Ayman al-Zawahiri: Jihad’s Judas
By Patrick Poole
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 26, 2007

In a videotaped message released last week, Al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, ridiculed President George W. Bush, who he claimed was “addicted to drinking, lying and gambling”, an obvious reference to Bush’s long-admitted moral failings dated a long-time ago. But since Zawahiri is interested in dragging up the distant past to mock his nemesis, let’s take time to revisit a couple of episodes from his own past that shed a less-than-flattering light on the principles of Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man and the public face of Al-Qaeda in recent years.

In Lawrence Wright’s recent book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), and in his lengthy September 2002 New Yorker profile of Zawahiri, “The Man Behind Bin Laden”, Wright recounts two incidents from Zawahiri’s biography that the Egyptian terror leader has been reluctant to advertise: his own qualifications as Jihad’s Judas.

In one instance following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Zawahiri fingered one of his closest friends sought by authorities and actively participated in setting up a trap to capture his fellow jihadi; and in the other instance, Zawahiri was directly involved in the car bomb assassination of Al-Qaeda founder Abdullah Azzam over a disagreement in the future direction of the Afghanistan mujahedeen and to advance his personal position.

On October 8, 1981, President Sadat was reviewing a military parade in Cairo, when a military vehicle carrying a group of assassins – associates of Zawahiri – veered towards the viewing stands where Sadat was seated. The assassins began throwing hand grenades into the stands and firing volleys of automatic rifle fire into the President, killing him immediately. Zawahiri claimed that he wasn’t aware of the plot until a few hours before it occurred, but immediately following the assassination, he was helping his closest friend and fellow member of Zawahiri’s jihad cell, Essam al-Qamari, coordinate a follow-up attack at Sadat’s funeral in an attempt to decapitate the government and install their own “Islamic” government. However, one of the conspirators was arrested before the plot could fully develop.

In the aftermath of the Sadat assassination, Zawahiri inexplicably was not immediately taken into custody, nor did he flee or go underground; Qamari, however, was the most wanted man in Egypt. Eventually, Zawahiri was brought in for questioning by Interior Ministry officials and his communications monitored. According to multiple sources, it was at this point that Zawahiri divulged the whereabouts of his friend, Qamari. This is confirmed by a former friend of Zawahiri’s and one of his cellmates, Montasser al-Zayyat, in his tell-all book on Zawahiri, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden’s Right-Hand Man:

After he was arrested on October 15, 1981, Zawahiri informed the authorities of Qamari's whereabouts. He had taken a refuge in a small mosque where he used to pray and meet Zawahiri and other members of the group. It was this painful memory which was at the root of Zawahiri's suffering, and which prompted him to leave Egypt for Saudi Arabia. He stayed there until he left for Afghanistan in 1987.

According to Wright’s account of Zawahiri’s betrayal of Qamari (found on pp. 52-53 in The Looming Tower), Zawahiri was present at the time of Qamari’s arrest to finger his associate. Zawahiri later testified against Qamari and thirteen other associates during their trials.

But as one analyst explains, in an attempt to cover-up the shame of his betrayal of Qamari, Zawahiri has engaged in a creative re-interpretation of the events surrounding Qamari’s capture (after Qamari was conveniently dead) in a series of articles he had published in December 2001 in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in response to Zayyat’s book:

…one reason for Al-Zawahiri's desire for a quick exit from Egypt had to do with the information he had given to the police which led to the arrest of his close friend, Issam Al-Qamari. The police investigation minutes, quoted by Al-Zayyat, suggest that Al-Zawahiri arranged to meet his friend at a location surrounded by security personnel so that Al-Qamari could be arrested without bloodshed. By contrast, in his memoirs Al-Zawahari draws a fantastic picture of great heroism shown by Al-Qamari and a small group of his comrades who were hiding in a workshop. When the police tried to break into the hiding place Al-Qamari, according to Al-Zawahiri, lobbed hand grenades and opened fire from automatic weapons causing a lot of fatalities and confusion among the police. Al-Qamari was chased by the police in the narrow lanes of the poor Cairo neighborhood lobbing hand grenades at his pursuers. The battle went on for hours until Al-Qamari's ammunition was exhausted. Al-Zawahiri's story sounds like a sheer fantasy. (Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli, “Radical Islamist Profiles (3): Ayman Muhammad Rabi' Al-Zawahiri: The Making of an Arch Terrorist,” MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 127 [March 11, 2003])

While Zawahiri’s betrayal of Essam al-Qamari might be excused on the grounds that his cooperation in capturing Qamari was obtained through the threat of torture, the assassination of one of the top mujahedeen leaders in Afghanistan, Abdullah Azzam, a mentor to both Bin Laden and Zawahiri and the founder of Al-Qaeda, over disagreements in the direction of jihad after the defeat of the Soviets, clearly shows that Zawahiri is hardly the man of principle and courage portrayed in his videos, but a power-hungry opportunist that will turn to murdering fellow jihadis to improve his position in the global jihad.

Azzam’s assassination occurred as a power struggle broke out among two Egyptian groups in Afghanistan: Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Saudi-funded Al-Jama’a Al-Islamiyya. Raphaeli describes the heart of the conflict between the two organizations:

Al-Murabitoon (a magazine published by Al-Jama’a) accused Al-Zawahiri of depositing in his Swiss bank account money he had collected to support the Mujahedeen. He was also accused of selling arms provided by bin Laden and using the proceeds to buy gold nuggets. In the face of these accusations, some relief agencies decided to cut off their aid to Al-Zawahiri, and the need for funds forced him to seek assistance from Iran. This move further alienated the Gulf countries, particularly, Saudi Arabia which henceforth channeled all its aid to Al-Jama'a. By the time the Soviet Union started pulling out of Afghanistan in 1992 the conflict between the two groups reached the stage of mutual accusation of Takfir, or apostasy, and individual acts of assassination. Al-Zawahiri emerged the winner from this conflict, largely because of bin Laden's support and because of the murder of Abdallah Azzam, the spiritual leader of bin Laden.

Most analysts agree that Zawahiri was the chief beneficiary of Azzam’s assassination, and it solidified his position alongside Bin Laden among the jihadis that remained in Afghanistan. Western intelligence authorities believes that the assassination of Azzam was carried out by Zawahiri’s close Egyptian associate, Mohammad Atef, under Zawahiri’s orders.

But as Wright explains in his New Yorker article, the murder of Azzam and his sons was driven by nothing more than ideological and strategic differences between the Azzam and Bin Laden/Zawahiri factions within Al-Qaeda:

Bin Laden's final break with Abdullah Azzam came in a dispute over the scope of jihad. Bin Laden envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Sheikh Abdullah strongly opposed making war against fellow-Muslims. Zawahiri undermined Azzam's position by spreading rumors that he was a spy. "Zawahiri said he believed that Abdullah Azzam was working for the Americans," Osama Rushdi told me. "Sheikh Abdullah was killed that same night." On November 24, 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. Although no one has claimed credit for the killings, many have been blamed, including Zawahiri himself, and even bin Laden. At Azzam's funeral, Zawahiri delivered a eulogy.

Azzam’s plan to take the jihad from Afghanistan to Israel would die with him. Instead, Zawahiri’s plan of launching attacks against the Muslim regimes in the Middle East prevailed, and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War a few years later would provide the justification for Al-Qaeda leadership to focus on taking out the only remaining Cold War superpower, the US. But it would take the murder of one of the brightest stars of jihad, Azzam, to put their plan into action – a murderous program repeated by Bin Laden and Zawahiri just days before 9/11 with the preemptive assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, hero of the anti-Soviet resistance and leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance.

Of course, it is easy for Zawahiri to mock President Bush and cite his past faults as he is hiding in a cave on the other side of the planet. But as we know, that takes no more courage than writing an op-ed for the New York Times or Washington Post. But as indicated by the two separate incidents of betrayal of his own, Ayman Al-Zawahiri has no moral high ground to lecture President Bush for his past personal failures or the American people for our foreign policy.

Perhaps Zawahiri should learn that people looking establish shari’a throughout the world, especially Jihad’s Judas himself, should not be so quick to throw stones.

Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.

Ailing Iraqi president arrives in Jordan for tests
By Suleiman al-KhalidiSun Feb 25, 6:59 PM ET
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani arrived in Jordan for medical tests on Sunday after suffering low blood pressure, Jordanian and Iraqi officials said.

A close aide to Talabani, an influential figure with close links to Washington, denied media reports of a heart attack. "It's a lie. He is exhausted...he had a very long week in Sulaimaniya meeting with party leaders," he told Reuters.

Talabani is involved in political efforts to quell fierce sectarian rivalries in Iraq, while U.S. troop reinforcements attempt to root out militant groups in Baghdad and avert a slide into allout civil war.

A Jordanian official and medical staff said Talabani was driven from Amman airport in a convoy to the specialist King Hussein Medical Center.

"The guest is now being thoroughly examined by a team of specialist doctors," said a medical administrator inside the military run hospital where security guards barred journalists from entering the front gate.

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told Reuters in Baghdad: "He had a drop in blood pressure. Doctors said he needs further tests."

Salih, a Kurd, is close to the president, a former Kurdish guerrilla leader in his early 70s.

A statement issued by Talabani's office said there was no cause for concern, but gave no details of his illness.

CLOSE LINKS TO WASHINGTON

"Because of his hard work in past days, President Jalal Talabani has become ill and the doctors advised him to take some tests and now he is on his way to Jordan," the statement said.

"This morning he woke up and he felt very tired. The doctor checked him up and didn't find anything wrong. But Sulaimaniya doesn't have all the technology and he is the president so the doctor convinced him to do further tests."

Talabani's post is largely ceremonial but he is an influential political figure at home and in Washington.

On Saturday, Talabani met U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in the autonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq and held a joint news conference with Kurdish regional President Masoud Barzani.

Talabani heads the secular, socialist Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two parties that dominate the Kurdish enclave that broke away from Baghdad's control after the 1991 Gulf war.

A former guerrilla leader who fought Saddam Hussein for years, Talabani capped a life dedicated to the Kurdish cause by becoming Iraq's first Kurdish head of state.

Born in 1933, Talabani has spent most of his life fighting for independence for Kurds. He is known affectionately among Kurds as Mam, or uncle.

(Additional reporting by Claudia Parsons and Mariam Karouny and Ibon Villelabeitia in Baghdad and Washington bureau)

From The Sunday Times
February 25, 2007
US generals ‘will quit’ if Bush orders Iran attack
Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter, Washington
SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources.

Tension in the Gulf region has raised fears that an attack on Iran is becoming increasingly likely before President George Bush leaves office. The Sunday Times has learnt that up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack.

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

“There are enough people who feel this would be an error of judgment too far for there to be resignations.”

A generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented. “American generals usually stay and fight until they get fired,” said a Pentagon source. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is believed to represent the view of his senior commanders.

The threat of a wave of resignations coincided with a warning by Vice-President Dick Cheney that all options, including military action, remained on the table. He was responding to a comment by Tony Blair that it would not “be right to take military action against Iran”.

Iran ignored a United Nations deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment programme last week. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted that his country “will not withdraw from its nuclear stances even one single step”.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran could soon produce enough enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs a year, although Tehran claims its programme is purely for civilian energy purposes.

Nicholas Burns, the top US negotiator, is to meet British, French, German, Chinese and Russian officials in London tomorrow to discuss additional penalties against Iran. But UN diplomats cautioned that further measures would take weeks to agree and would be mild at best.

A second US navy aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS John C Stennis arrived in the Gulf last week, doubling the US presence there. Vice Admiral Patrick Walsh, the commander of the US Fifth Fleet, warned: “The US will take military action if ships are attacked or if countries in the region are targeted or US troops come under direct attack.”

But General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said recently there was “zero chance” of a war with Iran. He played down claims by US intelligence that the Iranian government was responsible for supplying insurgents in Iraq, forcing Bush on the defensive.

Pace’s view was backed up by British intelligence officials who said the extent of the Iranian government’s involvement in activities inside Iraq by a small number of Revolutionary Guards was “far from clear”.

Hillary Mann, the National Security Council’s main Iran expert until 2004, said Pace’s repudiation of the administration’s claims was a sign of grave discontent at the top.

“He is a very serious and a very loyal soldier,” she said. “It is extraordinary for him to have made these comments publicly, and it suggests there are serious problems between the White House, the National Security Council and the Pentagon.”

Mann fears the administration is seeking to provoke Iran into a reaction that could be used as an excuse for an attack. A British official said the US navy was well aware of the risks of confrontation and was being “seriously careful” in the Gulf.

The US air force is regarded as being more willing to attack Iran. General Michael Moseley, the head of the air force, cited Iran as the main likely target for American aircraft at a military conference earlier this month.

According to a report in The New Yorker magazine, the Pentagon has already set up a working group to plan airstrikes on Iran. The panel initially focused on destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and on regime change but has more recently been instructed to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq.

However, army chiefs fear an attack on Iran would backfire on American troops in Iraq and lead to more terrorist attacks, a rise in oil prices and the threat of a regional war.

Britain is concerned that its own troops in Iraq might be drawn into any American conflict with Iran, regardless of whether the government takes part in the attack.

One retired general who participated in the “generals’ revolt” against Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war said he hoped his former colleagues would resign in the event of an order to attack. “We don’t want to take another initiative unless we’ve really thought through the consequences of our strategy,” he warned.

Forces Conduct Humanitarian Operations in Iraq
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2007 – U.S. troops conducted a medical support operation at a school and Polish soldiers handed out humanitarian supplies in two separate operations over the past three days in Iraq.

U.S. soldiers of the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, and the 210th Brigade Support Battalion, both part of the, 10th Mountain Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, conducted a medical support operation at the Ahmed Suhel School in Al Taraq, Iraq, Feb. 22.

Although the school offered a comfortable atmosphere, terrorists tried to disrupt the day's activities with small arms fire and a rocket-propelled grenade attack. But the medical support operation continued and Iraqis still received care.

Local residents nationals were seen from everything from coughs to burns, but some cases could not be treated with basic medical care.
Seventy-five received treatment. No one was injured during the terrorist attack.

"If we shut this down, then the terrorist would have won," said Capt. Shane Finn, the commander of Company C, 4-31st and native of Clinton, N.Y. "All they are trying to do is stop the operation - and they are not going to do that."

In a separate operation, Polish soldiers from Headquarters Battalion in Ad Diwaniya handed out gifts they had collected for humanitarian aid for the poorest people in Al Qadisiyah province, Feb. 23.

"The soldiers have initiated this assistance. They provided hygiene products and cleaning agents. We brought a lot of this stuff from Poland with us, and we bought more here with our own money," said Polish Maj. Miroslaw Marcinuk.

(Compiled from Multinational Corps Iraq press releases.)

Related Sites:
Multinational Corps Iraq

From Publishers Weekly
In this engaging if unbalanced survey, the author of the acclaimed Six Days of War finds continuity in U.S. relations with the Middle East from the early 19th-century war against the Barbary pirates to today's Iraq war. As America's power grew, he contends, strategic considerations became complicatedby the region's religious significance, especially to the Protestant missionaries whose interests drove U.S. policyin the 19th century and who championed a Jewish state in Palestine long before the Zionist movement took up that cause. Meanwhile, Oren notes, Americans' romantic fantasies about the Muslim world (as expressed in Mideast-themed movies) have repeatedly run aground on stubborn, squalid realities, most recently in the Iraq fiasco. Oren dwells on the pre-WWII era, when U.S.-Mideast relations were of little significance. The postwar period, when these relations were central to world affairs, gets shoehorned into 127 hasty pages, and the emphasis on continuity gives short shrift to the new and crucial role of oil in U.S. policy making. Oren's treatment views this history almost entirely through American eyes; the U.S. comes off as usually well intentioned and idealistic, if often confused and confounded by regional complexities. Oren's is a fluent, comprehensive narrative of two centuries of entanglement, but it's analytically disappointing. Photos. (Jan. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Robert Kagan
We often hear that Americans know little about other nations; a bigger problem is that we know too little about ourselves, our history and our national character. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, in particular, we were all born yesterday, unaware of how present policies and attitudes fit into persistent historical patterns. So when a brilliant, lucid historian such as Michael B. Oren does bring the past back to life for us, revealing both what has changed and what has stayed the same, it is a shaft of light in a dark sky.

Today, the conventional view is that George W. Bush took the United States on a radical departure when he declared a policy to transform the Middle East and that, as soon as he leaves office, U.S. policy will return to an alleged tradition of realism, rooted in the hard-headed pursuit of tangible national interests. This is both bad history and bad prophecy, as Oren shows in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures.

As a historian, Oren is more storyteller than grand theorist, so as a study of the complex and contradictory motives of American behavior, his book is a bit thin. Nevertheless, three powerful themes emerge from his tales: that from the Founders onward, Americans have repeatedly tried to transform Arab and Muslim peoples -- politically, spiritually and economically -- to conform to liberal and Christian principles; that since the days of the Puritans, many Americans have been obsessed with the idea of "restoring" Palestine to the Jews; and that from the colonial era to the present, many (and perhaps most) Americans have regarded Islam as a barbaric, violent and despotic religion. Whether these purposes and perceptions have been intelligent or misguided, based on reality or fantasy, Oren shows that they have been the dominant features of our foreign policy tradition in the Middle East.

Oren demonstrates that suspicion and hostility toward Islam are almost as old as the nation. John Quincy Adams called it a "fanatic and fraudulent" religion, founded on "the natural hatred of Mussulmen towards the infidel."

This was partly religious prejudice, of course, but that prejudice was reinforced by unfortunate experience. In the perilous early years of the republic, the Muslim Barbary powers preyed on American shipping and captured, tortured and enslaved hundreds of innocent men and women. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson implored the pasha of Tripoli to stop, Oren recounts, the pasha's emissary insisted that the Koran made it the "right and duty" of Muslims "to make war upon" whichever infidels "they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners." George Washington raged, "Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence." And Congress did create a navy in the 1790s primarily to crush the Barbary powers and protect American traders and missionaries. President Jefferson -- so often mislabeled as an idealist, pacifist and isolationist -- eagerly launched the war and ordered the permanent stationing of U.S. nav!

al forces thousands of miles from the nation's shores.

As Oren relates, the modest number of 19th-century Americans who lived in the Middle East largely considered Islam -- in the words of a former Confederate officer hired to improve the Egyptian army -- a religion "born of the sword," one that was "opposed to enlightenment" and crushed "all independence of thought and action." They found the oppression of Muslim women appalling. Being Americans, they thought the best antidote was a thorough transformation of culture and society. Protestant missionaries utterly failed to convert Muslims to Christianity, but they did work to spread the "gospel of Americanism": liberalism, technology and democracy.

Over the next century, American politicians and policymakers repeatedly imagined they could liberalize a people who seemed to them bursting with "democratic aspirations," as one New Dealer put it in 1943. This may have been hubris, but if so, it was an enduring hubris. Oren quotes a mid-19th-century Arab guide warning a missionary: "You Americans think that you can do everything . . . that money can buy or that strength can accomplish. But you cannot conquer Almighty God." Yet a century later, Harry S. Truman insisted, "God has created us and brought us to our present position of power . . . for some great purpose. . . . It is given to us to defend the spiritual values . . . against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them."

No act of international social engineering was more audacious than American support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the middle of an implacably hostile Arab world. But this idea, too, had deep roots. The earliest members of the "Israel lobby" were the Puritan settlers, who even before they reached America had petitioned the Dutch government to "transport Izraell's sons and daughters . . . to the Land promised their forefathers . . . for an everlasting Inheritance." Their prominent heirs included John Adams, who imagined "a hundred thousand Israelites" conquering Palestine; Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward; and, a century later, Woodrow Wilson, who delighted in the thought that he might "be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people." Thus, President Truman felt a deep sense of historical and religious destiny when he recognized the newly created state of Israel in May 1948, comparing himself to the ancient Persian king who also had repatria!

ted the Jewish exiles and helped rebuild a Judean state. "I am Cyrus," Truman crowed. "I am Cyrus!"

Few acts in the history of U.S. foreign policy have been less in accord with "realist" principles. Oren, an Israeli historian whose previous book was the bestselling Six Days of War, shows that U.S. backing for the establishment of Israel was rooted in religious convictions going back more than four centuries. Americans' response to the enormity of the Holocaust helped transform old Puritan dreams into reality. But even so, the essential element here was the rise of the United States to global predominance; it is doubtful that any other country -- including Great Britain, which ruled Palestine after World War I -- would have placed religious conviction and moral sentiment above selfish and practical interests.

Critics from World War I onward warned that American support for a Jewish state would produce unending war, severely damage America's otherwise amicable relations with the Muslim world and, after the discovery of massive deposits of Middle Eastern oil in the 1930s, endanger access to this vital commodity. Saudi Arabia's pro-American first king, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, flatly warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that the "Jews have no right to Palestine" and that Arabs would die fighting to resist a Jewish state. When the typically American president spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust, the typically Arab king questioned the fairness of making "the innocent bystander," Palestine's Arabs, pay for the crimes of others. If 3 million Jews had been murdered in Poland, ibn Saud reasoned, then there was now room there for 3 million more. Many Muslims' sentiments have not changed over the past six decades.

And neither have those of many Americans. Despite all the crises of the past years, including the present war in Iraq, Oren predicts that the United States will continue "to pursue the traditional patterns of its Middle East involvement." Policymakers "will press on with their civic mission as mediators and liberators in the area and strive for a pax Americana." American "churches and evangelist groups will still seek to save the region spiritually." And Americans will regard the region as both "mysterious" and "menacing," as they have for centuries, and will seek to transform it in their own image. Many today may want to disagree, but they will have to wrestle first with the long history of American behavior that Oren has so luminously portrayed.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.