World stage? Right this way, Mr. Zarqawi...

IN THE NEWS
CNN quotes a senior military official who blames the assassination of Izzedine Salim. president of the Iraqi Governing Council, on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I'm not sure why anyone in the CPA, CENTCOM, or the Bush Administration would want to depict Zarqawi as Public Enemy #1, since that would be a blatant admission that Operation Enduring Freedom has completely backfired.

As I outlined in my previous post, Zarqawi is the leader of Ansar al-Islam, a junior-league Taliban that had been based in northern Iraq before the invasion. Now, Zarqawi is reported to be Nicholas Berg's executioner in the infamous decapitation video, and I think it's not farfetched to include Ansar al-Islam on the list of leading suspects for the unsuccessful sarin gas attack on a US convoy two days ago.

Let's remove sarin scenario from the table. For the moment, we'll take at face value the Bush Administration's contention that Zarqawi is behind both the Berg and Salim assassinations. That would mean that...

• The United States passed on at least one chance to kill Zarqawi personally.


• We also had a good opportunity to cripple or destroy the entire Ansar al-Islam organization before the invasion. The group was confined to northern Iraq, the very region where we were the occupying power helping to defend the Kurds.

And, here's the clincher...

• By invading Iraq and mishandling the occupation, the Bush Administration gave Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group a far bigger stage on which to operate. In fact, the last several days have shown that Ansar al-Islam--once bottled up in a corner of Iraq, raging at the Kurdish authorities and Saddam Hussein--now has the world stage on which to play, and the United States as its chief target.

We're not fighting a war on terror--that's a quixotic effort. However, we shouldn't be helping terrorist groups (our real adversary) spread terror. Nor should we be giving them greater freedom of action. Nor should we give them greater opportunity to kill Americans or our allies.

Comments

[federal criminal lawyer]

Sounds awkward to me. For me it's only implementing the law.