Cheney Debunked Again (a year ago)

Here’s Eric Margolis writing about “the fake al-Qaida in Iraq”.

“Then, a tiny, previously unknown Iraqi group that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden appropriated the name, “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.”

If the US were to withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, the nation would be split between warring Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The fake Al-Qaida in Iraq would end up at the bottom of the totem pole, or be wiped out by other Iraqis. Even Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, have blasted the phony al-Qaida in Iraq and called for an end to its attacks on Iraqi civilians.”

So cynics think that “Al Qaida in Iraq” is an American creation, while other people are just parroting Pentagon propaganda? Haha, that has to hurt.

About those “suicide attacks”: The Boston branch of Pravda strangely confessed that “some” of the car bombs in Iraq came from America.

The FBI’s counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior government officials.

I find it unlikely that an Arab Islamist group is stealing cars in America to slaughter Arabs and blow up mosques on the other side of the world.

Whatever, I’ve talked to Margolis about this as well. He’s saying they’re “fake” in that they’re not bin Laden and friends in Pakistan and that they are only a small fraction of the (former) Sunni fighters.

But whatever, Cous, let’s just have the same argument again and again. Let’s hear your interviews of Cockburn and Margolis and we’ll see if they agree with you that Zarqawi worked for the CIA.

Yeah, like I was saying…
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/americas-allies-in-iraq-under-pressure-as-civil-war-breaks-out-among-sunni-811801.html

I like how the occupation is never mentioned because all violence in Iraq is due to “al Qaeda” and the “sectarian civil war”. The same story has appeared in the American and British media everyday for years. It’s called propaganda. The real story is that America is stuck in a hopeless guerrilla war and has created the ‘sectarian violence’ in an attempt to control the region:

Meanwhile, Iraq weighs around the American neck as an albatross. Moscow has sized up that the US is bogged down in a protracted guerrilla war in Iraq. As a Moscow commentator wrote recently, “The end of this conflict is not in sight. Intensive mine warfare is being waged on Iraqi roads. Not a single allied convoy passes without an explosion. Road mining has assumed such a scale that the US Air Force is using its strategic B-1B bombers for remote mine clearance. Weapons and ammunitions are freely crossing Iraq’s lengthy and difficult-to-control borders, while the continued occupation is increasing the mobilization potential of the guerrilla movement.” &

Similarly, the Kremlin’s policy criss-crosses the “Shi’ite-Sunni” divide that the Bush administration meticulously tried to erect on the Middle East and the Persian Gulf chessboard in recent years. Moscow stresses the “civilizational” aspect of the crisis and dilutes the relevance of the sectarian barriers that the US encourages in the Muslim world.

Where did I mention the CIA? I linked to an American general crowing to the Washington Post that the “Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.” Since Arab Islamists don’t normally hate Arabs and mosques it’s hardly surprising that he was a fraud. I’d also like to know how not reading the NYT to dozens of people everyday would invalidate the articles I link to, but I don’t expect a serious answer.

Here’s Patrick Cockburn from 2004 talking about the Zarqawi hoax: I think that its public prominence really started from January of this year. At the press briefings in Baghdad, every time the military and civilian spokesmen appeared, they would say Zarqawi did this, Zarqawi did that.

There was a story that a special letter from Zarqawi to al-Qaeda had been found, but this is pretty dubious. Many specialists on Iraq think that it’s a hoax.

Even the Washington Post was “skeptical about the document’s authenticity”. In case you’ve forgotten, it was the gibberish about the guerrillas being defeated if they couldn’t provoke a civil war to get the Americans to stay (they apparently hadn’t heard about those permanent bases!). You insisted that it made perfect sense yet were unable to explain how al Qaeda wasn’t defeated in Afghanistan when the Soviets left, or how the Vietnamese guerrillas weren’t doomed when the Americans left. You certainly never told me how many churches the American revolutionaries blew up in their quest to provoke a civil war to get the British to stay!

You take the fact that they blame everything on “al Qaeda in Iraq” for propaganda purposes to make the case that there’s no such thing. It doesn’t follow. I linked above to a piece by Cockburn from yesterday’s Independent where he describes multiple attacks by “al Qaeda in Iraq” against the former “Sunni Insurgency” now known as the Concerned Local Citizens and Sons of Iraq. But I guess he just heard that from a Pentagon spokesman right?

As far as it making sense for foreign jihadists in Iraq to provoke further war in order to stay needed, this has been bin Laden’s strategy all along - “creative destruction” as his counterpart at AEI calls it: Provoke turmoil wherever America dominates in the Middle East to further radicalize people to his cause at our expense. Just like the CIA and mujahedeen provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan in the Carter years. They believe, and are at least partly correct, that their efforts bankrupted and destroyed the USSR and have sworn since 1996 to do the same to us.

Not that I haven’t pointed to the “El Salvador Option” of hiring the Badr Corps death squads as provoking the sectarian war in the first place all along.

The examples of the Vietnam War and American Revolution don’t apply at all. The VC weren’t foreigners. They won the war and took over the place. If they’d been using, say, Brazilian mercenaries, those Brazilians would have indeed been hard pressed to find work after the fall of Saigon. And I don’t recall any foreign radicals from other colonies in the British Empire coming to help the American patriots in the Revolution, though if they had, prolonging the war here to bog down, bankrupt and otherwise keep their Redcoat forces occupied might make sense. I was “never able” to explain these things before since you’d never made such ridiculous comparisons before that I can remember.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/06/wallace-spins-zawahiri/

If Bin Laden’s plan is to slaughter Muslims in order to force the occupation to continue indefinitely, then why haven’t they blown up thousands of markets and mosques in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the last 3 decades? In case you haven’t heard about the permanent bases, America has no intention of leaving Iraq voluntarily and doesn’t need an excuse to stay. Don’t forget to ignore this quote again: Even Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, have blasted the phony al-Qaida in Iraq and called for an end to its attacks on Iraqi civilians.

Vietnam, colonial America, Lebanon, and any other guerrilla war are all applicable to the guerrilla war in Iraq. The guerrillas won those wars because the occupation was hated and they weren’t. If the guerrillas do nothing but slaughter civilians then they’ll be hated too, and they’ll eventually be destroyed. “The phony al-Qaida in Iraq” is hated by the Iraqis and will disappear when the occupation does. Don’t forget to ignore where the car bombs came from: The FBI’s counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior government officials.

Paraphrasing you: If they’d been using, say, Arab jihadists, those Arabs would have indeed been hard pressed to find work after the fall of the Soviet regime in Kabul.

Do you see why that statement is stupid now? Osama and friends want the locals to like them. The Afghans didn’t get rid of them because they helped drive out the Soviets and didn’t run around destroying mosques (hint: Muslims don’t hate mosques). “The phony al-Qaida in Iraq” wants the locals to think of the guerrillas as terrorists who need to be eliminated. Can you think of another group in Iraq who might share that goal? Here’s another quote to ignore: One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, “the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.”

And finally, evil foreign ‘terrorists’ did help the Americans fight the British. Strangely, I don’t recall reading about Lafayette and von Steuben blowing up markets and churches in a desperate attempt to provoke a ‘civil war’. Perhaps there’s a reason for that?

The link – I was still posting at your blog when that story came out. I pointed out that Soviet deaths in Afghanistan were around 10k-15k during their decade there and Israel lost about a thousand soldiers in the nearly two decade guerrilla war against Hezbollah. Both were massive victories for the locals and large body counts obviously weren’t necessary. The guerrillas want to drive the occupiers out, not help them stay forever.

If Bin Laden’s plan is to slaughter Muslims in order to force the occupation to continue indefinitely, then why haven’t they blown up thousands of markets and mosques in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the last 3 decades?

–What? Because they haven’t been occupied for 3 decades. When Afghanistan was occupied by the Russians in the 1980s, you think the mujahedeen never attacked their quislings? Bin Laden, like Brzezinsky, saw the value in giving the Russians their own “Vietnam,” though probably mostly after the fact. He has said for a decade that he wished to do the same to us. Forcing us out after a year does no good from his point of view. He wants to bog us down until the empire is broke and leaves the region entirely. What is so hard to understand about that?

In case you haven’t heard about the permanent bases, America has no intention of leaving Iraq voluntarily and doesn’t need an excuse to stay.

–Oh, gee. I guess I missed that. Anyway, Zawahiri has said over and over that the US is in the perfect trap, can’t leave without humiliation and disgrace and can’t stay without humiliation and disgrace. In the meantime his movement has spread. If we withdraw now, they have some talking points, but the locals’ will likely form some sort of coalition state and tolerance for the jihadists’ presence will dry up. They’ll be out of work. Or at least will have to find new battles to fight.

Don’t forget to ignore this quote again: Even Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, have blasted the phony al-Qaida in Iraq and called for an end to its attacks on Iraqi civilians.

–They didn’t call it phony. They were saying ‘knock it off’. And here I thought you’ve been saying all those messages between bin Laden and Zarqawi were fake phony pieces of Pentagon propaganda. Now they’re the basis of your argument that what? - Osama was at least attempting to reign in Zarqawi? Well, that’s what I’ve been saying, that no, “al Qaeda in Iraq” is not all just some Pentagon propaganda campaign, only a lot of it (when they try to call all Sunni resistance “al Qaeda”).

Vietnam, colonial America, Lebanon, and any other guerrilla war are all applicable to the guerrilla war in Iraq. The guerrillas won those wars because the occupation was hated and they weren’t. If the guerrillas do nothing but slaughter civilians then they’ll be hated too, and they’ll eventually be destroyed.

–So do you argue then that the Mahdi Army would never have put a drill in anyones head or forced families out of neighborhoods? I doubt it. It’s not like al Qaeda has been bombing markets in Sunni areas. And I’m not sure anyone outside of Fox News would claim they kill only civilians. They seem to spend a lot of time bombing “Iraqi government” forces, Sadrists and lately some of the Sunnis who have been temporarily put on the payroll.

“The phony al-Qaida in Iraq” is hated by the Iraqis and will disappear when the occupation does.

–That’s my whole point. Though it’s not because they’re just a Pentagon spy-op. It’s because fighting the occupation is the only excuse they have to stay around. Patrick Cockburn wrote and told me before that their attempt to create the “Islamic State in Iraq” as a jihadist-led umbrella for all of the Sunni fighters was a bridge too far for the locals who started fighting them back in 06 and accepting money for it from Petraeus last summer. (Conscription of locals, broken fingers for smoking and other such clumsy attempts at dictating to the locals built up to the same backlash, Cockburn said.)

Don’t forget to ignore where the car bombs came from: The FBI’s counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering that some of the vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior government officials.”

–I don’t know all about it, but it’s hardly proof that the US is behind the suicide attacks.

Paraphrasing you: If they’d been using, say, Arab jihadists, those Arabs would have indeed been hard pressed to find work after the fall of the Soviet regime in Kabul.

Do you see why that statement is stupid now? Osama and friends want the locals to like them. The Afghans didn’t get rid of them because they helped drive out the Soviets and didn’t run around destroying mosques (hint: Muslims don’t hate mosques).

–They weren’t bombing their hosts. They were bombing the neighborhoods of their enemies.

“The phony al-Qaida in Iraq” wants the locals to think of the guerrillas as terrorists who need to be eliminated. Can you think of another group in Iraq who might share that goal?

–Who says that’s what they want the locals to think? Cockburn’s explanation of their overreaching with the “Islamic State” and blowing it, sounds like the story of people who wanted to be loved and created a little too much blowback for themselves.

Here’s another quote to ignore: One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, “the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date.”

–Give me a break. Generals brag that they’ve been able to blame every attack by Iraqi insurgents on “al Qaeda terrorists” (or nowadays the Sadrists - who have also slaughtered thousands of civilians) and that this proves that there are none, or that they only blow up what the US wants them to or what?

–Yes, Zarqawi made a great bogey man. So did Koresh. So does Osama. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Only, at least in these cases, that government finds advantage in singling them out. At various points over the years generals and intelligence types have admitted - it seems to me - that really “al Qaeda in Iraq” made up a very small proportion of the Sunni insurgency. The propaganda campaign was that somehow the Sunni insurgency itself was al Qaeda in Iraq, that the Iraq war was against the terrorist perpetrators of 9/11. It’s an obvious lie and one I’ve pointed out continuously.

And finally, evil foreign ‘terrorists’ did help the Americans fight the British. Strangely, I don’t recall reading about Lafayette and von Steuben blowing up markets and churches in a desperate attempt to provoke a ‘civil war’. Perhaps there’s a reason for that?

–Perhaps it was the completely different circumstances…

The link – I was still posting at your blog when that story came out. I pointed out that Soviet deaths in Afghanistan were around 10k-15k during their decade there and Israel lost about a thousand soldiers in the nearly two decade guerrilla war against Hezbollah. Both were massive victories for the locals and large body counts obviously weren’t necessary. The guerrillas want to drive the occupiers out, not help them stay forever.

–For Christ’s sake. I’m done arguing with you after this. I have never in my life said that bin Laden, Zawahiri Zarqawi or anyone else wanted the US to stay “forever.” What I said - over and over again - was that they were trying to draw us in as a means to bankrupt our empire and force us all the way out - support for local dictators and all. They want to bring down the empire, not just get Iraq uninvaded in the short term.

–In that link, well if you google around anyway, Zawahiri told that interviewer that US withdrawal would “deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap.” Just because that’s consistent with his statements dating back to before 9/11 about luring us into a “desert Vietnam” we shouldn’t listen or what? It seems like they’ve made their strategy very plain and that our government is playing into their game as much or more than the other way around.

As I’ve told you before, I don’t like to read interminable cut and paste so I didn’t read it thoroughly. If you think I’m avoiding something important, then point it out.

I didn’t notice any links detailing the endless civilian massacres (attacking the puppets doesn’t count) and mosque and church bombings by guerrillas in Afghanistan, America, Lebanon, etc as they desperately sought to ensure the continuation of the occupation by any means necessary. Strangely enough, there’d be no difficulty producing accounts of colonial regimes targeting civilians in Algeria, Iraq, Vietnam, (OAS, Salvador option, Phoenix Program) etc as they desperately sought to ensure the continuation of the occupation by any means necessary. There’s a very simple explanation for this, the guerrillas will win if they’re more popular than the occupation. They don’t massacre the locals because without popular support they will lose. The occupiers are well aware of this, hence the aforementioned OAS, Salvador option, and Phoenix Program. For whatever reason, you aren’t capable of acknowledging this even though it’s not really debatable. Presumably you’ll have more explanations for why Arab Muslims really hate Arabs and mosques or how the guerrillas would be ruined if they won?

In the meantime, here’s an article by Dahr Jamail that explains what’s actually happening in Iraq: The myth of sectarianism - The policy is divide to rule It may be worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare between the two groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia. Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either.

Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one another’s mosques. As the rest of the article makes clear, the reason it has changed is because the “Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes”.