Submitted by: Kurt J Fitsch
The
Khorosan Group Does Not Exist
It’s a fictitious name the Obama
administration invented to deceive us.
By
Andrew C. McCarthy
We’re
being had. Again.
For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will
the country into accepting two pillars of his
alternative national-security reality. First, he
claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist
threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag
jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is
unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful,
moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent
extremists” who purport to act in its name.
Now, the president has been compelled to act against a
jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The
jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his
counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering
Islamic supremacists is the path to security and
stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and
Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing,
continue killing and capturing hapless opposition
forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids
— the president won’t let go of the charade.
Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.
The who?
There is a reason that no one had heard of such a
group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan
Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent
threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air
war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to
authorize.
You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there
isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up
with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian– Afghan
border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist
lore that no one would call the president on it.
The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a
faction within the global terror network’s Syrian
franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin
al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s
U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman
al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him
to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to
administration officials long enough, you come away
thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either.
Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains
to call “core al-Qaeda.”
“Core al-Qaeda,” you are to understand, is different
from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from
“al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda
spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq
and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”).
That al-Qaeda, don’t you know, is a different outfit
from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of
course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or
the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian
Subcontinent.”
Coming soon, “al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine.” In
fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if, come 2015, Obama
issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad
jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through
al-Qaeda in December.
Except you’ll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad.
You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying
proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality,
is a global network with multiple tentacles and
occasional internecine rivalries.
As these columns have long contended, Obama has not
quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized
them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels
it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole —
a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted
in Islamic scripture that can project power on the
scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the
West. The president does not want us to see the threat
this way.
For a product of the radical Left like Obama,
terrorism is a regrettable but understandable
consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to
involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of
Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the
doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives
itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict.
For the Left, America has to be the culprit. Despite
its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in
cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause.
As you’ll hear from Obama’s Islamist allies, who often
double as Democrat activists, the problem is
“Islamophobia,” not Muslim terrorism.
This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has
to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since
the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the
jihadists won’t disappear, it has to be denied and
purged. The “real” jihad becomes the “internal
struggle to become a better person.” The scriptural
and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism
must be bleached out of the materials used to train
our national-security agents, and the instructors who
resist going along with the program must be
ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized
into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by
parochial political or territorial disputes, with no
overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way,
they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement
problem fit for the courts to address, not a
national-security challenge requiring the armed
forces.
The president has been telling us for years that he
handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been
telling us for weeks that the Islamic State — an
al-Qaeda renegade that will soon reconcile with the
mother ship for the greater good of unity in the
anti-American jihad — is a regional nuisance that
posed no threat to the United States. In recent days,
however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly,
tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth,
were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading
American journalists, and threatening American
targets.
Obama is not the manner of man who can say, “I was
wrong: It turns out that al-Qaeda is actually on the
rise, its Islamic State faction is overwhelming the
region, and American interests — perhaps even American
territory — are profoundly threatened.” So instead . .
. you got “the Khorosan Group.”
You also got a smiley-face story about five Arab
states joining the United States in a coalition to
confront the terrorists. Finally, the story goes,
Sunni governments were acting decisively to take Islam
back from the “un-Islamic” elements that falsely
commit “violent extremism” under Islam’s banner.
Sounds uplifting … until you read the fine print.
You’ve got to dig deep to find it. It begins, for
example, 42 paragraphs into the Wall Street
Journal’s report
on the start of the bombing campaign. After the
business about our glorious alliance with “moderate”
allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar who so despise
terrorism, we learn:
Only
the U.S. — not Arab allies — struck sites
associated with the Khorasan group, officials
said. Khorasan group members were in the final
stages of preparations for an attack on U.S. and
Western interests, a defense official said.
Khorasan was planning an attack on international
airliners, officials have said. . . . Rebels and
activists contacted inside Syria said they had
never heard of Khorasan and that the U.S. struck
several bases and an ammunition warehouse
belonging to the main al Qaeda-linked group
fighting in Syria, Nusra Front. While U.S.
officials have drawn a distinction between the two
groups, they acknowledge their membership is
intertwined and their goals are similar.
Oops. So it turns out that our moderate Islamist
partners have no interest in fighting Syria’s al-Qaeda
affiliate. Yes, they reluctantly, and to a very
limited extent, joined U.S. forces in the strikes
against the Islamic State renegades. But that’s not
because the Islamic State is jihadist while they are
moderate. It is because the Islamic State has made
mincemeat of Iraq’s forces, is a realistic threat to
topple Assad, and has our partners fretting that they
are next on the menu.
Meantime, though, the Saudis and Qatar want no trouble
with the rest of al-Qaeda, particularly with al-Nusra.
After all, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch is tightly allied
with the “moderate opposition” that these “moderate”
Gulf states have been funding, arming, and training
for the jihad against Assad.
Oh, and what about those other “moderates” Obama has
spent his presidency courting, the Muslim Brotherhood?
It turns out they are not only all for al-Qaeda, they
even condemn what one of their top sharia jurists,
Wagdy Ghoneim, has labeled
“the Crusader war against the Islamic State.”
“The Crusaders in America, Europe, and elsewhere are
our enemies,” Ghoneim tells Muslims. For good measure
he adds, “We shall never forget the terrorism of
criminal America, which threw the body of the martyred
heroic mujahid, Bin Laden, into the sea.”
Obama has his story and he’s sticking to it. But the
same can be said for our enemies.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a
policy fellow at the National Review Institute.
His latest book is Faithless
Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s
Impeachment.
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