CPA gets some free PR

I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I can't help but have some doubts about the authenticity of the captured memo supposedly written by Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi calling for al-Qaeda's help in arranging attacks on Shia targets in Iraq.

I suppose it could be authentic, but it is just so damned convenient. It's chock full of things that the US will be delighted to hear and the Bush administration will love to point out. As the New York Times puts it, it "bears out a number of American assumptions about the strength and nature of religious extremists."

For example:

- It praises American resolve: "America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."

- It says the Iraqis themselves will not help: "Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother. However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house."

- It says the US-created Iraqi security services have deprived the insurgents of allies: "You end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance. When the Americans withdraw ... they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region."

- It says the US plan to hand over power to the Iraqis come July will leave them with "no pretexts" for resistance: "How can we kill their cousins and sons? The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority. This is the democracy."

- Ultimately, it says the US is winning and they are losing: "We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By God, this is suffocation!"

By God, what this is, is a bloody Coalition Provisional Authority press release. In fact, the CPA has already tried using it in just that manner, the Christian Science Monitor tells us on February 10. At a press briefing on Monday,

deputy director of operations Gen. Mark Kimmitt emphasized the US military's assertion that the thrust of the plans to sabotage coalition security efforts comes from outside the country.

"First of all, it is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society. And first of all, the Iraqi people have demonstrated time after time that they are unwilling to participate in any of these activities by and large. They are looking forward to a free, united and sovereign Iraq."

US officials also jumped at the chance to use the document to support old claims, as when the BBC reported on Monday that

US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington said the letter added "credence" to US pre-war claims about connections between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi leadership.

But in fact it did no such thing. Indeed, to the extent that the document is reliable, to that same extent it actually undermines those claims. First, as the Times notes, it says nothing about prewar connection with Saddam Hussein, "nor is there any mention of a collaboration with Hussein loyalists." More significantly,

[t]he author offers his services and those of his followers to the recipients of the letter, who American officials contend are Al Qaeda's leaders.

"You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad, we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did," the writer says. "So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command."

That is, Zarqawi, if he was indeed the author, is offering to put his supporters under the direction of the al-Qaeda hierarchy in the efforts in Iraq if they will help.

That clearly speaks against any current significant al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, breaking the chain of association. And if there's none there now and if Zarqawi makes no mention of working with Baathist elements in the insurgency, that would indicate no connection between al-Qaeda and the Baathists and no connection between Zarqawi and the Baathists. Since Zarqawi was the White House's Exhibit A in attempting to show an al-Qaeda-to-Saddam link (Both Bush and Colin Powell referred to him by name in that regard), that breaks the chain a second way.

In fact, there was never a good reason to closely link Zarqawi to al-Qaeda in the first place. As long ago as the June 25, 2003 issue of Newsweek, columnists Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported on German intelligence showing that not only was Zarqawi not a "collaborator of Osama bin Laden," as Powell charged in his UN speech, he was the head of his own terrorist group, al-Tawhid, and may even have been a jealous rival of bin Laden. That they knew each other and had some overlapping goals and kept in contact is undeniable. But the fact is that Zarqawi has been his own agent, certainly in no way answerable to al-Qaeda or any of its leaders.

So what does that mean for the authenticity of the document? I'm not sure. I still have my doubts, partly because it makes out the situation facing the insurgency - or at least Zarqawi's part of it - to be measurably worse, and US policy correspondingly more effective, than most observers think. But a fake would not, I suspect, so transparently refute an al-Qaeda connection to the violence. My best guess is that the document is genuine (although perhaps not written by Zarqawi) but is deliberately somewhat over the top in its descriptions, the better to make the case for assistance.

And the truth is, even if the letter is genuine, it doesn't take away from the dangerous and tenuous situation that is Iraq. Don't forget that the plan described was to launch attacks on Shiite targets in order to provoke retaliation against Sunnis and thus "awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands" of the Shiites. That is, it did not propose to create tensions and fears, it proposed to exploit those that already exist.

Not quite three weeks ago I raised the possibility of Iraq dissolving into a three-way civil war, a few days before it developed that the CIA was telling Washington the same thing. Now comes another voice, found in Time magazine for February 10.

"I will tell you right now, I believe there will be civil war in Iraq come July," warns retired General Anthony Zinni, an opponent of the war who, as chief of U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000, commanded all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions.

Not one of those judgments is based on the activities of "outsiders," to use General Kimmitt's word (truly an odd one coming from an American); all are based on the very real existence of bitter ethnic, nationalistic, and religious rivalries.

We have seen - recently seen - what can happen when long-suppressed rivalries of these sorts bubble freely to the surface. We saw it in the former states of the USSR. We saw it in the Balkans. I fear we will yet see it in Iraq.