- "Dear Mom:
-
- Iraq is really fun, and us guys from al-Qaida are doing
great work. I personally have organized 25 suicide attacks already, and
Osama bin Laden himself wrote to thank me. It's a great pity that our ally
Saddam Hussein didn't get his weapons of mass destruction finished in time
for us terrorists to start using them against the infidels, but that's
how the cookie crumbles. The dumb Iraqis are all grateful to the Americans
and won't help us, but with the help of other foreign terrorists I am now
trying to get a civil war going between the Sunnis and the Shias in order
to defeat the Americans and their stupid democracy. Gosh, how I hate their
freedoms.
-
- Your loving son, Ahmed
-
- P.S. Thanks for the clean socks."
-
- I am not at liberty to reveal how the letter came into
my possession -- let's just say that it came from a highly reputable U.S.
intelligence agency whose title includes the letters "C", "I"
and "A". According to what they told me, it was written by the
same al-Qaida terrorist from Jordan, Musab al-Zarqawi (real name Ahmed
Fadil al-Khalaylah) whose 17-page letter from Iraq to al-Qaida's leaders
was recently leaked to the New York Times. Like that letter, it proves
that President Bush was absolutely right to invade Iraq: The Iraqis love
Americans, and the problems there now are all caused by foreign terrorists.
-
- I must confess that I did wonder for a moment if the
intelligence service in question might just be trying to help the government
that employs it, but that way lies doubt, disillusion, and the deadly sin
of cynicism. These spies have professional standards, and they would never
cook the intelligence they provide just to suit the needs of some passing
administration.
-
-
- Same goes for the soldiers: When Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt,
U.S. deputy chief of operations in Iraq, said last Wednesday that the suicide
bombing outside a police station in Iskandariya the previous day that killed
50 people had "al-Qaida's fingerprints all over it," you just
had to believe him. I mean, why would any Iraqi who doesn't belong to al-Qaida
target a police station full of people who are collaborating with foreign
occupation forces? And who else but al-Qaida carries out suicide attacks
anyway (apart from Palestinians, Tamils, Chechens, and a few others)? "When
you see . . . these kinds of attack," as Kimmitt put it, "one
has the tendency to look at foreign fighters."
-
- OK, enough sarcasm. What kind of idiots do these people
take us for? Having failed to find the weapons of mass destruction they
allegedly invaded Iraq for, having failed to be greeted with open arms
by grateful Iraqis, and having arrested only a handful of foreigners among
the thousands of suspects they have rounded up since the resistance movement
started blowing up American soldiers and local collaborators, do they really
think that they can persuade us that this "foreign terrorist"
-- they have just raised the price on his head from $5 million to $10 million
-- is the source of all their troubles in Iraq?
-
- Al-Zarqawi is not really very foreign to Iraq -- he is
a Jordanian citizen, but he belongs to the Bani Hassan tribe which straddles
the Iraq-Jordan border -- and he is not very important either. He is a
rather obscure member of al-Qaida who was in Afghanistan during the period
when the 9-11 attacks on the United States were planned and carried out,
and there is no evidence that he or any other al-Qaida member was in contact
with the ruling Baathist Party in Iraq before Saddam Hussein's regime was
destroyed in the U.S. invasion.
-
- If he is in contact with underground members of the Baath
party now -- for which there is also no evidence -- that would hardly be
surprising: The enemy of my enemy is (for the moment) my friend. But the
notion that he and al-Qaida are behind the Iraqi resistance is purely an
ideological fantasy. There are plenty of Baathists in Iraq who hate having
been driven from power, plenty of Islamists unconnected with Osama bin
Laden's crowd (including even some Kurds) who hate the presence of arrogant
infidels in their country, and plenty of plain Iraqi nationalists who regard
the occupation as an intolerable national humiliation.
-
- So far these resisters are mostly Sunni, since the Shia
leadership has managed to keep its own people quiet in the hope that free
elections will finally bring the majority population to power without a
fight, but the U.S. plan to install a "sovereign" government
in July without elections risks bringing the Shias into the fight, too.
-
- Since unemployment has soared from 50 percent to 80 percent
since the U.S. invasion, it is no surprise that desperate Iraqis are willing
to join the new police and army that the U.S. occupation authorities are
building to serve as sandbags between American soldiers (who have largely
been pulled off the streets to minimize casualties) and the resistance.
But it is equally unsurprising that the resistance regards these Iraqi
police and soldiers in U.S. pay as collaborators and high-priority targets.
Sometimes their attacks employ suicide bombers, but almost all of them
have been native-born Iraqis.
-
- Still, you can see why "foreign terrorists"
is the preferred explanation in an election year. It makes the whole invasion
of Iraq look less like barking up the wrong tree.
-
- - Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist
whose articles are published in 45 countries.
-
- © Copyright 2004, The Salt Lake Tribune.
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