Seeping out of Iraq

June 30, 2007

The New York Times report on the defused bombs in London included this disconcerting graf:

[T]he idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 — raised concerns among security experts that jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda may have imported tactics more familiar in Iraq.

It is, unfortunately, immediately reminiscent of a Times report from a month ago.

The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.

Some of the fighters appear to be leaving as part of the waves of Iraqi refugees crossing borders that government officials acknowledge they struggle to control. But others are dispatched from Iraq for specific missions. In the Jordanian airport plot, the authorities said they believed that the bomb maker flew from Baghdad to prepare the explosives for Mr. Darsi.

Estimating the number of fighters leaving Iraq is at least as difficult as it has been to count foreign militants joining the insurgency. But early signs of an exodus are clear, and officials in the United States and the Middle East say the potential for veterans of the insurgency to spread far beyond Iraq is significant.

Insurgents are treating Iraq as some kind of Terrorism School, and are applying the lessons they’ve learned after graduation.

Here’s a crazy idea: we could withdraw from Iraq, deny terrorists a “cause celebre” for jihadists, and stop making it harder to combat terrorism.

As Ryan Powers noted, the State Department has acknowledged the war in Iraq “has been used by terrorists as a rallying cry for radicalization and extremist activity that has contributed to instability in neighboring countries.” There’s additional evidence of tactics from Iraq being exported to Europe.

The longer we stay, the worse it gets.

Republican’s still believe that another major terrorist attack in the USA would play to their supposed advantage. I’m not so sure that’s true anymore. I definitely think there would be a lot of people asking them to explain to us again exactly how that “flypaper theory” thing was supposed to work.

  • The curious, frustrating truth is that the influx of foreign terrorist organizations in Iraq is wholly — and I mean wholly — the responsibility of Bush policies. So it’s ironic, well, far worse than ironic, that the Bush administration should be allowed to reap propaganda victories out of it by referring to pretty much every terrorist (with consistent help from the New York Times and now even NPR) as Al Qaeda. In that way, he has an implied “justification” for his invasion of Iraq. But now we do indeed have AQ getting a foothold in North Africa, and of course SE Asia.

    In six years, the US has made a catastrophic mess, probably a very long-term mess. At the center of the planning were Bush and Cheney. For this alone Bush could have been removed from office long since if we’d exhibited what Thomas Powers is calling “civic courage.”

  • [T]he idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 — raised concerns among security experts that jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda may have imported tactics more familiar in Iraq.

    How’s this for disconcerting: The cars full o’ gasoline and nails were likely the work of wanna-be terrorists. If a real terrorists had tried this the headlines would be a lot gorier.

    I’d also point out that car bombs weren’t made in Iraq. They’re probably as old … Well, a quick look at Wikipedia claims a horse drawn carriage was used to bomb Wall Street in 1920.

    And of course, the IRA used car bombs in the UK. And what blew the front off the Murrah building? Hmm. Could it be that car bombs are really old and lots of people have heard about them?

    If the so-called security experts are just beginning to worry about the use of car bombs, they’re stupid. If they’re suggesting the only place a terrorist could get the idea for using car bombs is from Iraq, they must think we’re stupid.

  • I am skeptical of the claim that these guys have any Al Qaeda link. The only thing in support of the claim is the opinion of unnamed security experts. The whole thing is just a bit too reminiscent of the sudden attribution of all violence in Iraq to Al Qaede. See, for example, Glenn Greenwald in today’s Salon.

  • BTW, there has been another failed car bombing attempt in Great Britain. This one at the Glasgow airport. Juan Cole has it covered.

    Long may terrorists be clueless screw-ups who can’t start fires in cars because they leave the windows rolled up and starve the flames of oxygen, and who scramble around to manually detonate things while on fire themselves.

    Just remember what screw-ups these guys are when Alberto Gonzales comes to you with a plea to repeal the Bill of Rights in order to deal with them.

  • Larry Johnson gets it right about the London “car bombs.”

    Main point: Car bombs are NOT made with gasoline!!!!!!!

    London Bomb–What a Crock of Crap!!
    by
    Larry C Johnson

    So I turn on the telly this morning and find breathless CNN anchors hyperventilating over the nuclear suicide car weapon of mass destruction discovered smoldering outside of a London nightclub. One report from the scene notes that:

    London police were contacted when witnesses saw a Mercedes being driven erratically near London West End night club Tiger Tiger, and the driver jumped out of the automobile and ran away. The car was reported to have two gasoline canisters and be full of nails.

    CNN adds:

    Explosives officers discovered the fuel and nails attached to a “potential means of detonation,” inside the vehicle. Officers “courageously” disabled the trigger by hand, he said. Security sources told CNN that the “relatively crude device” in the first car contained at least 200 liters, or about 50 gallons, of fuel in canisters.

    You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.

    For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

    The fact that “officers courageously disabled the trigger by hand” coupled with the report of the smoke in the car leads me to believe that the mad London “bomber” tried to construct a Molotov cocktail of sorts and lit a cloth fuze. Fortunately he left the windows in the car up and there was not enough oxygen to really get the fire going. Looks like the brave British police reached in and snuffed the flame.

    Judging from the overreaction to this non-incident I think we can safely conclude that Osama Bin Laden will remain holed up in Pakistan and let the fear mongers at CNN, MSNBC, and FOX do the dirty business of scaring the shit out of people.

  • The learnt-it-in-Iraq techniques may or may have seeped into London but they are seeping into Afghanistan (roadside IEDs and suicide-bombers).

  • I completely agree with Tom Cleaver in comment # 6… Shame on the media here in America by turning it into a dramatic scary event.

  • I thought I remembered reading there was propane in the car in addition to the gasoline. That would make a bigger boom, I believe. Mercedes though, two of them, very classy. Whoever did this, whatever they may lack in bomb-making skills, they do know their cars. So many of your terrorists will skimp on the vehicle itself when making a car bomb, but not these guys.

  • It will take a great deal more than fifty gallons of gasoline to rupture the body of a Mercedes. Somehow, this smells a lot like an insurance scam.

    Car bombs? Old news. The French resistance first used them against their German occupiers in 1940. It’s the same with aircraft. Bushylvanian bobbleheads will cry to the heavens about how an airplane had never been used as a missile before. I guess they never heard of the “Kamikaze” of WW2—and some pilots tried using airplanes they couldn’t keep in the air due to damage to “ram” their opponents—in WW1.

    As for a gasoline bomb, I’d have been more worried if they had packed those damned cars not with nails, but with styrofoam. You mix gasoline and styrofoam, and you’ve got yourselves a crude version of Napalm—with a rather toxic smoke-cloud included….

  • Here is an interesting PBS expose on rail cars transporting anhydrous ammonia and chlorine in the US. Al Qaeda used our transportation system as a weapon against us on 9/11. Every day there is the potential for a Bhopal type incident in the US in major cities when these rail cars loaded with chemicals roll through the city. That is something I worry about, not Ali Ahkbar ramming his Pinto into a Blockbuster video store. Can DHS or anything done by the FrankenBush Misadministration be counted on to be effective at anything except at causing more deaths?

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