Played for a Fool

Ever since WWI and Lawrence of Arabia, guerrilla warfare has been a well-studied science. Conventional, or "big army" warfare is, by contrast, highly complex and dependent upon a matrix of military, economic, industrial, demographic, diplomatic and geographic factors all working in a more or less productive mix. Insurgency isn't so sharply wedded to extraneous factors and contingencies. Its strength is its very simplicity, pitting small and primitive against large and sophisticated and, far more often than not, winning in the bargain.

America's invasion of Iraq was al-Qaeda's dream, a chance for the terrorist movement to reinvent itself and recover from the thrashing it had endured in Afghanistan. These people wanted an American war in the Middle East and they wanted that war to be waged in Iraq. They wanted it so much that they actively lured the White House into it.

BBC recently aired an interview with "Omar Nasiri", the cover name used by a Moroccan who spent years playing both sides in this affair working for al-Qaeda while also operating as a double agent for western intelligence agencies. Nasiri described how ibn Sheikh al-Libi waged a highly successful disinformation effort after being captured by US forces in Afghanistan.

"He said Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran training camps in Afghanistan, told his US interrogators that al-Qaida had been training Iraqis.

"Libi was captured in November 2001 and taken to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured. Asked on BBC2's Newsnight whether Libi or other jihadists would have told the truth if they were tortured, Nasiri replies: "Never".

"Asked whether he thought Libi had deliberately planted information to get the US to fight Iraq, Nasiri said: "Exactly".

"Nasiri said Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" Libi said Iraq was chosen because it was the "weakest" Muslim country.

"It is known that under interrogation, Libi misled Washington. His claims were seized on by George Bush, vice-president, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell, secretary of state, in his address to the security council in February, 2003, which argued the case for a pre-emptive war against Iraq.

"Though he did not name Libi, Mr Powell said "a senior terrorist operative" who "was responsible for one of al-Qaida's training camps in Afghanistan" had told US agencies that Saddam Hussein had offered to train al-Qaida in the use of "chemical or biological weapons".

"What is new, if Nasiri is to be believed, is that the leading al-Qaida operative wanted to overthrow Saddam and use Iraq as a jihadist base. Nasiri also says that part of al-Qaida training was to withstand interrogation and provide false information."

The bitter truth is that Sheikh Libi didn't pull the wool over the Americans' eyes, he didn't have to work very hard to deceive them. All he had to do was tell them what they wanted to hear so that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld could simply ignore the hard intelligence they were getting from their own agencies. It worked because these people are fools, willing dupes. Libi did nothing that Chalabi wasn't able to pull off for his own ends. Both played these people like violins and the American military, the American people and everyone else drawn into Washington's coalitions will be paying for their idiocy for years, even decades to come.

If you think Afghanistan is going to turn out any better, look at the inept civilian leadership behind that one too.