The "third world war is raging in Iraq," President Bush said in a South Carolina speech this week. "The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever."
As the military surge advances in Baghdad, the president has commenced a public-relations campaign to challenge Capitol Hill defeatocrats who've already decided that Gen. David Petraeus' troop surge and counter-insurgency strategy won't work. Tuesday's speech was only the start of the White House's "surge of information," but the rhetoric above wasn't Bush's. He was simply quoting Osama bin Laden.
Yes, the guy who gave us 9/11 seems to be as invested in U.S. defeat as many here at home are.
Bush's speech was something more than recitation of the al-Qaida leader's brave words about the stakes in Iraq. It was a serious and sustained argument about al-Qaida's current role in Iraq, replete with fresh declassified information.
After repeating the bin Laden quote, Bush got down to specifics. He pointed out that the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was a Jordanian. Before 9/11, he ran an Afghan terrorist camp. He wasn't al-Qaida at that point, but Bush noted that "our intelligence community reports that he had longstanding relations with senior al-Qaida leaders, that he had met with Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri." Small world, isn't it?
Zarqawi went to Iraq after his Afghan terror camp was destroyed in 2001. Soon he was setting up terror operations and in 2004 he pledged allegiance to bin Laden, formally joining al-Qaida and promising to "follow his orders in jihad."
Again, Bush quotes from the U.S. intelligence community on the impact of the Zarqawi-bin Laden merger: It gave al-Qaida in Iraq a "prestige among potential recruits and financiers" and al-Qaida's senior leadership "a foothold in Iraq to extend its geographic presence ... to plot external operations ... and to tout the centrality of the jihad in Iraq to solicit direct monetary support elsewhere."
After U.S. forces killed him in 2006, Zarqawi's successor was Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian. An Egyptian who has worked with Ayman al-Zawahiri, fellow Egyptian and bin Laden deputy, for more than two decades. An Egyptian who spent time with al-Qaida in Afghanistan prior to 9/11. (Yeah, I know, it's tough to get good local management talent.)
True, al-Qaida in Iraq's foot soldiers are Iraqis, but the intelligence community reports that the group's leaders are foreign terrorists—a Syrian, a Saudi, another Egyptian, a Tunisian and a Turk who fought with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and met with 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. And the U.S. military estimates that foreign-born al-Qaida terrorists carry out 80 percent to 90 percent of suicide attacks.
U.S. forces recently captured the highest-ranking Iraqi in al-Qaida in Iraq. He told interrogators that al-Qaida in Iraq's foreign leaders go to great lengths to present the group as an Iraqi-led operation. They even created a fictional figurehead named Omar al-Baghdad to give orders to the Iraqi fighters—and used an actor to play him.
Our intelligence community's bottom line: "Al-Qaida and its regional node in Iraq are united in their overarching strategy" and both "see al-Qaida in Iraq as part of al-Qaida's decentralized chain of command, not as a separate group."
Are there other terror groups in Iraq? Yes, but the intelligence community sees al-Qaida as the most dangerous Sunni jihadist group because it's behind most of the high-profile, high-casualty attacks that make the news, and these attacks are designed to fuel the violence between Sunni and Shiite.
In response to Tuesday's speech, Democrats fired back that Bush spun "a false rationale for the escalation of the war in Iraq" and hurled "strawmen" and "red herrings" into the debate.
OK, fine, but critics would have more impact if they addressed the specific information, intelligence assessments and arguments Bush laid out.
With the welcome arrival of Ed Gillespie as White House counselor, the Bush administration may at long last have a serious and sustained communications strategy that's equal to the war on terror in general and the Iraq war in particular. And equal to Gen. David Petraeus' military surge in Baghdad.
