What do you do about Al Qaeda’s new base of operations?

It appears that Al Qaeda in Iraq has erred badly in its Jordan bombings earlier this week. According to the Chicago Tribune‘s Joel Greenberg:

The offshoot of Al Qaeda spearheading the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq sought to defend its actions Thursday in the face of furious Arab protests in the streets of Jordan’s capital over the hotel attacks that killed three suicide bombers and their 56 victims. After first claiming responsibility for the Wednesday bombings of three hotels popular with Israelis and Westerners, Al Qaeda in Iraq later issued a second Internet statement that appeared to acknowledge that its tactics may have backfired and undermined any support the group enjoyed among the Jordanian population. The group said the attacks were launched only after its leaders became “confident that [the hotels] are centers for launching war on Islam and support the crusaders’ presence in Iraq and the Arab peninsula and the presence of the Jews on the land of Palestine.” They also were, the group asserted, “a secure place for the filthy Israeli and Western tourists to spread corruption and adultery at the expense and suffering of the Muslims.” But most of those killed were Jordanians or other Arabs, and many of the thousands of residents who marched in protest Thursday spoke of an assault on their sense of security in this tightly run city, which had been spared the carnage of suicide bombings elsewhere in the Middle East and was considered an oasis of stability.

In its editorial for today on the topic, the Washington Post points out that this is the latest in a long string of reversals for Al Qaeda in the Middle East:

Even as it has bloodied Iraq — where two more suicide bombings were recorded yesterday — support for violence and Islamic extremism has been declining elsewhere in the region. Two movements that pioneered suicide bombings, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, have at least temporarily set aside violence and are focused on participating in democratic politics. An al Qaeda branch in Saudi Arabia has found little support, and most of its leaders have been captured or killed. In Lebanon this year, a popular revolution embraced a democratic agenda, and a grass-roots democratic movement has appeared in Egypt. The government most under siege in the region is not the Jordanian monarchy but the Baathist dictatorship of Syria, which has been a tactical ally of the Zarqawi network and the Iraqi insurgency.

This doesn’t even mention Al Qaeda’s unpopularity in North Africa. Here’s the thing, though — does any of this matter in terms of reducing terrorist activity in the region and across the globe? I ask because of this disturbing story by the Christian Science Monitor‘s Dan Murphy:

If a claim of responsibility from Al Qaeda in Iraq and official Jordanian statements are true, terrorist bombings of three Amman hotels that killed 57 people on Wednesday may be the first sign that Iraq is no longer just a magnet for international jihaddis. Like Afghanistan under the Taliban, say counterterrorism experts, Iraq is becoming a base from which Al Qaeda can plan, train, and launch attacks against its designated enemies. The Jordanians “run a very, very tight ship in terms of security so they have been able to foil a number of attacks,” says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif.. “But particularly with the war in Iraq, there will be more spillover.” Mr. Jenkins says that as a result of the insurgency, Iraq has been a “net importer of jihadists” – — drawing extremist sympathizers from other Muslim nations. But he worries the attacks in Jordan indicate Iraq will eventually become a net exporter of terrorists. That will have an impact on the jihadist movement worldwide, but particularly on countries like Jordan that are adjacent to Iraq and allied with the US, he says. In other recent incidents involving Iraq-based militants, Kuwait briefly banned the import of prized watermelons from Iraq in June after bombs were found hidden inside a shipment trying to cross the border; Germany last year arrested members of Ansar al-Sunna, which operates out of Kurdish Iraq, that it alleged were planning attacks there; and in Syria, two shootouts in the past six months have taken place between government officers and militants said to have ties to Iraqi fighters…. “Look at his success rate. He had succeeded in killing one US diplomat, just one, before the Iraq war,” says [Al Qaeda expert/author Evan] Kohlmann referring to Lawrence Foley, who was murdered at his home in 2002. Zarqawi “was tied to the attempt to blow up the Radisson in [Dec.] 1999 – that failed. Why is he successful now? Because he has an entire team of suicide bombers ready and waiting, and according to his Internet statement the people who carried this out belong to the … same unit that carries out his suicide attacks in Iraq.” Kohlmann points out, it’s useful to be close to your strongest recruiting pool. “What’s been effective for Zarqawi has been recruiting Sunni Arabs – Iraqi, Saudi, Jordanian, North African. These are the people who have been proven to be the most destructive, capable and driven fighters,” he says. “It’s all about a secure base and a good location. This is the reason that bin Laden and Zawahiri have so many problems – they’re up in the mountains away from modern technology and ways of getting around. Zarqawi didn’t come into his own until the jihad moved into an urban battleground, in Iraq.”

This development has some bitter ironies for both the Bush administration and the opponents of the Iraq war. The administration might take some PR comfort in the WaPo’s assertion that, “The targeting of Jordan can hardly be blamed on the Iraq war,” but it must accept the fact that the success of this attack (as opposed to a botched 1999 attempt) is directly attributable to the administration’s pre-invasion failure to take out Zarqawi and post0invasion failure to ensure basic security in Iraq. For opponents, however, the irony is even more bitter. The Bush administration might have been full of it when it claimed a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the invasion. However, as frustrating as it may be, Bush is correct to say that Iraq is now one of the focal points in the war against Al Qaeda — the Jordan attacks are merely the latest evidence of this. As long as Zarqawi has a base of operations and a playground to train zealots, he will continue to be a potent source of trouble. So, a question to those who advocate a pullout of U.S. forces from Iraq — how would a U.S. withdrawal help in any way towards removing Iraq as a base of operations for Al Qaeda?