I’d really be interested in reading about this in long-form, preferably from a mainstream journalistic outlet and not from a website I’ve never read before (no offense intended, Strategy Page, I just don’t know you):
May 27, 2008: Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about “why we lost in Iraq.” Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several of these Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. According to their stats, in late 2006, al Qaeda was responsible for 60 percent of the terrorist attacks, and nearly all the ones that involved killing a lot of civilians. The rest of the violence was carried out by Iraqi Sunni Arab groups, who were trying in vain to scare the Americans out of the country.
Today, al Qaeda has been shattered, with most of its leadership and foot soldiers dead, captured or moved from Iraq. As a result, al Qaeda attacks have declined more than 90 percent. Worse, most of their Iraqi Sunni Arab allies have turned on them, or simply quit. This “betrayal” is handled carefully on the terrorist web sites, for it is seen as both shameful, and perhaps recoverable.
If this is true–and it sounds plausible to me, tracking closely with some of the things I’ve been hearing out of Iraq–it’s kind of a big deal. One of the secondary reasons for going into Iraq was the idea that we needed to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.”* When I mentioned this to a friend a few months back he scoffed. But note the decrease in attacks around the world that Fareed writes about in this week’s Newsweek. Knock on wood, attacks in Iraq are cratering as well, suggesting that we’re doing a pretty good job of killing them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here. Hopefully I’ll have more on this later after I read this week’s New Yorker and the Lawrence Wright piece on the shift in al Qaeda’s strategies.
*I’m really, really not interested in getting into a debate over the reasons/justifications for going into war in Iraq.
h/t Andrew