Decision ‘08

Hitchens: Right On The Money, Again

Thanks to our good friend Aaron for alerting me to this Christopher Hitchens piece in the Wall Street Journal:

In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention (”to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates” and “accelerate the emergence of the Messiah”), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq’s largest confessional group that: “These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger.”

Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. “Civil war” has replaced “the insurgency” as the proof that the war is “unwinnable.” But in plain truth, the “civil war” is and always was the chief tactic of the “insurgency.”

The truth of the matter, for those willing to see it, is that coalition casualties are way down, and Iraqi forces are increasingly taking center stage. Clear minds like that of Hitchens are needed now more than ever…

One Response to “Hitchens: Right On The Money, Again”

1 Con George-Kotzabasis Says:
March 21st, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Hitchen’s has been right about the war in Iraq against all the weak nipple-fed intellectuals, such as Chomskey, Vidal, and others.

Zarqawi will fail in his mission to foment civil war in Iraq. There are two fundamental reasons for such a failure. First, the politicians who ascended into their position of power did so on the back of the ballot box and not on the barrel of a gun. Secondly, none of the three major factional groups, the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds could hold power by appealing to the militias that support them. As none of the latter singly or in combination of two is strong enough to defeat the others or other. Hence, an appeal by any of the factional groups to the militias that support them, would lead to a prolonged civil war with all its uncertitudes about which faction will be the winner.

Because of this uncertainty about the outcome of a civil war, during which many of the present politicians that are now at the threshold of government would lose their position, it’s most unlikely that they would be so foolish as to let go the bird in their hand for the two in the bush.

Thus, there is a high probability that the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, will form a government of national unity that will prevent a civil war. The auspices for the latter are very favorable, as the agreement of the three groups, two days ago, about the constituent members of the National Security Council has shown.

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http://congeorgekotzabasis.blogspot.com