Fighting ‘al-Qaeda’ in Iraq
About two weeks, Glenn Greenwald wrote a widely-cited post that questioned the oft-stated notion of a strong al-Qaeda role in the Iraqi insurgency.
That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term “Al Qaeda” to designate “anyone and everyone we fight against or kill in Iraq” is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as “Al Qaeda.”
Greenwald goes on to point out that such statements are misleading, given that the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that al-Qaeda’s role in Iraq is quite small. Indeed, most studies have found that, rather than a large presence of foreign al-Qaeda fighters, the Iraqi insurgency is largely made up of disaffected Sunnis, Saddam loyalists, and ex-Baathists.
Marc Lynch, over at Abu Aardvark, has written an interesting follow-up post. He argues, very convincingly, that labeling the Iraqi insurgency as consisting primarily of al-Qaeda militants is a deliberate strategy to discredit the ‘resistance’ effort.
So why the exaggeration of al-Qaeda’s role? Most commentators have focused on its role in bamboozling American public opinion… There’s another side to it, which fits the Petraeus method rather well: the ‘al-Qaeda gambit’ is part of an information operations strategy aimed at turning Iraqi opinion against the insurgency. By playing up the atrocities committed by the Islamist State of Iraq coalition and attempting to equate anti-US and anti-government violence with the unpopular al-Qaeda, the US (I’d wager) hopes do delegitimize violence which currently enjoys considerable support as “resistance”.
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8 Responses to “Fighting ‘al-Qaeda’ in Iraq”
Ok, these points are obvious. The point of pointing them out?
Building on Socks
There exists a well-known parable spoken by Jesus in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, that uses the example of foolish builders who build houses on the sand, only to watch those houses wash away in the flood because it…
It delegitimizes the violence in the eyes of what people?
I’m pretty sure the American population doesn’t approve of the violence, and the Iraqi population that is subject to the hell we’ve created doesn’t give a damn what lies we spew about it. They know that when we blow up their friends and family, that they weren’t part of Al Qaeda.
[...] no time zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where [...]
[...] no time zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where [...]
[...] no time zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where [...]
[...] no time zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where [...]
[...] no time zeroing in on a flaw he sees in his new organization: it has begun blindly accepting what some pointed to in recent weeks as a notable shift in the White House and military descriptions of Iraq where [...]