In yet another Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, "Independent Democratic Senator" Lieberman takes us through the whole gamut of delusional arguments about Iraq, and adds a cherry on top: Damascus.
The United States is at last making significant progress against al Qaeda in Iraq--but the road to victory now requires cutting off al Qaeda's road to Iraq through Damascus.
Note all the usual buzzwords: "making progress", "Al Qaida in Iraq", "road to victory", and the addition of a new target - Syria. The words are unambiguous.
The article is freely accessible, and the description of the situation in Iraq is the same as can be heard form the White House, so I won't bother copying too much of it. But I'll just flag a few points:
But defeating al Qaeda in Iraq requires not only that we continue pressing the offensive against its leadership and infrastructure inside the country. We must also aggressively target its links to "global" al Qaeda and close off the routes its foreign fighters are using to get into Iraq.
Recently declassified American intelligence reveals just how much al Qaeda in Iraq is dependent for its survival on the support it receives from the broader, global al Qaeda network, and how most of that support flows into Iraq through one country--Syria. (...)
Although small in number, these foreign fighters are a vital strategic asset to al Qaeda in Iraq, providing it with the essential human ammunition it needs to conduct high-visibility, mass-casualty suicide bombings, such as we saw last week in northern Iraq. In fact, the U.S. military estimates that between 80% and 90% of suicide attacks in Iraq are perpetrated by foreign fighters, making them the deadliest weapon in al Qaeda's war arsenal. Without them, al Qaeda in Iraq would be critically, perhaps even fatally, weakened.
In these paragraphs, Lieberman repeats some crucial talking points of the White House: first of all, the mere concept of "Al Qaida in Iraq" (see the Fact Sheet prepared by the White House on that topic), to try to create a link between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq - when, of course, the presence of Al Qaida (or loosely affiliated groups) in Iraq started after the invasion of Iraq by US troops. Secondly, the supposed importance of foreign fighters in the fighting in Iraq.
That was false in 2005:
The US and Iraqi governments have vastly overstated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq, and most of them don't come from Saudi Arabia, according to a new report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS). According to a piece in The Guardian, this means the US and Iraq " feed the myth" that foreign fighters are the backbone of the insurgency. While the foreign fighters may stoke the insurgency flames, they make up only about 4 to 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgents.
And it is still false today:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said, (...) "Most of the attacks on our troops are the IEDs placed by al-Qaeda or the insurgency or the Jash al-Mahdi or snipers and that sort of thing. So the suicide bombers are mainly killing Iraqis."
(...)
of the 18,000 detainees in the American-run prisons in Iraq, only 250 are foreign fighters. That's a little over 1 per cent.
Focusing on suicide bombers allows Lieberman to conveniently ignore the other (predominant) sources of violence, and to make foreign fighters appear ultra dominant when they represent at most a tiny minority of those fighting off the US occupation of Iraq.
But beyond carrying water for Bush, Lieberman uses very explicit words to try and open a new front - this time against Syria:
That is why we now must focus on disrupting this flow of suicide bombers--and that means focusing on Syria, through which up to 80% of the Iraq-bound extremists transit. Indeed, even terrorists from countries that directly border Iraq travel by land via Syria to Iraq, instead of directly from their home countries, because of the permissive environment for terrorism that the Syrian government has fostered.
(...)
Syrian President Bashar al Assad cannot seriously claim that he is incapable of exercising effective control over the main airport in his capital city. Syria is a police state, with sprawling domestic intelligence and security services. The notion that al Qaeda recruits are slipping into and through the Damascus airport unbeknownst to the local Mukhabarat is totally unbelievable.
(...)
When Congress reconvenes next month, we should set aside whatever differences divide us on Iraq and send a clear and unambiguous message to the Syrian regime, as we did last month to the Iranian regime, that the transit of al Qaeda suicide bombers through Syria on their way to Iraq is completely unacceptable, and it must stop.
We in the U.S. government should also begin developing a range of options to consider taking against Damascus International, unless the Syrian government takes appropriate action, and soon.
There are a lot of code words that should raise alarms here. Lieberman is saying that Syrian authorities are complicit of terrorism against US soldiers, that the country should be treated like Iran (i.e. as a pariah state against which "nothing is off the table", as we know) and that attacks against at least the Damascus airport should happen soon.
I also note the use of "we in the US government", which is intriguing, at the least.
At a time when the al Qaeda network in Iraq is already under heavy stress thanks to American and Iraqi military operations, closing off the supply line through which al Qaeda in Iraq is armed with its most deadly weapons--suicide bombers--would be devastating to the terrorists' cause.
The fact is, the US is not fighting terrorists in Iraq, it's fighting local people pissed off from seeing their country occupied, and their families or neighbors killed or empoverished. Against another adversary, these would be called "freedom fighters" by the US government. More military action, more attacks, more destruction and death are not going to solve the problem, they're only going to make things worse.