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General McChrystal is Right, Al Qaeda is a Non-Factor

By Larry Johnson on October 17, 2007 at 5:30 PM in Current Affairs

Monday’s Washington Post story announcing that a key general believes Al Qaeda is crippled should be taken seriously. According to the Post:

Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the Joint Special Operations Command’s operations in Iraq, is the chief promoter of a victory declaration and believes that AQI has been all but eliminated, the military intelligence official said. But Adm. William J. Fallon, the chief of U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, is urging restraint, the official said. The military intelligence official, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity about Iraq assessments and strategy.

Senior U.S. commanders on the ground, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, have long complained that Central Command, along with the CIA, is too negative in its analyses. On this issue, however, Petraeus agrees with Fallon, the military intelligence official said.

While General McChrystal is being unfairly pilloried as the author of “Mission Accomplished”, he is not receiving credit for extraordinary sacrifice and leadership during the last three years. The public will never know much about his command’s activities because they are highly classified. General McChrystal is not an armchair general. He has spent an extraordinary amount of time during the last three years deployed with his troops. He does not ask the units under his command to do anything he is not willing to do.

If the McChrystal quote is accurate (and I believe it is) then the American people are being given important information critical to understanding what is happening in Iraq. It is General McChrystal and his troops, not General Petraeus or Admiral Fallon, who are on the pointy end of the spear in the battle against what is left of Al Qaeda. What has been apparent for quite some time, most of the violence in Iraq is not (I REPEAT NOT) being caused by Al Qaeda in Iraq or foreign fighters.

As I have reported in these pages previously, I was in Iraq in May of 2006. I saw firsthand what units under General McChrystal’s command were doing–they were killing and capturing on a daily basis suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq operatives. Despite the success of their operations, the violence in Iraq continued to escalate (a trend that continued thru May of this year). Why? Very simple. Most of the violence was not being initiated nor carried out by Al Qaeda elements.  The violence then (and now) stems from sectarian strife–i.e., sunnis versus shias.

But the Bush Administration does not want to accept nor hear this kind of report. To admit that most of the violence in Iraq has nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and even less to do with foreign fighters, completely obliterates the Bush Administration’s rationale for keeping troops in Iraq. Once again we are witnessing a General being silenced for telling an uncomfortable truth to the American people.  This is a new “General Shinseki” moment in my view.

McChrystal’s assessment must be put on the public record as soon as possible.  The Senate and House Armed Services committees need to call General McChrystal to testify. He is not some political pollyanna seeking to curry favor with political masters. He’s a solid, professional soldier who has made enormous personal sacrifices during the last three years.  Once we understand that Al Qaeda is not the primary cause of violence in Iraq we can turn our attention to devising viable strategies to defuse the enmity fueling the civil war raging between Sunnis and Shias.  Unfortunately, it appears that the Congress and the American people are, once again, prepared to ignore an important warning from a frontline general.  McChrystal’s views on this are important and should be heard.