http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20041229-122750-5620r
ANALYSIS: Terror: 'Low-level but chronic'
By Richard Sale
UPI Terrorism Correspondent
Published December 29, 2004
WASHINGTON -- With the arrest of high-profile al-Qaida leaders, the terror
organization has become more loosely decentralized and its capabilities have
been somewhat degraded, according to half a dozen serving and former U.S.
intelligence officials.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that with so many al-Qaida and other like-minded jihadi
cells embedded in so many countries, Western intelligence services face a
new problem: a growing al-Qaida membership which will mount attacks on soft
targets that can come with no advance warning, conducted by terrorists not
currently being tracked by Western intelligence services, these sources
said.
"What this means is that the attacks are now being conducted by cells
whose members are below everyone's radar," said former CIA counterterrorism
chief, Vince Cannistraro. "We don't know they're there until they hit us."
His conclusion? "Terror will be low level but chronic."
A good example is the Dec. 7 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Jedda,
Saudi Arabia, according to these sources.
A heavily fortified, hard target, al-Qaida-associated terrorists managed
to enter the compound and kill five Saudi security guards and all four
attackers were killed. Two Americans were slightly wounded according to a
former senior CIA official.
Rachel Bronson, Middle East expert on the Council on Foreign Relations
saw the attack as a threat to the stability of Saudi Arabia, and further
evidence of U.S. vulnerability. Noting that the attack was brazen and in
daylight, she said: "It's incredible, that in spite of all the Saudi
crackdowns on militant groups, al-Qaida was able to do careful planning and
keep the consulate under surveillance without being detected. What does that
tell other terrorists?"
But Stephen Franke, a former U.S. Army terrorism expert and UNSCOM
weapons inspector, said that the attack essentially failed: "The target was
Americans, but none of them were killed."
Franke found the terrorist face to face shoot out with security force,
"macho but dumb."
If the attackers had wanted to succeed, they would have used improvised
stand-off weapons like improvised bazookas to blast down walls, he said.
But a former senior CIA Middle East operative agreed with Bronson: "As
the Arab world sees it -- Islamic warriors went and attacked the American
nest of vipers on the Red Sea. In other words, don't underestimate the
encouraging impact of the attack on the Arab world."
According to several veteran U.S. intelligence analysts, American
relations with the Arab world could not be worse.
Former senior CIA analyst Stan Bedlington said, "This administration
simply doesn't understand the impression its policies make on the Muslim
world."
An al-Qaida expert, Rohan Gunaratna, said, "Ordinary Muslims view the
West through the prism of anti-Americanism." He said that 61 percent of
Muslims polled in nine countries, including Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait,
and Pakistan, among others, denied Arabs were involved in the Sept. 11
attacks.
Only 7 percent said that Western countries "are fair in their
perceptions of Muslim countries," he said.
Last year in Iraq, a series of major U.S. blunders managed to revitalize
a disheveled a -Qaida because of policies that emphasized hunting down
insurgents rather then protecting the population and gaining its allegiance,
according to Pat Lang, former DIA chief of Mideast operations.
"The security situation in Iraq is a disaster, and it's of our own
creating," former senior CIA Mideast analyst Stan Bedlington said. "We
should never have gone in -- anti-Americanism is the galvanizing cry for
almost all the ethnic and political groups in Ira-Q. We are seen as an
occupier."
He added: "When the British tried to democratize the Iraqis in the
1920s, the British bombed the tribes, and everything turned to failure. No
Arab country is democratic, period."
Alexis Debat, a former official of the French Ministry of Defense, said
in The National Interest said: "The Iraq war has not up to now constituted a
step forward in the War on Terror. Quite the contrary, it has complicated
efforts the global efforts begun well before 9/11 to disrupt and destroy
jihadi networks throughout the Middle East and beyond," and he condemned the
Pentagon's "blind ambition."
He also said: "Not only has al-Qaida taken terrorism beyond its initial
function as a vehicle for resistance, it has turned it into a global
instrument by which to challenge not only Western influence in the Muslim
world but the West itself."
A former very senior CIA official said there has been a strict division
of labor between the Iraqi resistance and foreign jiadhi fighters, the
latter doing the large-scale suicide bombings, and while Sunni remnants of
the former regime, Iraqi and other Arab volunteers, have staged the
small-scale but deadly roadside bombing, sniper and RPG attacks.
The foreign fighters have brought some of their expertise to the
insurgents' construction of improved explosive devices or IEDs, this source
said.
Regarding the importance of the jihadis, another former senior agency
official with a long career in the region rated the insurgency as being "of
extreme importance."
Terrorists like the Jordanian Abu Musab al Zarqawi "are only a
sideshow," even though Zarqawi is thought to be behind the August 2003
bombings of the Jordanian and U.N. headquarters in Baghad, the bombing of
the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf which killed Ayatalloah Mohammad Bakir al
Hakim, he said.
He added: "We must improve our relations with the Arab world. This means
paying attention to Arab grievances." Top priorities should include the
United States "exerting real effort to help resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute
and displaying some humanitarian concern for the Palestinians."
Also the Bush administration "should make clear what U.S. aims are in
the region, frame a clear message for the Arabs about what our presence
means. Otherwise, we will continue walking down this very dark road we are
on."
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