In a book published this week, Dr. George Friedman, the founder of the lucid Stratfor, a private for-profit think-tank and intelligence-gathering organization which has been dubbed "the shadow CIA", proposes to explain what the war in Iraq, and the larger "war on terrorism", is really all about.
It sure wasn't about WMD hidden in Iraq -- one of several public arguments for removing Saddam Hussein which, because it didn't work out, has been hailed by our media (which once bought into the argument but has since cashed out) as the only reason. Yet as both parties in the U.S. election maintain, the threat of nuclear or other mass-destructive weaponry in the hands of terrorists -- and quite possibly terrorists trained and directed by a foreign state or states -- is real, and must be dealt with. The arguments are only over how to prevent carnage on a scale seldom before seen.
In America's Secret War, Dr. Friedman argues that the enemy grew out of the Cold War, an artefact of Jimmy Carter's decision to use Saudi Arabian money and Pakistani expertise to create a guerrilla army that could harass the Soviets then occupying Afghanistan. "Al Qaeda", the product, mastered the art of covert operation, and as the Soviets collapsed, began turning it against the West, biting the hand that fed them. Their large ambition is the creation of a new, pan-Muslim caliphate, however, and they attack Western targets as a means of advancing an Islamist revolution at home. |