President Bush Reciting Bin Laden's Script

Last week, Al Jazeera released a rather astonishing taped sermon from Osama Bin Laden. In it, he stated that al-Qaeda in Iraq had "made mistakes" and called on Iraqis to "beware of division" and "avoid extremism."

His speech appears to have thrown Islamic radicals around the world into utter confusion. The "jihadosphere" alternated between accusing Al Jazeera of "counterfeiting the facts" and pondering the meaning of "The Sheik's" words. For its part, the Bush Administration eagerly pointed to Bin Laden's message as proof-positive that the surge is working. Proponents of U.S. declaration of victory over AQI were doubly reassured.

Talk of victory and the misplaced focus on AQI suggests that the Administration continues to misunderstand the role of al-Qaeda in the Iraqi insurgency, with tragic policy implications in Iraq as well as the global "war on terror." The President should recognize that the terrorist-in-chief just provided a window of opportunity to shift our policy and rhetoric in two important ways. First, policymakers should deflate the importance of both Bin Laden and AQI so that a more accurate picture of the Iraqi conflict can emerge. Second, they should reorient policy to contend with the serious terrorist threat festering in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan.

Make no mistake: American special operations personnel have pummeled AQI and degraded their potency over the past two years. Yet, that accomplishment should not be articulated in terms of victory and defeat. This would belie the limited, but continuing threat that AQI poses to the overall security situation in Iraq. And these terms play directly into Bin Laden's narrative. In his view, another victory for AQI remains only one major car bomb away.

The President has continuously overstated the significance of AQI in an effort to tie the war to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This summer, the White House attempted to drum up support for the surge by underscoring that "al-Qaeda is the greatest threat to security in Iraq." In a speech this July, Bush mentioned al-Qaeda no fewer than 95 times despite the fact that his own State Department believes the group makes up less than 5% of the Iraqi insurgency. In recent testimony to the Senate, General James Jones offered a radically different assessment from the Administration, arguing that 98% or more of the fighting in Iraq is an internal civil conflict among Iraqis.

The Administration's imagined, if not fabricated, view serves Bin Laden's interest to be recognized as the tip of the spear of the Iraqi insurgency. The latest statement does not suggest, as some analyst contend, that al-Qaeda senior leadership has lost operational control over AQI — they never had it in the first place. At best, Bin Laden could only offer broad strategic objectives. For example, after a July 2005 plea from Ayman al-Zawahiri to cease attacks against Iraqi Shia, AQI leader Musab al-Zarqawi thumbed his nose and ratcheted up indiscriminant attacks.

By conflating all Sunni insurgents under the banner of AQI, the Administration misses an important opportunity to exploit cleavages among the resistance to the occupation. Even if it were to disappear tomorrow, the challenges to national reconciliation will remain and internecine warfare will not relent.

The President's mischaracterization of Iraq as a battle against al-Qaeda further serves Bin Laden's goals by ignoring one of the most pernicious consequences of its failure in Iraq: al-Qaeda, as the July National Intelligence Estimate assessed, has restored the "key capabilities it would need to launch an attack on US soil." Furthermore, as the 2006 Iraq NIE states, the Iraq war has become the "cause celebré for jihadists." The Administration's practice of pumping up the role of al-Qaeda in Iraq only encourages young radicals to head to Iraq and seek the glory of fighting American crusaders.

Rather than reading from Bin Laden's script, Bush should use the upheaval that Bin Laden has just created in the "jihadi community" to realign our strategic resources and discourse to reflect the reality of the threats we face.

As a first step, the President should abandon the rhetoric that fighting al-Qaeda is the principle reason for the U.S. to stay the course in Iraq. Second, the President should immediately refocus our policy establishment on the real threats to the homeland. The catastrophe of the Iraq war is in plain view — the question is whether President Bush or one of his aspiring successors will see it, and urgently begin to reorient our language and policy to deal with its reality.