Ayoon wa Azan (Expert Clown)
Jihad Al Khazen Al-Hayat 2005/03/9
While President Bush blamed Syria (or others) for the difficulties that the American military is facing in Iraq, I came back to two articles on the same issue, which were both published last Thursday; one of them appeared in the neo-conservative publication The Weekly Standard, while the other appeared in the liberal The Nation.
Stephen Schwartz wrote in the Israeli cabal's publication an article entitled The Face of Iraqi Terrorism A new study shows where the foreign fighters in Iraq are coming from. Care to guess? Whereas Ari Berman wrote in the liberal magazine that sells three times more than The Weekly Standard, an article entitled The Real Story of the Insurgency (In Iraq).
Schwartz once claimed jokingly that he was an expert in Balkans affairs, and he roamed around the Balkans while calling himself Suleiman Ahmad Stephen Schwartz; however, he came back to his origins when he returned to the United States, and with his new origins, this Israeli apologist quotes Israelis, and the 'study' he relies on was issued by The Global Research in International Affairs Center in Israel.
Thus, the study that was conducted and supervised by the Israeli Dr. Reuven Paz, analyzes the origins of 154 Arab jihadis killed in Iraq over the last six months, whose names have been posted on Islamist websites, and says that "Saudi Arabia accounted for 94 jihadis, or 61 percent of the sample, followed by Syria with 16 (10 percent), Iraq itself with only 13 (8 percent), and Kuwait with 11 (7 percent.) The rest included small numbers from Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Morocco (of which one was a resident in Spain), Yemen, Tunisia, the Palestinian territories (only 1), Dubai, and Sudan. The Sudanese was living in Saudi Arabia before he went to die in Iraq."
Schwartz the clown said that the study confirmed his suspicions that "Iraq's dangerous southern neighbor, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was the main source" of foreign jihadis.
Dr. Reuven Paz offered some interesting observations:
- "Jihadi volunteers constitute a significant portion of the Sunni insurgents"
- "Another element to note is the relatively small number of Iraqis involved in the fighting on behalf of the Zarkawi group."
- "Particularly striking . . . is the absence of Egyptians among foreign Arab volunteers [in] Iraq, due to a combination of the decline of Islamist influence in Egypt."
Schwartz closed his article by saying: "It's time to close Saudi Arabia's northern border, silence the jihadi preachers, and cut off the financing of international Wahhabism."
I said that Schwartz was a clown, which conflicts with my interest in reading what he writes; however, the truth is that he is a clown who finds people who believe him. Moreover, The Weekly Standard is close to the Bush administration, and has massive influence that exceeds that of The Nation, although the latter has more readership, credibility, and respect. Thus, it is a duty to follow up what fundamentalists like Schwartz write.
Ari Berman destroyed Schwartz's argument without even replying to him; as both articles were published on the same day like I said earlier. I will state in order the ideas that Berman discussed, without jumping to the end, which proves the weakness of Schwartz's Israeli information. I would like to personally add that President Bush said on December 20, 2004: "No question about it, the bombers are having an effect."
Berman presented the official American chronology in talking about the resistance, or the terrorists, after he witnessed the following: "At a testy hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 16, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to say how many insurgents are operating in Iraq. "I am not going to give you a number for it because it's not my job to do intelligent (sic) work," Rumsfeld replied. A little later, Rumsfeld claimed that the two most recent assessments of the insurgency provided by the CIA and DIA were classified and couldn't be disclosed. "Frankly, I don't have a lot of confidence in any of them," he said.
Prior to that incident, the U.S. Administration committed many tragic errors, which were picked up and presented by Berman in his article:
- June 17, 2003, The New York Times: "'We see nothing of a higher hand trying to organize these attacks into something you would actually call a guerrilla campaign' said one senior military official. 'These people have no future in a post-Saddam Iraq,' another Pentagon official said."
- June 18, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld: "In those regions where pockets of dead-enders are trying to reconstitute, General Franks and his team are rooting them out."
- June 18, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary: "I think these people are the last remnants of a dying cause."
- August 25, 2003, Rumsfeld: "The dead-enders are still with us, those remnants of the defeated regimes who'll go on fighting long after their cause is lost."
- April 9, 2004: Rumsfeld: "You have a mixture of a small number of terrorists, a small number of militias, coupled with some demonstrations and some lawlessness."
- June 25, 2004, Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State: "We underestimated the enemy, and we didn't destroy him in our initial attack, and he melted away, and we're seeing him again."
- September 20, 2004, Time Magazine: "The deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq, British Major General Andrew Graham, estimates there are 40,000 to 50,000 active insurgent fighters.
- January 3, 2004, Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraqi intelligence director: "I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people."
- January 26, 2005, General George Casey: "If you look back over the last year we estimate we have killed or captured about 15,000 people as part of this counter-insurgency."
- February 3, 2005, Rumsfeld: "The insurgency has clearly been at a level that has been more intense than anticipated."
- February 3, 2005, Senator John McCain: "We went from a few dead enders to killing or capturing 15,000 in the period of a year, and that's why there's a certain credibility problem here as to what the size and nature of the enemy we face...I don't know how you defeat an insurgency unless you have some handle on the number of people that you are facing."
The members of the U.S. administration do not know, whereas Schwartz and Paz know everything in detail.
The claims of the so-called American Stephen Schwartz lack credibility on many levels; since if 154 jihadis were killed in Iraq, the number is very small compared to the 14,000 that an official American General declared. This shows that the foreign fighters make up around 1% of the total number of insurgents, and even if they were all Saudis or Syrians, they would still be irrelevant due to their small number.
In all cases, the Americans did not specify yet the countries that the fighters came from, because they assume that the sweeping majority of insurgents consists of Iraqi nationals; If there was a high percentage of any other nationality, whether Saudi, Syrian, or other, they would have declared this. The accusation against Syria is part of a campaign, which does not even speak of Syrian fighters; even if such fighters were to be found, they would be only a few. The main accusations against Syria concern the control of the borders, not assisting the terrorists and financing them.
I would like to say, as a citizen who cares for Iraq, that there is a massive difference between the legitimate resistance against the occupation on the one hand, and terrorism on the other. What we are currently witnessing in Iraq is gruesome terrorism, and it is the duty of every Arab to try to help the Iraqis in putting an end to it, despite whatever the Israeli cabal says, and despite any stance from the American presence in Iraq.
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