Flypaper Redux

[Annie]

http://impearls.blogspot.com/2005_06_19_impearls_archive.html#111945985253374887

Earthdate 2005-06-22

(Permalink) Posted 17:03 UT by Michael McNeil
BBC World confirms the Flypaper Strategy

It was Canadian essayist David Warren who in 2003 originated the concept of the so-called “Flypaper” strategy with regard to the war in Iraq. As Warren wrote in his first essay on the subject:

While engaged in the very difficult business of building a democracy in Iraq — the first democracy should it succeed in the entire history of the Arabs — President Bush has also quite consciously to my information created a new playground for the enemy away from Israel and even farther away from the United States itself. By the very act of proving this lower ground he drains terrorist resources from other swamps.

This is the meaning of Mr. Bush's “bring 'em on” taunt from the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday when he was quizzed about the “growing threat to U.S. forces” on the ground in Iraq. It should have been obvious that no U.S. President actually relishes having his soldiers take casualties. What the media and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be provided by defenceless civilians both in Iraq and at large. The sore thumb of the U.S. occupation — and it is a sore thumb equally to Baathists and Islamists compelling their response — is not a mistake. It is carefully hung flypaper.​

Nothing that has occurred since in Iraq and elsewhere has invalidated the fundamental correctness of this doctrine. Warren himself has written considerably further on this topic, most recently during this last month here, where he says:

I do feel sure, that while the continuing terrorist carnage in Iraq, especially, but also in Afghanistan, must disturb us as conscientious human beings, we have less reason than ever to be alarmed by it. We are witnessing what amounts to the purposeful bleeding of a septic wound, as the most fanatic Islamist incendiaries from within Iraq and abroad take their best, hopeless shot at bringing down the new Iraqi constitutional order. It is a matter of life or death for their cause, and we could hardly expect them to abandon it easily.

As the author of the much-mocked “flypaper theory” — the phrase I used to describe the implicit strategy behind the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — I am more and more persuaded it has worked. All ground indications are that large numbers of Islamist terrorists who would otherwise remain dangerously under cover, not only across the region but in Europe and elsewhere, are irresistibly drawn towards these theatres of action, where they sooner or later get themselves killed.

As terrorists, they were, almost invariably, in a position to be more effective where they were. They are lured away for emotional reasons, or “spiritual” if that word can be applied to something that is essentially not Godly but demonic. It is the Islamist analogy to the way young socialists, anarchists, and adventurers from across Europe were drawn to Spain during its Civil War in the 1930s.

In addition to being annihilated, themselves, they deflate their cause by showing it to be losing. And what began as a recruiting inducement, soon becomes the opposite. For the near-certainty of getting killed oneself, in the cause of murdering (mostly) defenceless civilians, is not as attractive a motivator as the incendiaries make out.

Many other analysts have commented on this strategy, most recently James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's editorial OpinionJournal page, where he runs a daily feature the “Best of the Web Today.” Yesterday, in a piece called “Red on Red,” Taranto notes a report from that day's New York Times revealing that insurgents in Iraq are now fighting each other as some local Iraqis, otherwise opponents of the Coalition's presence in the country, seek to forestall the imported foreign jihadists' proclivities towards blowing up Iraqis right and left in their campaign to prevent the newly installed elected Iraqi government from consolidating its hold on power and completing work on the new democratic Iraqi constitution.

As Taranto says, “it would seem to vindicate both Vice President Cheney's much-maligned view that the indigenous insurgency is in its ‘final throes’ and the ‘flypaper’ theory that liberating Iraq is drawing in terrorists and forcing them to face the U.S. military.”

In this regard, a report from the BBC just a week ago thoroughly reinforces this point of view. While the BBC has been almost unremittingly negative with respect to the war on terror, including its Iraqi theater, even a stopped clock gets it right occasionally, and the BBC now and then does partially make up for its “sins.”
​

On June 15, 2005, BBC World broadcast a remarkable story (carried in the U.S. by PBS outlets) illustrating how fighting the terrorists in Iraq is making both America and Europe safer. They reported, “Police in Spain say they've arrested sixteen suspected Islamic militants in raids across the country. Eleven of them are said to be linked to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

As BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner (who was crippled a year ago incidentally by gunmen in Saudi Arabia) narrates:

Under cover of darkness, Spanish police move into position. In five different locations around the country, more than 500 officers broke into the suspected hideouts of Islamist militants. Sixteen men of North African origin were arrested, in what's said to be one of Europe's biggest ever counter-terrorist operations. Spain's Interior Minister spoke today of jihad and would-be suicide bombers, but their targets, he said, were not in Europe, they're in Iraq. Investigators believe they have uncovered an international network of extremists, financed and supported by robbery, drug dealing, and false documents. They say most of those arrested in Spain are linked to a cell of Islamist recruiters in Syria dedicated to sending volunteers into Iraq to fight the US-led Coalition. Five of those arrested are accused of links to last year's Madrid bombings. The remainder are accused of connections to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the Al Qaeda operative who's been driving the insurgency in Iraq.​

A BBC interviewee, Jeremy Binnie of Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, put it thusly:

The war in Iraq has minimized the threat to Europe [emphasis added] because everyone who's Jihad-inclined wants to go fight over there. So even though some of these… the guys suspected of involvement in the train bombings have reportedly gone over to lodge themselves in Iraq. So there are these radicals sort of coming out of Europe and actually going to a different theater altogether.

​

Gardner concludes his report, noting:

“Spain has seen terror-related arrests like these before, but despite early claims by the authorities, insufficient evidence has often seen them result in embarrassing acquittals.”​

As one might expect from the BBC, the written reportat their web site concerning this incident has been sanitized of all such stuff as “The war in Iraq has minimized the threat to Europe.” However, the report does include some other very interesting tidbits, to wit:

Twenty-four men charged with terror offences recently appeared in court, three of them accused of involvement in planning the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US [!]. The BBC's Katya Adler says interior ministry sources say one Madrid train bombing suspect who escaped police is believed to have carried out a suicide attack in Iraq last month.
​

Thus, the importance of the war in Iraq for keeping terrorists at bay from the centers of civilization. The BBC broadcast piece shows how the “flypaper strategy” for attracting terrorists to Iraq is working. Instead of subverting European countries or attacking America, potentially at the cost of thousands of civilian casualties as we've seen before, jihadists are flocking to Iraq, where our military can kill them in detail.

It's also worth observing how the suicide bombers we hear about every day in the news from Iraq are actually arriving from abroad. From the reports I've seen, essentially none of the fanatics willing to blow themselves up taking many Iraqis along with them are Iraqis themselves. So much for the idea that it's primarily the Iraqis who hate Americans and the Coalition and want us out; rather it's radical Islamofascist foreigners from around the world who are desperate to prevent Iraqis from taking destiny in their own hands to establish a modern, decent democratic society in the heart of the Muslim world.

 

[Annie]

It's still working...

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005882.php

December 03, 2005
The Flypaper Strategy Sticks Around

Kevin Brock, the Deputy Director of the new National Counterterrorism Center, told the AP that al-Qaeda has not established a "significant operational capability" in America since 9/11 -- and the only attempted AQ operation since then fell apart due to the incompetence of its cell leader. Brock also said that while the American effort to secure itself must remain vigilant due to the changing nature of the Islamist threat, the actual effort of terrorist operations have been directed elsewhere:

Brock said he doesn't believe the invasion and war in Iraq can be blamed for the threat reports that come into his center each day. "That would be too simplistic," he said. "There is too much of a diverse nature to these threats."

Had the U.S. not invaded Iraq, Brock said, terrorists would still carry out attacks. "But now they are mostly carried out in Iraq. That is where most of the people willing to commit suicide are going."

That flypaper strategy that has almost disappeared from debate over the past two years apparently worked as planned. We drew AQ into the open in Iraq, because they understand (better than some American politicians) that establishing a democracy in the crossroads of Southwest Asia represented an existential threat to Islamofascism. The AQ 'philosophy', such as it is, argues that the only legitimate way of life for Muslims is to live under brutal and intractable tyrannies appointed by Allah himself, and so are unchallengeable and unaccountable for their brutality. Once democracy shows that Arabs can choose their own leaders and hold them accountable for their actions and simultaneously practice their religion without interference, they will overwhelmingly choose democracy. AQ could not allow that example to establish itself.

So why fight in Iraq, rather than Afghanistan? They tried a stand-up fight in Afghanistan and lost -- badly. They got surprised by the quickness of the American response and the speed in which the Taliban mismanaged the war. They've tried some of the same tactics in Afghanistan that they use in Iraq, but the Afghanis already know what living under the Taliban's rule was like and have no illusions about wanting it to return.

The Iraqis, however, knew what Saddam's secular Ba'athist dictatorship was like, not an Islamic theocracy, which might have had more attraction for Iraqis, at least at first. When AQ attacked Americans, some Iraqis might have supported them. However, as more AQ assets died in that effort, the terrorists turned their attention to Iraqi recruits for security forces and lost any sympathy they may have had.

Now they mostly kill Iraqis while having almost no support even among the Sunni (who favor the native "insurgents" but spurn "foreigners" of any stripe) and don't even pretend to be liberating Iraq any more. They want to stop democracy and explicitly say so, calling it a heretical doctrine. AQ flocks to Iraq to fight us there, because that front matters most now. And if we don't fight them there, AQ would be freed up to attack us anywhere else around the globe -- including here at home.

I'd rather fight them in Iraq and put the democracy in their backyard that even they acknowledge would present a tremendous defeat for Islamofascism. Too bad that some here can't acknowledge what even AQ admits.
Posted by Captain Ed at December 3, 2005 08:35 AM