The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (15 page)

Efforts to restore services were hampered by roaming resistance groups that targeted Iraqi civilians hard at work on repairing the infrastructure and providing the basics. The workers suffered verbal harangues at best, beatings and public execution at worst. As U.S.-trained Iraqi police began to patrol the cities, they became immediate targets for the terrorists. They were murdered on the streets, in training facilities, and in police stations; they were killed where they ate and where they slept. Is it any wonder that nothing constructive can be accomplished in Iraq, or why the Americans are blamed for all the ills that have befallen the nation since the removal of Hussein?

This violence only added to the difficulties that the United States faced daily in Iraq. The news that Saddam’s sons had been killed elicited a surprising backlash among the Muslim media. The Hussein sons were quickly elevated to martyr status, which all but negated the horrific crimes perpetrated by the two under their father’s tutelage. This only served to swell the ranks of willing martyrs for the cause. The one to benefit least from the release of the Iraqi people from the repressive Hussein regime was the United States. The invasion was declared to be the best thing that had ever happened in inspiring the Islamist cause.

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NTER
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RAN,
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GAIN

At this point in the war, even Arab-friendly states were beginning to back away from America’s involvement in Iraq. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak signed on with Iran to send Egyptian extremists imprisoned in Iran to Iraq as fighters. Mubarak, concerned about the rise of fanatical Islam in the Middle East and how it may affect Egypt, wanted to jump on the support bandwagon. He acknowledged the role of Hamas and other Palestinian forces in an effort to prevent an incursion into his country. Mubarak pledged funds and arms in support of the Islamic groups in close proximity of Egypt. After meetings between Iran’s intelligence chief, Ali Yunesi, and Mubarak’s envoy, Gen. Omar Suleiman, Iran agreed to a pact with Egypt that would protect Mubarak’s empire.

Not content with only creating an anti-American revolution in Iraq and a Sunni-Shiite civil war, Tehran also set about to create civil war between the ranks of the U.S.-friendly Kurds and Turkmen. Communities rose against each other, clashes with United States troops became more common, and a warning was issued against trying to disarm the Kurdish soldiers. As the unrest grew, the door was opened for infiltration into Kurdish ranks by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorists and others from Syria and Iran. The United States was in grave danger of losing another ally in Iraq.

The Islamic radical offensive against American forces escalated as the year neared an end. On October 26, 2006, in the midst of Ramadan, suicide bombings escalated in the heart of Baghdad. An American Black Hawk helicopter was downed near Tikrit, a first for the terrorists in this conflict. The Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad was hit by rockets fired from launchers disguised as generators. The targets were American VIPs, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Killed during the attack was an American colonel. A number of American civilians and military personnel were wounded. It was later determined that the rockets used were modified versions of rockets originating in France and the old Soviet Union.

The attack was followed by what the Islamic radicals deemed to be a symbolic withdrawal of Americans from the Al-Rashid Hotel to the safety of the green zone and to protected sites outside the city. The Americans were on the run, albeit not very far.

Following closely on the heels of the attack on the Al-Rashid on October 27 were car bombing attacks on targets in Baghdad, the Red Cross headquarters, Iraqi government offices, police stations, and a fourth attack that failed when the car bomb did not explode on contact with a cement barrier outside a second police compound. The driver responsible for the failed mission carried a Syrian passport.

On October 28, revolutionaries targeted a tank north of Baghdad, shot a Baghdad deputy mayor—an American ally—in the head at a café in Baghdad, attacked an Iraqi military police convoy, bombed a shopping area serving Iraqis working for the government, and blew up an American supply train near Fallujah. The attackers didn’t stop there. October 30 saw the dawning of another day of intense terror activities: U.S. military patrols were attacked, roadside bombs detonated, police stations strafed with gunfire, American bases hit by mortar fire, and an American patrol ambushed. The attacks spilled over into the next day with attacks on Americans in Mosul and Abu Ghraib. As October gave way to November, the attacks intensified, both in power and superiority.

Once the terrorists became aware that they possessed the capability to bring down a Black Hawk, an all-out campaign to rid the skies of helicopters and troop transport planes began anew. With an arsenal of rockets and machine guns, the insurgents were able to hit the engine of a Chinook helicopter. The crash killed sixteen and injured twenty on board. Another attack on a Black Hawk near Tikrit resulted in the deaths of all six crewmembers. Yet another Black Hawk, hit by machine-gun fire, rolled violently and crashed into another helicopter, bringing both down. Seventeen were killed and five wounded.

November saw an increase in the number of strikes and a new round of assassination attempts aimed at those thought to be in collusion with the United States. Car bombings increased as American patrols were decreased to protect the troops. American commanders instigated new evasive actions designed to safeguard American units, and the terrorists took advantage of their absence.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden had not been idle. He was busy setting up training camps in remote locations to provide on-the-job training for the insurgents flooding into Iraq. The objective was to whip out small cells in a short period of time, equip them with arms and funds, and send them forth to create murder and mayhem at will. The CIA determined that bin Laden had a pool of some ten thousand Saudi radicals ready and willing to join his cause—a situation that could ultimately signal trouble for the House of Saud. Why? A number of his commanders had joined him straight from the ranks of important tribes in Saudi Arabia.

However, just as the terrorists had their training network, so did the United States. Once again the armed forces called on the Israelis, long submerged in combating antiterrorism and urban fighting. The intifada had served as an excellent training ground for the Israeli Defense Forces. They were, in turn, able to share their knowledge acquired in the trenches with U.S. troops. Special combat units were sent to Israel to train, and in return Israeli commanders were invited to the United States to provide instruction for their U.S. counterparts.

The Israelis were also able to provide information on special operations and knowledge of the particulars of dealing with the kind of social structure the Americans were encountering in Iraq. The United States even went so far as to clandestinely import Israeli instructors into Iraq to provide on-the-ground indoctrination.

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RAN’S
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URGEONING
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MBITIONS

Meanwhile, it was revealed that Iran had put itself back in the race for nuclear power. After the revolution of 1979, Iran’s nuclear program was all but defunct. Contractors who had been working with the shah’s government canceled all nuclear contracts, including finishing the Bushehr nuclear power plant whose two reactors were partially completed. The facility was further decimated in repeated attacks during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. In 1995, Iran contracted with Russia to rebuild one of the reactors at Bushehr, much to the chagrin of the United States, but little evidence existed to prove that Iran’s nuclear capabilities would produce anything more than electricity.

Then in 2002, Alireza Jafarzadeh, a member of the dissident People’s Mujahedin of Iran (also known as Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, or MEK for short), revealed that Iran had two secret facilities aimed at something more than just powering cities: a partially underground uranium enrichment site at Natanz and a heavy water facility in Arak.

Thus began the cat-and-mouse game I outlined in detail in
Showdown With Nuclear Iran
that I will not recap here. Iran, because of the extremism of its worldview, saw no reason to play things straight with outside infidels. Needless to say, this issue came to a head again in the summer of 2006 with two new events.

The first was that a package of incentives was offered by the EU3 (Great Britain, France, and Germany) and the United States to Iran to stop its uranium enrichment programs. Iran promised a response to this by August 22, 2006. The second was Iranian talks with world leaders that took place in early July before the G8 Summit in Russia on July 15–17. At these talks, Iran was told that pressure to verify that its nuclear program was peaceful would be a major point of discussion at the G8 Summit.

To this, Iran’s response was twofold as well. As Israeli minister of tourism Isaac Herzog told me:

Shortly after those kidnappings, Hezbollah began firing Katyusha rockets on Israel’s northern cities. The result was the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict that saw Israel push deeply into Lebanon with the hope of disarming Hezbollah. A UN ceasefire proposal brought the hostilities to an end on August 11, 2006, but despite suffering the destruction of most of their rocket launchers and armaments, much of the world media proclaimed Hezbollah the true winner of the fighting. During this time, the G8 Summit had come and gone, and the press paid little attention to Iran and its uranium enrichment. On July 31, however, the UN Security Council had set an August 31 deadline for Iran to stop its enrichment activities or face sanctions. The deadline came and went with no further action.

Regarding the first event, the UE3 and U.S. incentive program for August 22, Iran responded with a long document that said they would gladly return to the negotiating table but refused to stop their enrichment activities, which had, of course, been the prerequisite set forth in the incentive plan for negotiations to resume. On August 31, President Ahmadinejad boldly stated via Iranian television, “They should know that the Iranian nation will not yield to pressure and will not let its rights be trampled on.”
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On October 23, Ahmadinejad announced, “The enemies, resorting to propaganda, want to block us from achieving (nuclear technology)…but they should know that today, the capability of our nation has multiplied tenfold over the same period last year.”
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Then on October 27, Iran announced that it had doubled its nuclear enrichment capabilities. “We are injecting gas into the second cascade, which we installed two weeks ago,” an unidentified Iranian official reported.
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An Iranian official also announced Iran would add three thousand new centrifuges to the facilities at Natanz by March 2007 of the type that a BBC expert said could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
¹³

Obviously Iran has no intentions of stopping its nuclear pursuits just because we’ve asked them nicely.

According to all sources, Iran is very close to its determined plan of possessing nuclear weapons capabilities. Pakistan, North Korea, and even Russia can be thanked for the advances in nuclear technology enjoyed by this rogue nation bent on destruction. While the world’s eyes were turned on Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Iran’s nuclear pursuits slipped under the radar of world leaders. One can but wonder how much additional technological progress was made by the scientists at the enrichment facilities scattered across Iran as Hezbollah lobbed shrapnel-laden missiles into the midst of Israeli cities.

In an interview on CNN in May 2006, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said, “The technological threshold [for Iran to make a nuclear weapon] is very close. It can be measured by months rather than years.”
¹⁴

Of course, the estimates of when Iran might possess the technical capabilities to produce a nuclear device have ranged from the end of 2006 to the prognostications of Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. He told BBC Radio’s
Today
program that “Tehran could have a nuclear bomb ready between 2010 and 2015.”
¹⁵

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RAN’S
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ROXY
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ARS

Although the kidnappings and missile attacks in the summer of 2006 heightened U.S. awareness of Iran’s threat to worldwide freedom, this had become clear to me as early as 1983. It was a little past 6:00 a.m. in Beirut, and I was standing on a beachhead along the beautiful Mediterranean, talking to a group of marines.

The U.S. Marines stationed at Beirut’s International Airport were just beginning a new day. One marine sentry at the airport gate looked up to see a big, yellow Mercedes truck barreling down on the security gate. The sentry reportedly stated that the driver of the truck smiled at him as he crashed through the gates. The truck was on a course for the lobby of the barracks. The sentries, armed only with loaded pistols, were unable to stop the speeding vehicle.

The Mercedes carried explosives equal to six tons of TNT. The driver rammed into the lower floor of the barracks and discharged his deadly cargo. The explosion was so great that the four-story building collapsed in a heap of rubble. Many of the 241 dead were not killed by the blast itself but were crushed beneath the cinder-block building as it fell in on itself.