The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (12 page)

While the United States was hard at work building a coalition in advance of a possible attack in Iraq, Israel was making war preparations at home. During the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had hinted at including payloads of chemical weapons in his Scuds targeting Israeli cities. This time Israel would be prepared to retaliate at the first sign of a missile launched in its direction. Having been asked to keep a low profile, as in 1990, Israel provided assistance in other ways. According to
USA Today
, Israeli commandos provided intelligence services to the United States, as well as:

As defense preparations continued, new concerns arose; the Palestinian Authority’s leader, Yasser Arafat, had a new toy. He became enamored of toy airplanes—literally. The Iraqis had allegedly taken toy airplanes, operated by remote control, and retrofitted them to carry explosives. A gleeful Arafat ordered that toy stores order large supplies of the model planes, bound ostensibly for children in hospitals in the PA. Not surprisingly, no child received a toy airplane. The planes were said to have been paid for by funds designated for humanitarian projects. The planes were converted into mini-bombers capable of carrying explosives—another means to kill innocent civilians in Israel.
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Israel’s hopes of being able to defend itself were dashed when, on December 22, 2002, senior officials in the Bush administration “told Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz that the U.S. has decided that Israel will not be involved in the war against Iraq even if Iraq launches a missile attack against Israel.”
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Mofaz also reassured the Israeli people that the Israeli Air Force was prepared to defend the country. In fact, by January 2003, the Israeli Air Force was flying reconnaissance forays over parts of Iraq.

In an attempt to sidetrack the United States from its focus on Iraq, Saddam Hussein pushed his Palestinian allies to launch a series of attacks against Israel. The
Jerusalem Post
reported that one major suicide attack was thwarted when police discovered a car filled with gasoline canisters and 300 kilograms of explosives. The vehicle was successfully detonated with no harm to anyone. Hezbollah stepped up attacks as well, sending a barrage of antitank missiles and mortar rounds into the Mount Dov region. Not to be outdone, Hamas jumped into the melee with Qussam rocket attacks into southern Israel.
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The increased activity caused Israeli officials to question whether or not the United States possessed a contingency plan based on all possible worst-case scenarios in Iraq. A
New York Times
article outlined some of the same concerns and nightmarish possibilities expressed by the Israelis:

Whether or not the United States had these plans in place, it was on March 17, 2003, that President Bush gave his final ultimatum: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”
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On March 20, 2003, at approximately 02:30 UTC, explosions were heard in Baghdad. The “shock and awe” air campaign to cripple Iraq’s defenses had begun. Within roughly twenty days, coalition forces captured Baghdad and were greeted by Iraqis cheering and pulling down a statue of Hussein, whose twenty-four-year rule had come to an end. By April 15, Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, was under coalition control. At that time it appeared the major fighting of the invasion was effectively over. On May 1, President Bush declared the cessation of major combat operations, and the occupation of Iraq, with the aim of establishing democratic self-rule, began.

Who would have imagined that in the next forty-two months we would suffer nearly twenty times as many casualties as during the time of the major combat operations? Little did anyone think at the time that over three years later, there would still be no end in sight to the major U.S. presence in the country, except perhaps the forces Hussein had enlisted to fight the real war in Iraq—the terrorist/guerrilla war that would be born the same day the occupation began.

They intended to spread Islam and in the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad, you can see that. He thinks there is going to be a second coming and that before that second coming can happen there has to be a clash of civilizations.
¹

—C
HRIS
H
AMILTON
,
senior fellow of Counterterrorism Studies,
Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Since the revolution by Khomeini, the view of Iran is to try to spread the Muslim revolution all over the world. To ruin whatever smells democratic, to ruin whatever seems democratic, and on the remnant of those democratic walls to build a new entity—an extreme Islamic regime that will be operated according to the Sharia Law which is the Islam leaders’ codex of laws. What they want to see is a new world where Islam is in control, and all entities will be like Iran, meaning they will be controlled and ruled by the ayatollahs, by the spiritual leaders, the clerics.
²

—G
EN.
D
ANI
Y
ATOM
,
former head of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad
and chief of staff under Prime Minister Ehud Barak

O
nce it became apparent to Hussein that his bravado was not going to deter the U.S.-led coalition from an attack, he began to order the disbursement of trainees from the various terrorist training camps around Iraq, most notably in Nasiriyah and Fallujah. The trainees were provided money, arms, explosives, and transportation. Teams of terrorists were assigned the job of penetrating Saudi Arabia’s borders with the assignment to carry out terrorist attacks. One team was able to murder a Saudi judge, Abdul Rahman al-Suhaybani, known for combating subversive activities in his province. The team members then went underground to join the vast terror networks—Al Qaeda, al-Muwahhidun, Hezbollah, and others—so that they could one day emerge to kill again.

With the U.S. air and ground offensives in full swing and coalition troops steadily advancing on Baghdad, Hussein began to lose confidence in the outcome of the war. It is thought that Hussein began to put into effect several possible escape plans. One involved calling in markers from his friends in Belarus. Hussein asked for charter flights to transport cargo and members of his family out of Iraq. A plane identified as a Belarusian IL-76 transport allegedly took off from Saddam International Airport and traversed Iranian airspace on its flight to Minsk, Belarus. There was initial speculation that both Hussein and his sons were on board the flight.
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Another exile-of-choice location was Paris, and indeed a group of Hussein’s handpicked scientists were among the first to be transported from Iraq to Paris via Damascus. This was yet another example of French cooperation with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Another arrangement involved Hussein joining a convoy of Russian diplomats from Baghdad to Damascus. When it was suggested that there might be a safer route through Amman, the Russian delegation declined and insisted on going to Damascus. With the convoy was Russian ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Titorenko. It has been reported that Hussein donned a disguise and joined the convoy carrying some twenty-five Russians. Just outside Baghdad, the convoy came under fire; five diplomats were wounded, some seriously, said Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko. Although the U.S. Central Command maintained that there were no coalition forces near where the attack occurred, Secretary of State Colin Powell contacted Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov to express his sincere apology for the incident. Powell did not admit any U.S. culpability, though.
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As the ground fighting around Baghdad began in earnest, Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, CENTCOM deputy commander, reported, “Regular Iraqi army units seemed to vanish as the coalition advanced. Low numbers of Iraqi prisoners indicated that the regular army units were avoiding the fight…. Regular Iraqi forces [along with senior officers] ‘have just melted away.’”
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With coalition troops entering Baghdad, the city fell into chaos. Various Iranian-armed and funded militia groups began to make their presence known in the city. The Shiite faction was, from all accounts, the most well armed and organized of the groups. The popularity of the anti-American, anti–Saddam Hussein groups grew as it became known they could provide food and medicine to the neighborhoods they controlled. One such area became known as Sadr City, a low-income suburb of Baghdad and home of some two million Shiite Muslims.

It looked as though advance preparations by Iran and Syria to make Iraq virtually uncontrollable were in full swing. The rage and antipathy of the Muslim world was directed at the “Great Satan.” Decree after decree and fatwa after fatwa were issued, calling for jihad against the United States. One came from Dr. Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, sheikh of Al-Azhar. He rallied the Iraqi people to continue their “
Jihad
in defense of religion, faith, honor, and property, because
Jihad
is a religious ruling of Islam aimed at opposing aggressors,” and encouraged Arab and Islamic volunteers to travel to Iraq, “to support the
Jihad
of their oppressed brethren there, because resistance to oppression is an Islamic obligation, whether the oppressor is Muslim or not.”
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In meetings between Iran’s Khamenei and Khatami and Syria’s al-Assad, the leaders determined that the United States should be met with violent resistance from the various Iraqi factions and from jihadists imported for the purpose of creating pandemonium for the coalition troops. The men called on the radical Islamic forces in the region to oppose an American occupation by every means possible. Again, Yossef Bodansky reported that Majlis (Iranian parliament) deputy Majid Ansari, in a briefing prior to the summit between Khamenei and al-Assad, outlined Iran’s position:

Both leaders were well aware that they were unable to forestall an American attack but could create havoc within Iraq once Saddam Hussein was deposed. The call for Islamic fanatics—terrorists, all—went forth and was answered by volunteers from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Palestinian Territory, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iran, and Syria, among others. The question for the coalition troops now became one of how to identify peaceful Iraqi citizens from the influx of terrorists bent on killing them in any way possible.

Outside Baghdad, Shiite enclaves that had been suppressed under Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime welcomed liberation by the coalition troops. In al Najaf, a long-repressed Iraqi leader and exile, Abdul Majid al-Khoi, was among the first to return to throngs of ecstatic townspeople. It was al-Khoi who first contacted Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and persuaded him to issue a decree to the Shiite population not to resist the American troops.

Iran was incensed, and retribution soon followed. Al-Khoi was attacked outside the Grand Imam Ali mosque by a death squad, his body hacked to pieces. It was widely intimated that the attack was carried out by a squad of the Mahdi army controlled by Iran-supported Sheikh Moqtada al-Sadr, whose family represents itself as the champion of the Shiite majority.

All the meetings, the conversations, and the proposals flying between Tehran and Damascus were for one purpose only: to stop the spread of democracy in the Muslim world. Tehran specifically saw the tide of democratic change as a direct threat to the continuance of its Islamic revolution. At that time, no Middle Eastern country—particularly Iran—possessed the weapons to effectively challenge the United States. Furthermore, if the United States could not be stopped in Iraq, would Iran be next in the crosshairs of democracy? The mullahs were desperate to find ways to further advance Iran’s interests.

Spurred on by Iran’s influence, and in direct defiance of Ali al-Sistani, “another Iraqi exile in Iran, Kadhem al-Husseini al-Haeri, issued a religious edict urging Iraqi Shiites ‘to seize the first possible opportunity to fill the power vacuum in the administration in Iraq.’”
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Indeed, as coalition troops withdrew from largely Shiite towns and villages, Iranian proxies were rapidly filling the void. It was not difficult to trace the point-of-origin of some of the infiltrators, especially when a Syrian missile (Syria, of course, being Iran’s “axis of evil” compatriot and the homebase of Iranian proxy Hezbollah) was used to bring down an Air Force A-10 over Baghdad.

The United States began to realize the seriousness of Syrian involvement in the continuing upheaval in Iraq and began to make plans to put a stop to it. Some in the Bush administration made conciliatory comments denying a possible move against Syria, and Britain’s Tony Blair assured al-Assad that he would not support such a move.

Faced with a growing certainty that it would be next in America’s sights, Syria pled with Saudi Arabia to intercede. Backed by Saudi promises to persuade al-Assad to relinquish Iraqi henchmen that had fled to Syria, the leaders in Riyadh successfully averted a Syrian invasion that would have been on the coattails of the Iraqi one.

“A
LLIES” AND
A
LLIANCES

Although some participated in the 1990–1991 Gulf War, many of America’s so-called allies sat on the sidelines during the Iraq invasion of 2003. However, once the coalition troops marched into Baghdad and began pulling down the idol-like images of Saddam Hussein, the Europeans began to line up for a piece of the postwar building program. They were eager to share in the bounty that was sure to result from the pillaging of Saddam’s palaces and storehouses. France and Germany began to try to ingratiate themselves with the United States to secure a role in future Iraq projects. They, along with other United Nations members, wanted a central role in the process. Even as France’s smooth-talking then foreign minister Dominique de Villepin was encouraging the Bush administration to let bygones be bygones, a French delegation was winging its way to Tehran to meet with leaders from Iran and from the Iraqi resistance.

Meanwhile in Iraq, Iranian-supported factions were spreading the jihad much like Typhoid Mary spread her murderous disease across New York in the early 1900s. Moqtada al-Sadr and his cronies spread “Shiite-controlled Iraq” propaganda, while other clerics encouraged their followers to defy American troops in open hostility. The southern Iraqi city of Kut rapidly became a stronghold for Iranian-backed forces determined to spread Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution to Iraq, and Tehran infused Sadr’s Mahdi army with new blood, raising their numbers to five thousand men. (As of the end of 2006, estimates of the Mahdi army’s size have grown to around sixty thousand.) These death squads assumed the duties of the local police while emulating the Iranian style of dress and driving vehicles supplied by Iran.

One of the ways the Iraqi Shiites made their presence known following the collapse of Hussein’s government was to celebrate Ashura, a holy day set aside to display the might of the Shiites. A part of the ritual surrounding Ashura Day is the use of chains for self-flagellation. It was during Ashura that the Iranian-backed forces made their presence known near Karbala and al Najaf, two of the holiest Shiite cities in Iraq. It is estimated that some two million people began the march toward the two cities, rapidly joined by millions from nearby cities, all “protected” by forces loyal to Iran. Intelligence services surmise that the march to and from Karbala and al Najaf was a means to transport weapons, explosives, munitions, and money throughout Iraq, as well as a means to transport and embed Iranian agents.

By the end of April 2004, coalition forces were already beginning to sit up and take notice of all the activity sponsored by neighboring Iran. In one of my meetings with Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, he stated that more than 85 percent of the improvised explosive devices used in Iraq were furnished by Iran.

The coalition troops were becoming more and more vulnerable to suicide attacks carried out by terrorists crossing the border from Iran. To compound the problem, Hezbollah forces remaining in Iraq after Saddam’s fall were joined by more forces slipping across the border from Syria. It was estimated that some twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand Iranian forces were actively fighting coalition forces in Iraq. This was a surprising turn of events for the Bush administration. The
Washington Post
reported they had “underestimated the Shiites’ organizational strength…[and were] concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government [in Iraq].”
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True to Israeli concerns expressed before the war, it appeared that the administration had a clear entry strategy but were unprepared for the task of stabilizing Iraq and dealing with the various factions in the country. Like the Energizer Bunny, France was too eager to jump on the bandwagon to encourage the United States to seek Iran’s assistance in the region. The French foreign minister de Villepin was one of the first to openly endorse asking Iran to join in providing assistance in the rebuilding of Iraq. What neither France nor the United States could know was that Iran was preparing to unchain the terrorist forces of Islamic radicals in Iraq. This, apparently, was in response to Iran’s fear that, given the opportunity, the United States would stop the Shiite majority in Iraq from controlling that country.

Equally staunch in making Iraq a case study for dealing with terrorist states, President Bush, in his speech aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln
on May 1, 2003, had issued this warning:

To add to the Islamic radical frenzy, Osama bin Laden reared his head via an audiotape from Pakistan and challenged the terrorists racing toward Iraq not only to attack American troops but to turn their hatred on moderate Arab countries that dared support the United States, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. On the tape, unveiled in a CBS news report, bin Laden called for every segment of Islamic society to support suicide bombers. With repeated calls for martyrdom, bin Laden expressed his support for “those martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the sake of Islam.”
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