some excerpts:
At least Zarqawi's a better nominee than Saddam. He's a real guerrilla operator, with a solid mujahedeen resume: born in Jordan, probably to Palestinian refugee parents, grew up in the town of Zarqa (his alias means "The Guy from Zarqa"), went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and got radicalized.
You know, what we should have done with all those brave Muslim volunteers who helped boot the Russkies out of Afghanistan was hold a big victory banquet in Kabul, thank them all for their contribution to Liberty:and then nuke the banquet hall. It sounds cold-blooded, but if you want to rule the world you have to do some stuff you won't want to tell your grandkids about.
Those guys had got used to blowing things up in the name of Allah and didn't feel like quitting just because the Russians went home. They went back to their native slums all over the world and started making no end of trouble. It was Afghan mujahedeen vets who taught the Somalis how easy it was to bring down a chopper, even one as well armored as the Blackhawk, by firing RPGs at the tail rotor. It's Afghan vets who form most of the effective Al Qaeda cells around today.
Like I've said before, foreigners just don't cut it in a guerrilla war. Zarqawi, a Jordanian/Palestinian, can't disappear in an Iraqi crowd. That means most of his time has to be spent surviving. His face has been all over the net for years now, and there's a $25 million bounty on him. Like they say in spy movies, his cover is blown. No way he can be really useful as a guerrilla leader. That job puts you out on the street all day, moving through checkpoints, changing your identity non-stop.
funniest line:Which suits the insurgents just fine. That's the most depressing angle of all on Zarqawi: it's not just the Pentagon and Al Q who are happy to keep him in the spotlight. The real bosses of the insurgency must get down on their knees every night and thank Allah for the Z-man, because he keeps the heat off them.
They're not Mr. Big. There is no Mr Big. They're more like a few thousand Mr. Middles, a whole crowd of ex-officers and clan leaders in every Sunni town or village who have some kind of loose control over some of the insurgents. Not all-there are hundreds of insurgent groups fighting, and nobody controls them all.
But it stands to reason that some of the bigger, more professional networks have real leaders. These guys will turn out to be solid, intelligent men, usually young-20s, early 30s-who get respect in the neighborhood. They'll be homegrown Iraqis with real standing in the clan and tribal networks that really run things in Iraq.
And they'll be anonymous. Guerrilla war kills off the glory-seekers like Zarqawi pretty quickly. The guys who last will be total unknowns, until the new regime gives them their medals when we finally give up on this mess.
They'll be shy by Arab standards, coolheaded types. Contrary to what the dumb-ass press keeps saying, the leaders don't need to "fuel" the insurrection. It's got all the fuel it needs. The Iraqis, not just the Sunnis either, are so pissed-off by now that the real leaders' job is mostly persuading the hotheads to take it slow, plan their attacks.
It's real hard to know when a guerrilla leader's dead. The Pentagon claimed Zarqawi was killed in an air raid in 2004. The Russians have claimed every Chechen leader was killed more times than a Hindu cat.
