For those of you who haven’t heard, the U.S. military has produced a letter it intercepted, which it believes was written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which he asks al-Qaida for help in fomenting a sectarian war in Iraq.
Basically, what he wants to do is launch a series of large attacks against the Shiite population, in hopes that they’ll retaliate against Sunnis.
This in itself is a frightening prospect, but what I find interesting is the tone of the letter and the obzervations Zarqawi makes about Iraq. The points Zarqawi makes are:
[ul]
[li]The Iraqi population is not helping the resistance.[/li][li]The suicide bombings are not being carried out by Iraqis, but by Zarqawi’s terrorists.[/li][li]The realization that the Americans are not leaving.[/li][li]The Iraqi police force is a serious problem for Zarqawi’s network. “The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance,” the document says. “When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region.”[/li][li]Zarqawi says that there is a hard deadline before the terrorists will have no chance of winning, and that is when power is turned over to the Iraqis. He explicitly says that democracy in Iraq is a direct threat to them.[/li][/ul]
The letter ends in frustration:
It sure sounds like Zarqawi’s bunch is losing.
Comments?
Oh, and incidentally, Zarqawi’s name may be familiar, because he was the guy Powell identified as the link between Iraq and al-Qaida before the war, and said he was being protected by Saddam.
I read the letter, and it just seemed a bit farcical to me. I mean, regardless of how well we’re doing, is an Al Qaida VIP really going to write a letter that basically reads “These infidels are destroying us with their superior army, intelligence, and penis size!” The whole thing reeks of propaganda.
If true, then great, and not because of partisan political reasons, but serious death-to-the-terrorists ones, and bring-the-troops-home ones.
It could also be a great piece of propoganda, or a deliberate psy-op, although I wouldn’t think that the MI community would be so bold as to try to deliberately decieve the American media to conduct a psy-op.
Assuming it is true, I think he’s badly undersestimating their impact. No, they’re not even close to overthrowing Iraq and setting up a radical Islamist state. But they’re also pulling off operations with a success rate that’s on par, if not surpassing, the level we’ve seen in Israel. And turning Iraq into another example of that would be a significant political problem for the US. Most of Al Qaida’s “success” stories in South Asia haven’t pulled off their overall political goals, but they have led to massive instability and violence. Which in turn empowers terrorist groups.
Al Qaida has a fairly low bar to meet in Iraq. We have a fairly high one.
Well, I’m a bit skeptical. But, if you assume it IS true it’s certainly…interesting. Very interesting. Honestly, if we see a rather large attack on the Shiite majority in the next few weeks/months, it will go somewhat corroborating all this I suppose. And if it IS true, it speaks volumes about the tactical situation in Iraq, at present at least.
I’ll withhold further judgement until more evidence it IS true is forthcoming though. Frankly we’ve seen other things like this before, and I try and take them all with a rather large grain of salt these days. And it SEEMS to be a bit…contrived to me, at least on first inspection. Time will tell I suppose…
Duhbya (wringing his hands)…They aren’t buying our lies about how the war is going Karl…What do we do? It seems the people there hate us!
Rove (smiling evilly)…Let’s pretend to intercept a letter! Who, except these backwards people would send someting this big in a letter, that blames all the insurgency on Al Queada!
Duhbya (kissing Roves ring)…Brilliant! No wonder you are in charge Karl!
If this letter is a fake, it wasn’t planted by the Bush administration. My money would be on Chalabi’s group. I don’t trust them one bit.
But note that the article says that one of the reasons the military thinks its authentic is that it DIDN’T come through one of their intelligence channels or from the Iraqis. It was discovered during a raid on a safe house. That makes the conspiracy theory a lot more convoluted. It’s one thing to have an INC member hand you something and say, “Hey, we… FOUND this letter”, and having them set up a fake safe house, plant a letter, then convince the U.S. military to raid it so that the letter would be found.
Of course, it’s also possible that it’s disinformation intentionally left behind by Zarqawi’s group, but I doubt a disinformation letter would take such a defeatist tone.
In any event, it’s a good thing they went public with the letter, because it’s the best defense against that sectarian war if the Shiites are attacked.
A civil war between Shiites and Sunnis? My god, if only somebody could possibly have predicted that before we went to war!
Ummm, yeah, it was those Chalabi bastards who told us all those lies about “WMDs.” No, wait, it was the CIA. Or weren’t they the guys we were excoriating last year for being a bunch of naysaying obstructionists? Then it was definitely Chalabi. Yeah, he was they guy who promised us garlands of laurels lining the streets of our soldiers. Fuck him, I don’t trust those bastards.
There is a BIG, BIG difference between cherry-picking intelligence or getting intelligence wrong, and intentionally manufacturing a fake document, planting it into a house in Iraq, and then ordering the military to attack it so that you can pull off a deception.
Do you honestly believe the U.S. government is doing stuff like that? That’s why I would suspect Iraqis doing the deception, if indeed there is one.
In the past couple days the Iraqi’s have suffered two car bombings with ~50 dead each. Over a hundred were killed in the bombing of two kurdish political offices in early february, and smaller such attacks are nearly a daily occurance. Whatever the recruiting problems al Qaeda has among ordinary Iraqi, it certainly seems that someone is on a roll.
The letter wouldn’t really have to be planted in a safe house if it’s fake. We “know” that it came in that way only because that’s what the press was told. If you’re going to fake something like this, lying about how you got it isn’t that much of a concern.
There’s a difference between a plausible fake and flat-out impossible beyond belief.
Like, if I wanted to fake a White House letter showing that George W. Bush went to war with Iraq over oil, I would not write, “P.S. Hey, Dick, now that the inauguration’s over, when can we go nuke Saddam already? My petroleum stocks need goosin’, yeee-haw!”
As well, it might be a forgery without any US involvement. There’s all kinds of motives in this situation. It is said that this guy is a major player in an organization “connected” to Al Queda, but not that the is a major player within Al Queda (who, we are given to understand, is on the run and has had 75% of it leadership neutralized.) But he is not sharing secret information here, this is more along the lines of an opinion piece. His opinion may carry great force in the terrorist community, or it might be like Andy Rooney.
He is not passing information unavailable to Al Queda, nor is he apparently in a position to give orders.
There is a lot of manpower and money being spent to acheive the transition to a democratic, self ruled government for Iraq. This letter may be an indication that those efforts are bearing fruit. There may be some other explanation. Time will tell.
