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.
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
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Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2
