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”.