Fight al Qaeda, Not Iraq

Over the last several weeks, al Qaeda has reemerged on the terrorist scene. In Bali, a powerful bomb killed 181 people, mostly foreigners; both President Bush and the Indonesian government have tied the blast to al Qaeda. In Kuwait, two men shot two American soldiers, killing one; the leader of the attack professed his allegiance to Osama bin Laden in a videotape. In Yemen, a French oil tanker was apparently rammed by a smaller craft packed with explosives in an attack reminiscent of the U.S.S. Cole incident two years ago. President Bush has said these incidents prove the need for a global coalition against terrorism, and he is completely right. But they also show that in order to fight al Qaeda effectively, the U.S. must not pursue military action in Iraq.

If the failure to capture bin Laden and second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri was not enough to demonstrate that Bush’s war on terror has faltered, this string of attacks shows without doubt that al Qaeda remains capable of carrying out small- and large-scale terrorist operations. In a way, this is unsurprising; it would have been impossible to completely destroy al Qaeda’s capabilities immediately. The war on terror will be long, and it will be painful; there will be both setbacks and progress. But it is not too much to expect that it would receive the administration’s undivided attention. Yet just over a year after Sept. 11, with Osama still at large, President Bush points to Iraq as one of his most pressing priorities.

Saddam Hussein is a ruthless murderer in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq poses a danger to the perpetually unstable situation in the Middle East. But attacking Iraq now, while al Qaeda regroups and adapts to America’s counterterror campaign, leaves the United States open to a far greater threat.

No one is as dangerous as al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. They attacked American embassies in Africa, killing 224 people. They attacked the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 American sailors. They hijacked four jet planes and crashed three into buildings, killing over three thousand people. Even Saddam Hussein cannot claim such grisly results against America.

Bush claims that action against Iraq would strengthen America’s efforts to fight terror, but such an argument is difficult to believe. Even the U.S., with its stratospheric spending on military and intelligence, has limited resources; a war against Iraq would require a large proportion of those resources that would be better employed searching for al Qaeda. America also has a limited supply of international goodwill; many other nations are still unhappy about the proposed action against Iraq, and the U.S. needs their cooperation in intelligence gathering and operations against al Qaeda more than it needs their support against Saddam Hussein. This problem is particularly acute in the Middle East, where opposition to an attack on Iraq is high and where many fighters trained by al Qaeda have fled.

After the battle in Afghanistan, al Qaeda has become far more decentralized, sending small cells to all corners of the globe. The campaign to locate and destroy the remaining danger will take years of work. It may never be finished if the U.S. divides its forces and attacks Iraq.

Dissent: Defeat al Qaeda and Saddam

Without a doubt, this past weekend’s terrorist bombing in Indonesia reveals the continued threat posed by al Qaeda cells, especially in Southeast Asia. The Staff is right to say that the U.S. military should keep aggressively pursuing bin Laden’s network.

However, to claim that the war on terrorism precludes action against Saddam Hussein’s evil regime is misguided. The Staff needs to realize that the war cannot fully succeed if a terror-sponsoring, genocidal dictator like Saddam Hussein is allowed to stay in power and continue developing weapons of mass murder. As Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan pointed out last January in the Weekly Standard magazine: “[T]he effort to remove Saddam from power would be no more a ‘diversion’ from the war on al Qaeda than the fight against Hitler was a ‘diversion’ from the fight against Japan.” Indeed, Hussein and al Qaeda are merely different manifestations of the same fundamental danger.

To that end, America’s arsenal of democracy can topple the regime in Baghdad and still have the manpower and technology to hunt al Qaeda. The greatest superpower in human history certainly has the ability to fight simultaneously on two fronts, just as it did during World War II.

—Duncan M. Currie ’04