Richard WarnickForgotten But Not Gone
Sunni insurgents have accounted for most of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq. They are the ones with the IEDs and the car bombs. Their commander (and Saddam Hussein’s successor as head of the Iraqi Baath Party) is Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri. Has General Petraeus and the Bush administration forgotten about them in all this talk about Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)?
Well, not entirely. From Talking Points Memo:
It came late in the final day of hearings yesterday so you may have missed it. Gen. Petraeus was asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL) to rank the enemies the U.S. is fighting in Iraq. Petraeus ran through the list of threats, then, as an afterthought, said, “There are certainly still some Sunni insurgents out there.”
Yeah, no kidding. It would be foolish to write off the insurgency just yet, so I assume Petraeus was simply lying to Congress (again). Some Sunni insurgents in Ramadi just assassinated Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, leader of the Anbar Salvation Council and probably America’s chief ally in Anbar. Abu Risha and two of his bodyguards were killed by a roadside bomb. Just to make sure, a car bomb exploded a short time later. Everyone from Ramadi to Washington is blaming AQI, that’s become standard procedure whether or not it’s true.
UPDATE: There is an unconfirmed claim on a website that AQI is behind the sheik’s assassination.
UPDATE: Main and Central also curious about who really killed the sheik and his companions. We’ll probably never know.
UPDATE: Danger Room looks at the evidence pointing to tribal rivals as the assassins.
September 13th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
bush is NPR right now(Thurs) spinning the latest news…it’s just unbelievable.
If this were Vaudeville the hook would come out and drag off the stage.
Fact is, it’s worse than bad Vaudeville. More like a peep show, dirty and dark.
“Iran will benefit from the chaos”, says the dunce, oh, like they haven’t already.
Where is the democratic majority?
September 17th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Rich,
On what authority do you say with such confidence that Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was assasinated by Sunni insurgents? The article your link points to says that “No group claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion fell on al-Qaida in Iraq”.
While this article ever so characteristically provides no evidence whatsoever to indicate WHY suspicion should fall on al-Quida in Iraq or even who might have been the suspicious party–neither does it provide any evidence whatsoever that would lead to the conclusion that the culprits were Sunni insurgents.
In the past, your source for sweeping conclusions such as a statement by Anderson Cooper, which you characterize as “the truth”–that Al Queda in Iraq is no more than 3% of the Iraqi insurgency, have been casual remarks by CNN commentators, who are very far from being what I would consider credible intelligence experts, let alone, unbiased let alone remotely competent reporters of fact.
To know what you purport to know with perfect certainty, you would have needed reliable eyewitnesses on the ground in Iraq who were present on the ocassion of this assassination and who could positively identify the attackers with 100% certitude.
To be successful in challenging the disinformation put forth by the Bush administration AND the news media, it will be necessary to use something more convincing than naked conjecture as the basis for authoritative statements of fact.
It’s fine to conjecture wildly so long as you pointedly identify conjecture as such. But ultimately what will win the war of wills with the deviants in the White House is to develop better credibility than they have, by maintaining a wide margin between conjecture and assertions of fact, and by offering a crushing accumulation of evidence to support every conjecture.
We have no basis for critiquing the traditional media if we don’t outperform them. And given their performance, that should be ridiculously easy.
September 17th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Ray, do you believe that Al Qaeda in Iraq is behind the assassination of Sheik Sattar? In fact, we are told that there is a website claiming just that (and when is wrong information ever posted on a website?).
My sources are no better than CNN, GlobalSecurity.org, Wikipedia or the Pentagon for that matter. The AQI threat is negligible– they have between 850 and 5,000 fighters. They have virtually no popular support. Everybody knows that. It’s absurd to credit them with controlling large areas of Iraq.
The Bush administration’s rhetoric has tried to inflate the AQI threat because it’s a way to pretend that our soldiers and marines in Iraq are fighting the same Al Qaeda that attacked America. Bush mentioned Al Qaeda 12 times in his last speech about Iraq.
Abraham Wagner, a senior researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism at Columbia University, in the Boston Globe:
OK, so if AQI barely exists, who was Sheik Sattar fighting? Bobby Ghosh, reporting for Time Magazine, has the answer (emphasis added):
Got it? If you opposed the sheik you were branded as Al Qaeda, arrested and often summarily executed. Then the US military gave him duffel bags full of cash. My guess is our friend had plenty of enemies, especially the Sunni insurgents who regarded him as a turncoat.
This is no different from the situation in Afghanistan in 2001, when warlords got paid for rounding up alleged “Al Qaeda terrorists” to be sent to Guantanamo.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden must be relishing this. With almost no effort on his part, the USA is tied down in Iraq and Al Qaeda gets the credit!
September 17th, 2007 at 10:59 am
The poppet shiek is dead, and with him the sham of cooperation of Sunnis’ with bush controlled America. That’s all that matters. Doesn’t matter who did it. The “enemy” knows exactly what to do. Plus they have a bunch of new neat guns, that petraus happily gave them, unknowingly of course.
Now we have a new AG, with obvious leanings. I don’t imagine we’ll have any trouble with renditions or plans to bomb Iran from the legal side of things. The fight is just beginning. One cannot defeat an enemy, until recognizing who, in this case WHAT, it is.
This Country is going to come to a bad end, if it continues to ignore facts directly in front of it eyes.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:59 am
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