New School Politics

Bush-Wrong on Al-Qaida in Iraq

Eftychis | 24 07 2007

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Today President George W. Bush linked the war in Iraq to the fight against Al-Qaida. While he has done this many times before, it was one of his most controversial speeches as he “lashed out at critics who say that al-Qaida’s operation in Iraq is distinct from terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.”

I would briefly like to give our president a foreign policy lesson.

Al-Qaida in Iraq is a separate organization that Al-Qaida; it was formed by now infamous terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi under the name Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad was created in Afghanistan by Al-Zarqawi after the retreat of the end of the war with the Soviet Union. He ran a terrorist training camp that had no correlation to Al-Qaida or Osama Bin Laden and was operating with the intent of overthrowing the Jordanian government (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a Jordanian who resents the Jordanian Kingdom for not following strict Sharia law).

He left Afghanistan prior to the US invasion and traveled to Iraq where he was famously treated at an Iraqi medical facility. However, this occurred prior to the invasion and he still had no tie to the terrorist organization, which attacked American on September 11th. While he was in Iraq he established ties with a radical Kurdish militant group and also manifested contacts with senior Iraqi intelligence and military officials. It was not until nearly a full year after the invasion (in 2004) that al-Zarqawi announced his coalition with Al-Qaida. Zarqawi allied himself with Al-Qaida with the belief that it would legitimize his guerrilla movement to the rest of the Muslim world and increase his recruitment of foreign fighters. In 2004 al-Zarqawi renamed his organization Al-Qaida in Iraq, note that Al-Qaida in Iraq is a different entity than Al-Qaida with its own separate command structure and military imperatives.

It is true that there is an organization called Al-Qaida in Iraq, but it was not until after the US invasion (a full year after) that there was a correlation between the radical Sunni groups which killed over three thousand Americans in 2001 and the group which is responsible for many of the roadside bombs and beheadings in Iraq.

Today both groups share similar broad goals, however prior to US intervention in Iraq the groups had separate ideologies and goals and were only united in a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It is true that there is now a connection between the people who attacked us on our own soil and those we are now fighting in Iraq, but to say that Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden are leading operations in Iraq on a day-to-day basis is plane wrong.