Arabs have also seen the Iraqi people's struggle and their emerging political alternative to despotism and feudal autocracy.Let us hope so.
Zarqawi's murder spree has revealed fissures among Al-Qaida fanatics. Last week, the United States released a letter coalition intelligence believes Al-Qaida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, sent to Zarqawi [noted here at 'Not PC' last week]. Zawahiri describes Iraq as "the greatest battle for Islam in our era." But Iraq has become a political and information battle that Zawahiri realizes Al-Qaida may be losing. According to The New York Times, Zawahiri told Zarqawi to attack Americans rather than Iraqi civilians and to "refrain from the kind of gruesome beheadings and other executions that have been posted on Al-Qaida websites. Those executions have been condemned in parts of the Muslim world as violating tenets of the faith."
In February 2004, Zarqawi acknowledged a democratic Iraqi state would mean defeat for Al-Qaida in Iraq. To defeat democracy, he has pursued a strategy of relentless, nihilistic bloodbath. It's a brutal irony of war: In doing so, he is losing the war for the hearts and minds.
[UPDATE: Alan notes below that doubts about the letter have been raised, first by Al-Qaeda -- well, they would say that, wouldn't they -- and also by Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Cole, who has been much-quoted, says the letter "raises questions for me as to its authenticity."]
[UPDATE 2: Iraqi Bloggers Central have their own thoughts on Cole's "gut" which tells him "the letter is a forgery." An "outrage to logic" is what they call Cole's reasoning.]
2 comments:
The letter is probably a fake, as mentioned on CNN and BBC, as well as many other news sources. Here is a good explanation as to why it's likely to be fake.
Here's an interesting history and analysis of Zarqawi: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO405B.html
Anyone who wants to believe there's no such things as 'black ops', illegal actions committed by a government or military, in order to advance a political or military agenda, only need to study a bit of history to learn a few dark truths. Ever heard of 'Operation Northwood', an officially planned operation that focused on destroying US civilian planes in order to blame it on Cuba? Luckily it never made it past the final approval. But what if it did? And what if other similar operations were approved? Read more about it here: http://www.snant.com/fp/archives/kurt-nimmo/. And what about the Phoenix Program, an operation during the Vietnam War that put US troops behind enemy lines, killing anyone - civilian or military - that they thought were involved with the North Vietnamese, and generally creating terror amongst the civilian population in the hope of reducing support for the NVA.
And today we have coalition forces allegedly found dressed as Arabs, engaging in terrorist activities against Iraqis, in an effort to apparently lay the blame on terrorists, insurgents and even Zarqawi and others. It puts into question the legitimacy of many of the coalitions claims that suicide bombs and terrorist attacks against Iraqis themselves are actually by Iraqi or foreign terrorists, when those 'foreign terrorists', etc, could very well be US or British special forces engaged in black ops.
These questions wouldn't need to be asked if we'd never found information that supports coalition involvement in anti-coalition terrorist activities, for some as yet unknown purpose.
Post a Comment