Zarqawi: Western fearmongering made flesh

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/389/

Loretta Napoleoni, author of Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, on how a nobody became the most notorious terrorist in the world.

Now that Zarqawi the man is dead, maybe we can finally kill off the myth too. The myth of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who shifted his operations to Iraq in recent years, is that he was an ‘international terrorist mastermind’, a leading figure in the Iraqi insurgency and an al-Qaeda bigwig, who was about to spread his bloody brand of terror around the world until an American bomb finished him off on Wednesday. Apparently he not only had the ear of Osama bin Laden but at one stage of Saddam Hussein, too; Zarqawi had been described as the ‘sinister nexus’ between Saddam’s Ba’athist regime and bin Laden’s terror network. He was either ‘the most dangerous terrorist in the world’ or ‘the most evil man in the world’ (or possibly both), and he was single-handedly ‘fomenting civil war in Iraq’.

The truth? ‘He was not in control of the Iraqi insurgency and he was not popular among the Sunni population there. His death will not make much difference’, says Loretta Napoleoni, the Rome-based author of Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation. Napoleoni has been following Zarqawi’s career (if you can call it that) for the past two years, and argues that the man who was said to be holding the world to ransom with his antics in Iraq was in fact weak, isolated ‘and not influential at all, really’. ‘The Coalition created a myth about him, and he tried to become that myth’, she says. ‘To the extent that Zarqawi was a “terrorist mastermind” he was fulfilling the Coalition’s own prophecy.’ snip

Back then he was, in the words of the CIA, a ‘lone wolf’, a wannabe jihadist who fantasised about fighting in a holy war but never quite managed it. So how, by 2006, had he become the most wicked man in the world, with a $25million bounty on his head, whose death elicited comments from almost every world leader and made the front covers of Time, The Economist and Newsweek? Napoleoni says it was nothing Zarqawi did or said that elevated him to this status. Rather he was promoted by Coalition officials who needed a bogeyman, a figure of evil, to justify their war in Iraq. ‘The Americans love to personalise the enemy’, says Napoleoni. ‘Zarqawi just happened to be the right man at the right time. It was pure luck that he was labelled the evil one.’

Napoleoni says the turning point for Zarqawi came in February 2003 – 5 February 2003, to be precise, when six weeks before the war in Iraq then US secretary of state Colin Powell delivered his now widely-ridiculed dossier of evidence against the Ba’athists to the United Nations. Courtesy of Powell, Zarqawi became an overnight terror-celeb. Powell cited Zarqawi’s presence in northern Iraq, where he was holed up with Ansar al-Islam, and an alleged trip he made to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment on his injured leg, as evidence of ‘a sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda network.’ This followed a televised address by President Bush four months earlier, on 7 October 2002, in which Bush referred to a ‘very senior al-Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year’.

‘Of course, we now know that Zarqawi had no links with Saddam Hussein. He may have met bin Laden but he was not closely associated with him either. So the idea that he was the link between the two of them was utter nonsense’, says Napoleoni. Yet Powell catapulted Zarqawi on to the world stage. As the Washington Post puts it, prior to Powell’s speech Zarqawi was ‘barely known outside Jordan’. He rarely, if ever, featured in news reports in late 2001 or 2002, a time when al-Qaeda was being written about on a daily basis. Consider the UK Guardian: he was not mentioned in that paper at all in 2001 and only twice in 2002 – both times after Bush’s 7 October televised address. There was no mention of Zarqawi on BBC News Online in 2001 and 2002. Yet after Powell’s speech he became a talking point: he was mentioned in 23 articles in the Guardian and in 50 articles by the BBC in 2003, and in too many to count since then.

[leftchick]

1. Sadly the myth continues..."Zarqawi successor threatens more violence"

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=106354

The shadowy rebel named by Al-Qaeda in Iraq to succeed slain leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wasted no time in making his own threats of further violence in the war-torn country.

The previously unknown Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, whose suprise appointment was announced on Monday, threatened to punish Iraqi Sunnis who have embraced the political process in their country.

In a statement on the Internet, he also threatened Iraq's Shiite majority and warned the United States of more trouble to come.

He addressed himself to "those Sunnis who have let down our dear ummah (Islamic nation) and embraced the crusaders and collaborated with the envious rafidha (Shiites).

"You will see, God willing, what we have in store for you as punishment for your treason. Judgment day is near and your fortresses inside the Green Zone will not protect you," he said, referring to the fortified seat of the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

:eyes:

[Master Mahon]

2. I love the recent video of him

where the military was making a joke of him because he couldn't
shoot a machine gun and his aid, who also couldn't do much, burning his
hand on the barrel of the gun, had to show him how to work it.

Now that he's been killed he was the greatest mass murderer since Hitler.

HA... what a joke.. their own hypocracy over him and others is blatantly obvious.