Jihad on the Cards

What do you do when you've rolled up most of your 52-card deck of Iraqi bad guys but the bad stuff keeps on happening? Why, mint a 53rd card, of course. The Coalition Provisional Authority announced last week that it was doing just that, adding a "wild card" bearing the visage of a Jordanian terrorist who goes by the name of Musab al-Zarqawi to its deck of former regime figures. The decision is hardly surprising: Most of the original deck are now dead or in U.S. custody; only seven are still at large. Yet, the insurgency continues to kill Americans and Iraqis every day, and shows no sign of abating. Perhaps because of a deeply ingrained Hollywood convention, Americans need to put a face on the enemy. Finding the "evil one" ends the game, at least in the movies.

And so, as Iraq appears to careen down the road to civil war and the bloodletting gathers momentum, we are offered Zarqawi as an explanation. Iraqi Kurdish security forces recently intercepted a man described by U.S. officials as an al-Qaeda courier, and in his briefcase they found a letter purportedly written by Zarqawi recommending to al-Qaeda a strategy of "sectarian warfare" in Iraq. Some of the more desperate elements in the pro-war cheering section sought to portray the letter as the "smoking gun" proving the administration's prewar claim that bin Laden and Saddam were in cohoots. But even a cursory glance at the document, accepting at face value the CPA's account of its authorship, makes nonsense of this: It reads as a business proposal to the al-Qaeda leadership from an independent group of foreign "mujahedeen" waging jihad against the U.S. and its allies in post-Saddam Iraq. Saddam Hussein is mentioned, but as a threat; the writer warns that the U.S. plans to hand over power to a "bastard government with an army and police force that will bring back the time of Hussein and his cohorts" and throttle the jihadis.

The mysterious Mr. Zarqawi was a star of Colin Powell's UN address last year, in which he was cast, somewhat improbably, as the link between bin Laden and Baghdad. But European intelligence agencies reportedly hold a more complex picture of Zarqawi's role, stressing that the Jordanian runs his own autonomous terror network, al-Tawhid, that functions independently of al-Qaeda's command structure although with many overlaps, and at some points even with a degree of competition. That sense is confirmed by some of the passages in the letter which read not as a report to HQ from a field operative, but as a proposition from a like-minded independent group to a larger and better-endowed organization that dominates the market: "We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you, and we have never striven to achieve glory for ourselves. If you agree with us on [the strategy of attacking Shiites], if you adopt it as a program and road, and if you are convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy, we will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders, and indeed swearing fealty to you publicly... If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil [our] friendship. [This is] a cause [in which] we are cooperating for the good and supporting jihad."

The reason the CPA has decided to mint a playing card depicting Zarqawi, however, has nothing to do with the administration's prewar claim of a Saddam-bin Laden link. Instead, it aims to use Zarqawi as an explanatory device for the ongoing violence. As a propaganda tactic to warn Iraqis off sectarian strife it's a noble idea: If you fight each other, you're playing into the hands of foreign jihadis who wish you no good. After all, everyone from the CIA to the UN's representative in Iraq is warning that civil war is a real and growing danger. But as an explanation for what's going on in Iraq, painting foreign jihadis as the fount of all discord is misleading to the point of self-delusion.

Last weekend, for example, a large unit of insurgents overran an Iraqi police station in Fallujah, inflicting heavy casualties and challenging the U.S. assumption that Iraqi security forces will be in a position to cope with the insurgency in the coming months. CPA and Iraqi Governing Council officials were quick to blame the foreign jihadis, but the U.S. military quickly corrected the impression that the attackers may have been foreigners and stressed that those captured and killed had all been Iraqis.

Last week, CPA spokesman Dan Senor repeatedly cited passages from the "Zarqawi letter" proclaiming the difficulties being caused by the deployment of Iraqi security forces to insist that the U.S. political and security strategy is winning: "The foreign terrorists coming into this country, elements associated with al Qaeda, feel threatened by the prospect of a sovereign, democratic Iraq. And that is all the more reason to continue to forge ahead in handing over more and more authority to the Iraqi people, to continue to train more and more Iraqis who are stepping forward to protect their own country."

This reference was to passages in the excerpts posted on the CPA web site that say things like "Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse (for jihad) thereafter," which seem so tailored to CPA spin that they prompt skepticism over the document's authoriship. That, according to University of Michigan Middle East scholar Juan Cole, may be in part that the CPA was relying on a very literal translation that missed the meanings intended by the author.

But the "Zarqawi letter" actually contains its own negation of the argument that the ongoing violence in Iraq is primarily the work of foreign jihadis. The author writes that the number of foreign jihadis who have made it to Iraq is, in fact, "negligible," and laments the reluctance of Iraqis to sacrifice themselves in suicide attacks. "Jihad here unfortunately (takes the form of) mines planted, rockets launched, and mortars shelling from afar," the author complains. "The Iraqi brothers still prefer safety and returning to the arms of their wives, where nothing frightens them. Sometimes the groups have boasted among themselves that not one of them has been killed or captured. We have told them in our many sessions with them that safety and victory are incompatible? that the (Islamic) nation cannot live without the aroma of martyrdom and the perfume of fragrant blood spilled on behalf of God, and that people cannot awaken from their stupor unless talk of martyrdom and martyrs fills their days and nights."

The bad news here is obvious: It is precisely these 9-5 nationalist warriors who want to fight but also to survive, rather than the Islamist "martyrs" with their suicide bombs, that are responsible for most of the attacks on the U.S. and its allies in Iraq. Three or four grisly suicide bombings may have grabbed the headlines in January, but according to a report distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development that month in fact saw 642 attacks of the hit-and-run type described by the author of the "Zarqawi letter," presumably conducted by Iraqis who then returned home to their families and communities. And that suggests that even when and if the "Wild Card" Zarqawi is nabbed, Iraq will remain the proverbial "tough town" for the U.S. and its allies.