Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is behind a small percentage of the bombings and terrorist attacks in Iraq. But his have been the bloodiest. This week has seen some of the worst: On Sunday, an orchestrated series of bombings and shellings rocked the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad and killed 37 across the country. On Tuesday, a crowd at a police recruiting station was ripped apart by a suicide car bomb, killing 59.
All this has made Zarqawi the face of jihad in Iraq and the most-wanted terrorist after Osama bin Laden. [continued]
WASHINGTON--The U.S. intelligence community considers authentic a message on an Islamic Web site in which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who has asserted responsibility for bombings and assassinations in Iraq, was announced to have sworn his network's allegiance to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, a senior administration official said Monday.
...Although President Bush and his top national security officials have for two years described al-Zarqawi as an al-Qaida official, most analysts in the intelligence community have seen him until now as independent, someone who shared some aims with bin Laden but also considered himself a competitor. Al-Zarqawi has differed in the past with bin Laden over the al-Qaida leader's determination to carry on terrorist operations in the United States and not just in the Middle East.
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I was thinking along those lines this weekend, although it was more like 'Iraq was a hornets nest. If you walk by it carefully, you might see some hornets and might get stung, but that is about it. Bush (with instigation from Cheney, Rumsfeld et al) went and kicked the tree. And now he'll run off and leave the rest of us to deal with the consequences.'Terrorism is like a beehive. It usually just sits there with bees swarming all around, and every now and then a bee may venture out and sting someone, but for the most part the bees stay near the hive. They have their own problems and bee politics to contend with.
If the bees are causing problems and you need to deal with them, walk around the hive carefully and maybe poke the hive gently with stick, but you want to keep the bees where they are. You want them contained in the hive.
Bush went after the hive with baseball bat.
Ivan Seeking said:I talked with my buddy again today and he offered a bit more insight. Before the war, America was like the boogey man - the US military threat was not completely understood, so we gained an advantage through fear of the unknown. But now [though I say incorrectly so] it is perceived that the US military has shown its stuff along with its limits. It is now perceived that we can be managed.
Until now, Bush has had virtually unlimited control and funds to fight his war, and he has created a disaster with us stuck in the middle and no clear way out. What the enemy doesn't understand is that we are fighting a limited war without a draft, and a war that only places demands on a vanishingly small segment of the US population, so as I have argued before, if push came to shove, they ain't seen nothin yet. But most war supporters don't want a draft and we don't want to use nukes, so, we lose; 3000+ dead Americans lose, tens of thousands of injured vets lose, the US military is greatly damaged, US prestige is lost, the Iraqi people lose, we each send uncle Sam about $2000 [minimum] for the trouble, and the bees win.
I think Ivan was making the point that Bush has really fouled things up and created a terrible mess - and Bush has already lost - there is nothing to win.devil-fire said:are you saying that it would be in the best interest of the usa for the public to stop being squeamish and throw many thousands of more troops into the middle east and even use weapons of mass destruction to clear roadside bombs?
i don't think i understand what you are advocating here