by Pat Lang
BAGHDAD — The top U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq said Abu Musab Zarqawi and his foreign and Iraqi associates have essentially commandeered the insurgency, becoming the dominant opposition force and the greatest immediate threat to U.S. objectives in the country.
“I think what you really have here is an insurgency that’s been hijacked by a terrorist campaign,” Army Maj. Gen. Richard Zahner said in an interview. “In part, by Zarqawi becoming the face of this thing, he has certainly gotten the funding, the media and, frankly, has allowed other folks to work along in his draft.” WASHPOST
WE did! By we, I mean all the journalists, spinmasters, sycophantic generals, tourist politicians and deluded Jacobin ideologues who keep insisting that he personifies the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in its Iraq manifestation. If you read the post at my blog on the “Sunni Insurgency in Iraq,” you will see that it is extremely unlikely that Zarqawi’s “Al-Qa’ida in Iraq” has more than a few thousand people in action. His group is responsible for most of the suicide bombings in the country but the insurgents are mostly other kinds of people, people who have very different goals than Zarqawi.
No! No! Zarqawi did not make himself the “face” of the insurgent war in Iraq.
Continued BELOW:
Zahner’s comment is unfortunate proof that we have not yet overcome our own fantasies in Iraq. Until we do so we have little hope of dealing with the reality that is the war in Iraq.
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“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
But unfortunately the “reality based” people of america are not running the adminstration, war or media.
You know, Alohaleezy, a lot of us here – rather independently — long ago figured out that Zarqawi is as much make-believe as he is real.
How did we figure that out without much, if any, help from the media?
Because we never drank from the Koolaid pitcher…lol!
Zarqawi is another boogeyman just like bin Laden. As look as they are “on the loose” Bush has something to fight for…teehee!
day posted a diary about what would happen if the Bushies did ever get their poster boys Bin Laden and/or Zarqawi, and they dared to wonder out loud if it is deliberate that they never really catch the big poster boys because it would reduce the fear that has been cast over the American populace. Then the war on terror would no longer have such a blanket justification or such a blank check either!
I believe it was Booman?
Yes! It was pretty much inevitable that the neocon warmongers would need to create a figure to fulfill the role of Al Qaeda demon in Iraq, especially since the real Al Qaeda leadership would never be so fucking stupid as to go to the Iraq shooting gallery themselves.
Then you get — gee, should we call them neocon apologists?
Evan Kohlmann is on Keith O’s show often … hmmm.
Geez! This guy’s as cracked as those cognitively dissonant neocon academics like Reuel Marc Gerecht, Gary Shmitt, Max Boot, the Kagan duo, idiot bad-historian Victor Davis Hanson, and the increasingly nauseating media whore Monica Crowley.
There’s no lie or inaccuracy these lunatic hacks won’t peddle with impunity to keep their delusional worldview intact.
It’s curious. He’s sometimes good on the TV shows, and Keith Olbermann does call on him often. Well .. goes to show that the Kool-Aid may be in the water in D.C. (Wonder how Pat and Larry Johnson avoid it.)
Vietnam redux.
The REAL insurgent leaders must really be torn.
On one hand, no western press for their “ideals”.
On the other, they’re free to do as they please as our guys look the other way and pretend they aren’t even there.
If they want to remain off the radar, I suggest they fill their headquarters and their propaganda videos with red elephants and other Republican symbols. Maybe a few pictures of Delay, Frist, Rove, Cheney and co. That’ll guarantee the western (well, US) press never ever mentions them.
Once apon a time intellegnce analysts and operatives were celebrated for their abilities to be both objective and to “think outside the box.” Nowadays, if you don’t think inside the neo-con box using approved referrants you don’t have a job. The same things get recycled through the machine without any new input changing the conclusions.
making distinctions about the different acts against coalition forces and Iraqi forces not being all from the same group of insurgents. I watched grieviously as Zarqawi has been made the face of “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”, and Americans bought it hook and all. In different areas of Iraq the insurgents are different groups attacking for different reasons and goals. I hate how dumbed down this nation is about what their own soldiers are up against in Iraq. Please diary on about it all and inform those who really seek to understand what the hell is up over there!
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By the Bush Neocon Cabal before the war to make the only connection of Osama Bin Laden – “Biochemical and ricin” plants in Ansar Al Islam [btw Kurdish territory patrolled by US-UK aircraft since 1991].
See all bs rhetoric by Blair before and after the Iraq invasion about the ricin threat and the UN display of fool’s oil in the Colin Powell Powerpoint presentation.
Al Zarqawi earned the distinction of Al Qaeda leader just a few months ago, as gratitude for his relentless beating up on the coalition invasion forces.
BBC — Profile Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ::
Jordanian Roots – Tortured in Prison – Became Militant
My diary —
Ricin – Al Zarqawi – Bly Oregon – Niger
▼ ▼ ▼ MY NEW DIARY
The Republican School of Reality. That’s where.
The problem is not that there is a greatest threat, it is that there are too damn many threats.
The whack a mole machine seems to have fired up in Basra. A female suicide bomber blew herself up in supposedly Northern Iraq near the boundary of Iraqi Kurdistan. A sucide bomber was stopped in the Green Zone. The rest of the country continues the usual patterns of violence.
If you can’t keep the areas you had under control that way, how can you hope to expand islands of stability?
We as a culture need our super villain as well as the super hero. We really are that detached from reality. As King George runs around thinking he is superman saving the poor downtrodden Iraqis he is opposed by the evil but cunning Zarqawi. The media jump on the bandwagon and we end up with some pathetic superman sequel except in this one lots of innocent people are killed (by hero and villain) and unlike in the superhero comics and movies we are accustomed to the ending is not happy.