... Until early 2005, U.S. authorities understood that the Iraqi insurgency consisted primarily of FRE's or Former Regime Elements. As then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Atlantic Monthly, "[T]hey're allied with people who want to help them win, by which I mean the jihadis on the one side and the Syrian Baathists on the other."
In the spring of 2005, however, the U.S. understanding of the insurgency shifted. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came to be seen as the most dangerous part of the violence, and he was understood to act independently of the Baathists. Yet the Baathists and Islamic radicals have been working together for a number of years -- at least since 1998, according to the documents cited here. Why should that cooperation have stopped in 2005?
Iraqi officials understand the insurgency quite differently from U.S. officials. In late 2005, the Iraqi Defense Minister instructed the embassy in Washington to tell the Americans that the Baathists were the enemy. His warning, which followed a mortar attack targeting General George Casey and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, evidently fell on deaf ears.
Similarly, another senior Iraqi politician told a small group of Americans last fall that Zarqawi was "nothing." Zarqawi's operation is essentially run by the Syrian mukhabarrat, this Iraqi figure explained. Jihadis are recruited through the mosques to Syria, where they are trained by individuals from Afghanistan. They then cross into Iraq, all the time under the watchful eyes of Syrian authorities, without realizing that they are, in fact, part of a major Syrian intelligence operation.
Most recently, Jawad al-Maliki, Iraq's new Prime Minister -- in his first television interview after assuming that post -- warned neighboring states that Iraq would not tolerate "security interference" or involvement with "certain movements inside Iraq."
"[I]f you don't see who the enemy is and why they're fighting, you can't win," Wolfowitz told the Atlantic Monthly. Indeed, "know the enemy" is ancient and axiomatic. A critical link is missing in the current U.S. understanding of the violence in the Middle East, namely how the intelligence agencies of terrorist states interact with the jihadi networks. We consistently see the jihadis, indeed, they are front and center, but we are blind to the intelligence agencies that use them, support them, and hide behind them...
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