Ever wonder what life is like on the other side? A letter recently found on a senior al Qaida courier in Baghdad gives striking testimony of the trials and tribulations of a foreign fighter in Iraq.
The letter in question was written by one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who’s been directing suicide bombings in Iraq over the past several months. In the letter, which according to unidentified U.S. officials was en route to Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi gives al Qaida leadership a 17-page synopsis of the situation in Iraq.
Now, before I relate to you the details of his letter, let’s run the tape back to last summer. Months passed after the fall of Baghdad, and American soldiers continued to die in firefights with remnants of the regime. Terrorists then began coming in from outside Iraq to join the fray, and before long, the pessimistic and short-sighted media mounted its own all-out assault on the Bush administration for its handling of postwar difficulties.
When the U.N. headquarters in Iraq was bombed, a New York Times editorial lamented that “America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.” In October, Time magazine ran a cover story titled “Mission NOT Accomplished.” The consensus among cynics everywhere was that the war in Iraq was being won by the terrorists, and our stubborn attempts at establishing security there would inevitably become the next Vietnam.
But now al-Zarqawi’s letter proves that our persistence is paying off. It’s essentially a scorecard filled in by the terrorists, who concede that they’re losing the contest in Iraq.
The letter begins with a bit of bad news for the al Qaida. First, as al-Zarqawi admits, they’re having a rough time getting the support of the Iraqi people: “They will not allow you to make their homes a base for operations or a safe house. Therefore, it has been extremely difficult to lodge and keep safe a number of brothers, and also train new recruits.” He tells of having “few supporters, lack of friends, and tough times.” This begs the question: Whatever happened to those Iraqis who author Robert Wright predicted in Slate magazine would “see their “resistance” hailed across the Arab world as a watershed in the struggle against Western imperialism?” Why aren’t they cooperating with their Islamic liberators?
If the Iraqi people are being unhelpful to al-Zarqawi and his pals, the American security forces there are a downright nuisance. He tells his friends, “Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By god, this is suffocation!” Al Qaeda sends in suicide bombers and detonates improvised explosives with some success, but in the long run, it’s a losing strategy: “America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes.” If that line sounds vaguely familiar, it could be because that message – slightly paraphrased – is precisely what the Bush administration has been saying all along.
Meanwhile, prominent journalists and nationally syndicated columnists have insisted that Iraq is a quagmire city all the way. We can’t beat these Baath insurgents and foreign terrorists, so why not cut-and-run now and spend that $87 billion somewhere else? The longer we stay there, they warned, the stronger the terrorist resistance will become.
I’m willing to bet that al-Zarqawi, for one, would disagree. He knows the real score in Iraq, and he doesn’t like the way things are shaping up. He knows our recent successes there are not good news for him and his terror cohorts: “We are racing time. If, God forbid, the government is successful and takes control of the country, we just have to pack up and go somewhere else.”
I don’t make a lot of profound predictions. But I’ll offer one now – if Iraq succeeds in becoming a stable democracy, it will mark the beginning of the end for radical Islamic terrorism, not just in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East.
Keith Platfoot is a senior in computer science and engineering. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
