Corps.
"They no longer view Iraq as fertile ground to establish a caliphate and as a place to conduct international terrorism," he said in an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Rafid Ibrahim Fattah aka Abu Umar al Kurdi served as a liaison between terrorist networks and was linked to Taliban members in Afghanistan, Pakistani-based extremists and other senior al Qaeda leaders, the military said yesterday.
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