Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [349]
Deploying five fresh combat brigades, generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno launched operations to destroy the insurgency through combined military, political, economic and diplomatic methods. The essence of this was to deny Al Qaeda the outlying and suburban strongholds from which they had launched the urban roadside bombs and suicide missions that were killing six thousand Iraqis a month. It was a variant of the counter-insurgency tactics used by General Sir Gerald Templer in Malaya, although US forces have been used aggressively and without any equivalent to the British colonial police. Large-scale follow-up operations like Phantom Strike hit the jihadis as they fled towards Mosul. At the same time Petraeus took many unemployed young men off the streets by instituting essential public works programmes designed to fix things that should have been fixed on day one.
Judging from the discontent revealed in Al Qaeda in Iraq’s internal correspondence, these surge operations have stemmed the flow of foreign volunteer martyrs coming from Libya and Saudi Arabia. They arrive, hang around, grow disillusioned and leave because the major urban attacks have been interdicted. They want the big money-shot (for the structure of jihadist suicide videos resembles that of porn movies) and not some minor attack that kills a couple of American civilian contractors. Insofar as most Iraqis are keen to retain democratic elections while their elected government is urging the US to maintain a military presence, these operations can be said to have been a political success, even if the main geopolitical consequence of the war has been to extend Iran’s influence westwards, thereby triggering improbably improved relations between Saudi Arabia, Syria and Israel. Al Qaeda in Iraq has also conspicuously failed in its twin objectives of creating an Islamic state and plunging the country into a sectarian civil war. However, one worries about how many men may have experienced training and combat in Iraq, and how many of them are Europeans who may try to commit acts of terrorism on their return home. In that sense, Iraq may play a similar role to the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. In 2005 French counter-terrorism officials rounded up the so-called 19th arrondissement cell. This was the handiwork of a twenty-six-year-old Franco-Algerian called Farid Benyettou, an ex-janitor turned imam, who had recruited suicide bombers to go to Iraq.
In Europe, intelligence and police work has frustrated several conspiracies to murder. As a result of the concentration of powers of investigation, detention and punishment in the juges d’instruction such as Jean-Louis Bruguière and Jean-François Ricard, the French have been the most aggressive in combating terrorism and religious subversion, holding suspects for periods of time that would embarrass the US itself. French skill in this area is indirectly reflected in the fact that the main CIA station for counter-terrorism is in Paris, while the Spanish intelligence services have agreed joint operations that take no notice of the Pyrenees as a border. This co-operation has paid off. Thanks to a tip-off from a French agent inserted into a Pakistani network, on 19 January 2008 Spanish police arrested eleven Indian and Pakistani males who were allegedly conspiring to blow up Barcelona on 11 March so as to force the tiny Spanish contingent out of Afghanistan. It is striking that although France has been largely spared major terrorist incidents since the 1990s, while its government ostentatiously refused to get involved in Iraq, it nevertheless sees itself as an integral part of Western civilisation under jihadist attack. The hardline domestic approach to terrorism does not prevent a highly nuanced French diplomacy towards the Arab world. In April 2008 the US homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff and the German interior minister Wolfgang Sch