SKIRMISHER

Michael Hirsch kicked it in the groin and on the spot: How Washington ended up creating a larger-than-life image of what in reality was a “small and fractious” organization like the Al Qaeda.

Hirsch puts it so well:

But there was substantial evidence showing that, up to 9/11, Al Qaeda could barely hold its act together, that it was a failing group, hounded from every country it tried to roost in (except for the equally lunatic Taliban-run Afghanistan). That it didn’t represent the mainstream view even in the jihadi community, much less the rest of the Muslim world. This is the reality of the group that the Bush administration has said would engage us in a “long war” not unlike the cold war—the group that has led to the transformation of U.S. foreign policy and America’s image in the world.

The intelligence community generally agrees that the number of true A-list Al Qaeda operatives out there around the time of 9/11 was no more than about 1,000, perhaps as few as 500, most in and around Afghanistan. It is also fairly well established that bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were engaged in a fierce pre-9/11 struggle with their own meager band of followers over whether it was wise to take on the “far enemy”—the United States—when many jihadis really wanted to engage the “near enemy,” their national regimes, like Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

The ultimate tragedy of the Iraq war was not only that it diverted the U.S. from the knockout blow against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan—the deaths of bin Laden and Zawahiri would likely have persuaded most jihadis it was wiser to focus on the near enemy—but that Iraq also altered the outcome of Al Qaeda’s internal debate, tipping it in bin Laden’s favor. “Iraq ended that debate because it fused the near and the far enemy,” as Arquilla puts it succinctly. America ventured into the lands of jihad and willingly offered itself as a target in place of the local regimes. And as a new cause that revived the flagging Al Qaeda movement. It is, no doubt, bin Laden’s greatest victory.

THE MYTH OF AL QAEDA [MSNBC]

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