it seems that every interest had their own reasoning for invading iraq. as wolfowitz said in that vanity fair interview, ‘wmd was the one issue they could all agree on’ to push their ‘product’, and this was primarily b/c the wmd threat was the rational that got the most response from the u.s. public in ’91, after testing a range of justifications from ‘oil’ to ‘american jobs’ to ‘human rights’ to ‘saddam == hitler’. while some of those threads of interest are more equal than others, there are multiple realities for the different parties & they do not boil down to one overriding solid reason, outside of the intent to plunder (not just iraq, but also the u.s. govt, it’s citizens, other nations, etc…).
PNAC serves as the intellectual justification – a revolutionary blueprint for u.s. control of the earth (& space). like most abstract theorizing, esp in the realm of dogmatic politics, details on the full implications of its implementation & consequences are always lacking, if addressed at all. of course it’s incompetent – the people that rationalized that view are insane, ignorant & incompetent. my take is that PNAC only serves as the impetus for a great big predatory-capitalist scam & the “crazies” are only taken seriously enough in that their adventures guarantee profit & power amongst a large enough contingent of the pirates.
one thing you constantly here about war is that it is unpredictable – that if history has taught those paying enough attention anything at all, it’s that nobody can predict the outcome before it starts. however, this ignores the perspective that war has always been about profiteering & amassing fortunes. and those who are in the position to capitalize on this aspect of war are rarely punished for it. there’s your incentive for the invasion of iraq & an ambiguous ‘long war’ right there.

Posted by: b real | Mar 1 2006 16:13 utc | 3

b real is right about the profit of war. Also, managed chaos in Iraq vindicates longterm US military occupation. Further, fomenting low-level civil war might also draw Iran into direct confrontation w/ the occupation. This would deligitimize sciri/dawa and undermine shia political power and justify US-led attack on Iran. One can easily imagine the sunni ‘insurgents’ of today will tomorrow be allies of US against Iran.
Splitting Iraq up is ‘good’ for the US.

Posted by: slothrop | Mar 1 2006 16:51 utc | 5

so…’intent’
The USA, right now, is just plain, pure evil. People know this implicitly, or, as anyone can see when visiting the local rightwing blog, the evil is extolled as entitlement.
And it’s gonna get worse.

Posted by: slothrop | Mar 1 2006 17:10 utc | 7

the intent of the US presence in the ME is to function like an IUD. a constant low grade infection, it really doesn’t matter how it works, or how much pain it causes, or damage to the body as a result. the chaos as a result of its presence insures an unhealthy atmosphere where any conception will abort.

Posted by: annie | Mar 1 2006 17:22 utc | 9

Then again, maybe,…just maybe, it was PANIC (not PNAC) at the imminent failure of the profit system. Where the only course for continued ‘margin’ was PIRACY on a global scale.
If JC ever does show up again, I hope the first thing He does is go after the ‘Money Changers’ again. What could they do to Him this time? Kill Him?

Posted by: pb | Mar 1 2006 18:02 utc | 11

You are asking several different questions, primarily: “Why did we go to war?”,”What were the plans for the war?”,and “What was the scope of the planned war?”.
First off: “He tried to kill my daddy!” is an old canard, based on a coerced confession from our nascent gulag.
Why did we go to war?–this is always a complex question where many interests need to be balanced; when the equation tips one way, we go.
As Howard Zinn notes:

“War is the health of the state,” the radical writer Randolph Bourne said, in the midst of the First World War. Indeed, as the nations of Europe went to war in 1914, the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class struggle was stilled, and young men died in frightful numbers on the battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of trenches.
In the United States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the state. Socialism was growing. The IWW seemed to be everywhere. Class conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco, a bomb exploded, killing nine people, two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested and would spend twenty years in prison. Shortly after that Senator James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training for all males to avert the danger that “these people of ours shall be divided into classes.” Rather: “We must let our young men know that they owe some responsibility to this country.”
Nothing has changed since then, except that our economy is even more dependent on war related production. After all, weapons, movies about war, and wheat are about our only exports these days. War has always spured the economy without without redistributing income to the less well off.
Chomsky notes:

“Business understood that social spending could overcome market catastrophes as well as military spending, but social spending has a downside: it has a democratizing and redistributive effect while military spending is a gift to the corporate manager, a steady cushion. And the public is not involved. People care about hospitals and schools, but if you can “scare the hell out of them,” as Senator Vandenberg recommended, they will huddle under the umbrella of power and trust their leaders when it comes to jet planes, missiles, tanks, etc. Furthermore, business was well aware that high-tech industry could not survive in a competitive free enterprise economy, and “government must be the savior,” as the business press explained. Such considerations converged on the decision to focus on military rather than social spending. And it should be borne in mind that “military spending” does not mean just military spending. A great deal of it is high-tech R&D. Virtually the entire “new economy” has relied heavily on the military cover to socialize risk and cost and privatize profit, often after many decades: computers and electronics generally, telecommunications and the Internet, satellites, the aeronautical industry (hence tourism, the largest “service industry”), containerization (hence contemporary trade), computer-controlled machine tools, and a great deal more. Alan Greenspan and others like to orate about how all of this is a tribute to the grand entrepreneurial spirit and consumer choice in free markets. That’s true of the late marketing stage, but far less so in the more significant R&D stage. Much the same is true in the biology-based sectors of industry, though different pretexts are used. The record goes far back, but these mechanisms to sustain the advanced industrial economy became far more significant after World War II.
In brief, the permanent war economy has an economic as well as a purely military function. And both outcomes — incomparable military force and an advanced industrial economy — naturally provide crucial mechanisms for foreign policy planning, much of it geared to ensuring free access to markets and resources for the state-supported corporate sector, constraining rivals, and barring moves towards independent development.”

Domestic considerations: Stock Market going nowhere, tech boom over, Bush’s approval rating in freefall and hence his elite mandate to continue the radically redistributive economic policies begun under Reagan were stymied.
War creates conditions conducive to the enhancement of elite control. We see that Bush has taken full advantage of these with the passage of the patriot acts, the domestic spying, and advancement the unitary executive theory.
Economic considerations: Enron was about to go belly up, implicating Bush and creating growing pressure for serious business reform, but more importantly, Halliburton was near bankruptcy, facing asbestos lawsuits and hitting a low of $9.30 on Jan 18, 2002 (cf: 01/30/06 $80.68). Then there’s the whole tangled web of Bush Pere related crony capitalism involving CSX, Carlyle, and many others. Oil, as a domestic consideration, has also not been well understood. Completely outside the realm of peak oil, there is the cyclical nature of oil prices and their function. The nineties saw a great consolidation of industry as smaller firms had to sell out due to low oil prices. The market had become sufficiently consolidated by 2000 that low prices were no longer serving a business purpose. This dictated a need for a cover to raise prices, and hence, profits.
International Considerations: The PNAC declaration, most succinctly explicated by Zia Mian, has been covered by others here. It only extends the American doctrine, which since WWII has called for world domination, into space. The outright bellicosity of the document only reflects the continual economic weakening of the American position since the fall of the Soviet Union, when history was said by Fukuyama to have ended. American share of global gdp has steadily fallen from over 40% after WWII, to 20% at the present. EU and US share are approximately equal. China should (baring surprises) overtake both within 5-7 years. Noteable here is that the former Soviet block is of course gone, and Russia is at a mere 12% of US gdp, behind Italy and Brazil, shocking considering its population, resource and industrial base, and relative world influence.
In any event, as has been noted, control over the middle east means control over the policies of its rival power blocks, the EU and China, both major oil importers. It also represents a vast relatively untapped market for US consumer goods such as soft drinks and cosmetics, as I have mentioned before. Whether invasion has helped the inage of the American brand in the muslim world is certainly debateable at this point. Finally, control over this area puts potential pressure on western european hi tech contracts in the area.
War in the middle east potentially provides cover for ‘less militaristic’ adventurism, both in Africa and our hemisphere,
Chomsky comments on the role of Israel vis-a-vis the US

Tehran Times, October 11, 2004
There are strong pro-Israel voting blocs and funding constituencies. The largest voting bloc by far is evangelical Christians, an enormous segment of the population in the US, which is entirely unlike other industrial societies in the scale of religious fundamentalism, and in recent years, its role in electoral politics. The matter is debated, but my own view is that US policies towards Israel have been guided primarily by geostrategic considerations, more so than domestic politics. That has been so particularly ever since Israel performed an enormous service for the US (and its Saudi and Iranian allies) in destroying the major center of secular Arab nationalism in 1967, Nasser’s Egypt. By now Israel has become almost an offshore military base for the US, and a high tech and financial center closely linked to the US economy, and resembling it in many ways.

Chomsky in 2001 comments on the role played by Terrorism

‘What is the war against terrorism?’ and a side question, ‘What’s terrorism?’. The war against terrorism has been described in high places as a struggle against a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by “depraved opponents of civilization itself.” That’s a feeling that I share. The words I’m quoting, however, happen to be from 20 years ago. Those are…that’s President Reagan and his Secretary of State. The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago declaring that the war against international terrorism would be the core of our foreign policy….describing it in terms of the kind I just mentioned and others. And it was the core of our foreign policy. The Reagan administration responded to this plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world, primarily….well, partly nearby, but not only there. I won’t run through the record, you’re all educated people, so I’m sure you learned about it in High School. [crowd laughter]

As has been noted, the particular raison d’etre advanced for war, the casus belli, “WMD”, was admitted by Wolfowitz, the chief US architect of third world subjugation, to be primarily a matter of convenience, a mere marketing slogan. This is unremarkable. It has always been so, whether it was the ‘war on drugs’ in S.A., and southeast asia, the ‘Humanitarian war’ in the Balkans (Where Christopher Lydon exulted daily from his outpost on NPR’s flagship program, “The Connection”, about the wonders of smart bombs and how much of the civilian infrastructure we were destroying. That we ‘inadvertently’ destroyed the Chinese embassy in the process should have been a tip-off for all.), even back to the Spanish American War when we were told to “Remember the Maine”, later proved to have exploded from a simple boiler problem, and invaded Hawaii, Guam, and the Phillipines in order to “protect Cuba.”
******************
As far as question 2, “What were the plans for the war?”:
The evidentiary record seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not expect the level of resistance they have encountered. It is clear that they made no use of State department plans for occupation. It is also clear that Rumsfeld and others in power believed that the limited shock and awe, militarily and looting-wise would be sufficient to pacify the population. The overextension of the Army and weaponry demonstrate this. It is also clear that there was a sizeable minority within the edministration who held countervailing opinions that this would not be a “cakewalk’, and that they were silenced for domestic considerations; thus the eventual troubles of occupation were not a complete surprise.
It is also clear that plans to create and extend public and covert gulags were developed prior to the invasion, as were plans to employ Negroponte’s El Salvador option. This is in keeping in line with the known psychology of the architects of war.
Also clear was Israel’s early role in preparing and training Western forces for urban conflict.
All of this is a part of the tactical preparation for war.
*************************
Finally, question 3, “What was the scope of the planned war?”:
Strategically, it seems clear that the more optimistic factions of the regime saw this as only the first salvo in reforming the middle east. Despite the difficulties encountered, the more militant factions still believe this. From the beginning, Cheney publicly warned that this would be a war that would last for our lifetimes at least, if not for generations. Now, they are rolling out the term “long war”; whether this sufficiently molds public thinking about perpetual war remains to be see.
A further strategic benefit of this war is the opportunity to enforce unity and bludgeon would be competitors like the EU and Japan (who they would like to further militarize as a bulwark against China),into grudging alliance.
Some believe that the administration will be able to manage the conditions of ‘creative destruction’ which they have created. The most optimistic see this as a positive property of the conflict, allowing the occupation forces to play the time honored card of divide and conquer. Indeed, perennial importunings that the “the Arab street” would revolt at each sucessive outrage have been no more than lonely cries of wolf.
However, they are playing a very, very risky game here should they prove wrong. Just today, Immanuel Wallerstein states:

The level of agitation is rising everywhere, and the world-system has never been more anarchic than now. We may be going over the edge.
The bombing of the Askari Mosque in Iraq resulted not only in an immediate and large surge in intra-group violence in Iraq, but has probably derailed the efforts of the U.S. Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, to bring about Sunni participation in the Iraqi government. This could mean a failure to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority vote to establish the government and therefore new elections, which would be very difficult to arrange in the present climate. At the very same time, the U.S. Army has demoted the single Iraqi unit previously thought capable of military operations without U.S. support to one that still needs U.S. support. The United States is now being openly criticized – indeed attacked – by the principal Shia parties, creating for the first time a pan-Iraqi hostility to U.S. presence and objectives in Iraq. And the British in Basra are now as limited in their ability to control the situation as the Americans in Baghdad…
The attempts of Muslim governments to channel this anger, by themselves leading the attack, has backfired in that the demonstrators have now turned actively against them, as in Pakistan, where President Musharraf’s erstwhile Islamist supporters are now calling for his resignation.

Combined with mounting domestic criticism and resistance, the Bush administration is finding itself steadily backed into a corner. The ‘how’ and ‘if’ of the beast lashing out are now being debated in the centers of government worldwide.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 1 2006 19:38 utc | 13

This bit from Today in Iraq:

It seems extremely likely that the attack on the religious shine at Samarra was the work of those attempting to cause a civil war in Iraq leading to its destruction as a unified country. An eyewitness report confirms Americans were in control of the area when the bombs were set. That would be American troops operating on behalf of the American neocons, who, despite some recent setbacks, are proceeding with their original Israeli plan without interruption. Iraqi Shi’ites would hardly blow up their own shine (nor would the Shi’ite Iranians, who in addition like the way things are going in Iraq without this added complication), Sunnis wouldn’t do it because they would be aware of the retaliation it would cause, and, despite some warblogger opinion, it is not al Qaeda’s style to attack a Muslim shrine. The insurgency wants to remove the occupiers, and this attack just strengthens the occupiers, who of course can’t leave while the Iraqis are in so obviously incapable of looking after themselves. That leaves the Israelamericans, who have the characteristics of being capable of doing the deed, being the only group that benefits from it, and having security forces in the area (means, motive, and opportunity). There is nobody in Iraq or the Middle East who doesn’t know who really was behind the attack.
The most telling incident wasn’t the attack itself, but the execution of a group of Iraqis, Sunnis and Shi’ites, who were driving to attend a rally of national reconciliation. There were intercepted on the road by people who set up a fake checkpoint outside of Baghdad, pulled from their cars, and summarily slaughtered. The provoking incident and the violent prevention of positive Iraqi steps to prevent civil war are part of the same conspiracy. Who would want to stop reconciliation? More pointedly, who uniquely has the ability to identify the reconciliation group, and immediately mobilize to block the road? The combination of technical ability and desire to stop reconciliation points to only one group, the neocon operators in Iraq and their allies in the Iraqi government. The Yinon plan – one also favored by parts of the American establishment including Leslie Gelb – of breaking Israel’s possible enemies into small, unthreatening statelets, continues.

Oded Yinon’s Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties is unfolding just nicely, should that be the blueprint for whats going down in Iraq at the moment, with a 20 year delay. As he wrote in 1982, the fragmentation and seeding of Iraqi infighting, the sclerosis between the different ethnic groups, means weakening Israel’s potential enemies.

The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorites and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging.5 Most of the Arabs, 118 million out of 170 million, live in Africa, mostly in Egypt (45 million today).

…Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel…

Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible.

Although 20 years is a long time, and lots has changed, but the theory is still valid. Who’ll benefit the most from a broken up Iraq? Israel. And would they care about a mosque in Samarra? Probably not. Are they already on the ground in Iraq? Most definitely. Do they have the expertise, materials and connections to pull that stunt? Yes Sir.
Is it good for the US forces there? Certainly not, but the PNAC doesn’t waste time with such minor details. Should Iraq disintegrate, Iran might be forced to play its hand, at least more openly as it does already, and by doing so giving the PNAC possibly the next justification for an attack (especially should the nuclear enrichment reason disappear). I agree with you Bernhard, the flames could quickly travel across borders and ignite other powder kegs, but the initial invasion carried the same risk, and they did it anyway, despite the warnings. If they’d be worried about the US troops, they wouldn’t have send them in the first place.
Its hard to tell who is behind this instigation of violence between the various ethnic groups, but somehow I can’t see Ahmadinejad ordering the bombing of the mosque of the hidden Imam, the Iraqi Shi’ites wouldn’t blow up their own holy place, and the Sunnis? Hmm, whats in it for them? Nothing but trouble. The Kurds? Hardly. No Iraqi gained anything, but some outsiders did, straight after the maxim “Divide and conquer”.

The United States supports Israel not because of “shared values” and “democracy”, but rather because for four decades Israel’s actions – particularly those that ostensibly harm the chances for peace – have served US goals in the Middle East.

And continue to do so. Peace in the Middle East? Can’t be. Not until the PNAC crew has a, control over the region and b, the nation found a new sellable and beatable menace, coz’ one “threatening” enemy at least is needed to keep the war industry in profitable business, PNAC style.

Posted by: Feelgood | Mar 1 2006 20:46 utc | 15

the AP story on bush, lies & videotape that groucho linked to gets beat into better form here , “Bush lies, deserts under fire”.

Posted by: b real | Mar 2 2006 3:26 utc | 17

Michael (McIntyre) and slothrup; Go to Botox Cosmetics. Not only will they put a (slack) smile on your (wrinkly) sourpuss frown, but with increased dosage, eliminate those migraines you must be experiencing. With prolonged treatment, you’ll become another one of the waking elite. You can see them talking on their cellphones, driving in the carpool lane in their Escalades, planning their Glacial Ice catering empire. It’s a Neo World. They won, we lost. Forged abahd et! Laissez les bon temps rouler, et rendez joyeux, pour le demain où nous mourons.

Posted by: Larry Ellison | Mar 2 2006 6:14 utc | 19

Let’s try again.
Roberst Fisk shares his Middle East knowledge

Posted by: vbo | Mar 2 2006 11:10 utc | 21

It’s About the Oil
Paul Street channels Chomsky

By many analysts’ estimation, OIF is part of a White House effort to use America’s last truly unchallenged form of world dominance – it’s near monopoly over globally projected organized violence – “to establish U.S. control over the global oil spigot, and thus over the global economy, for another fifty years” …
Iraq cannot be physically lost – territorially conceded – to the Iraqis without monumentally dire consequences to American Empire. If abandoned, Iraq’s significant share of “the greatest material prize in history” can only be left to the control of others, an outcome that is unacceptable to American policymakers for (again) “very good [imperial] reason[s].”
The fully and ugly truth is that the self-proclaimed universal state and global super-power Uncle Sam has no intention of granting management of the world’s most “stupendous source of strategic power” and “critical” global political-economic “leverage” to the people who happen to live on its merely national, not-so sovereign topsoil. At this precarious and potentially late point in the history of its global dominance, the U.S. can be expected to hold on to that control with an impressive imperial death grip. It will likely exhibit a fierce determination to defend that grasp through even the most terrible conflicts and violence abroad and at home, where more and bigger 9/11’s seem all-too likely in coming years.

Liberal columnist and author Richard Reeve was on Charlie Rose last week peddling his new book about Reagan. He said that Bush will go down as the worst president in American History (which of course is a history of glorious conquest), right there with Buchanan. He said “Reagan assumed the Presidency with two superpowers, and went left with only one. Bush assumed the Presidency of the sole superpower, but will leave it with two great powers again.”
One can only hope that it will make for a safer world, if we get that far.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 2 2006 14:42 utc | 23

@Corona:
Then this will really give you a headache; I present Max Boot:
LINK

Posted by: Groucho | Mar 2 2006 15:18 utc | 25

from Mad Max talking to a soldier:
“the nonkinetic problem set”
Who gets paid to craft phrases like that, and how can I get a job? I actually think I could work for the government without moral problems if all I had to do was invent nonsense like that.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 2 2006 15:32 utc | 27

Oil Royalties Index Error an “Oversight”
Turns out “someone” in the Fed “inadvertently
left out” oil royalties indexing clauses on Fed
(public lands) oil contracts, (which used to
be in the oil contracts and) which would have
required indexed-higher royalties, tied to the
price of oil (as it soared). No explanation was
given how the “oversight” occurred, and it’s
estimated the loss to US taxpayers will only
amount to $7B or so, a drop in the FEMA bucket.
No word whether contracts would be rewritten,
there doesn’t appear to be a lot of interest.
Thanks, Carrie, for the update!
And now for local news.
Dog bites man!

Posted by: Carrie Underwood | Mar 2 2006 17:41 utc | 29

Thanks all and esp. Malooga for that collection. So it is a mix. Now how can break that. What are conflicting aims that could collide etc….

Posted by: b | Mar 2 2006 21:03 utc | 31

@vbo – thanks for the Fisk link, recommended!

Posted by: b | Mar 2 2006 21:32 utc | 33

Covering the Mangoes
“The United States is looking forward to
eating Indian mangoes,” President Bush
told his obescient audience in India today.
“Man-goes”, of course, is the local pidgin
short-form encapsulation of a common Hindi
rural-villager expression, “Chale jao ke
liye kucch bhi karega” which translates
literally, “I will do anything to go away
(from here to get work)”, (e.g. ‘man goes’).
Bush’s phrase appears to be a clever double
entendre, referring not only to the imminent
resumption of unilateral trade in exotic
Indian fruits, but the growing unilateral
trade in foreign outsourcing of US high-tech
to urban Indian technology centers, where
the same computer and engineering work is
performed for a little bit under US$10.
Umm, did I mention nuclear engineering?
The gigantic career gap which occurred when
new reactor sales ceased in the late ’70’s,
means there are few trained US engineers
today with nuclear engineering expertise,
to meet Vice President Dick Cheney’s Neo
Energy Policy Act plan to build six (6)
tax-payer funded, and Federally-operated
nuclear reactors in the next few years,
as well as up to seventeen (17) commercial
reactors, again in preliminary planning.
Along with that outsourcing of nuclear
engineering to Indian nuclear engineers,
will go a significant share of related oil
and gas engineering design work, continuing
a trend which began back in 1991, when the
First Gulf War brought the first price spike
for oil from it’s $12 a barrel doldrums,
and started a boom in offshore exploration
that was in many cases designed by (India)n
technicians and engineers.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao promised a
swift response, with a trade consortium
planning to visit the United States in
March to discuss trade in “lai dzi”,
(pronounced like “lazy”) or the litchee
fruit, perhaps the Premier’s own racist
double-entendre slam against (India)n
in-roads into what the Chinese must feel
is their US territory and their’s alone.
Taiwan’s Big Brother, as it were.
Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao, when
asked about the twin impacts of Indian
and Chinese high-tech outsourcing upon
the US labor pool, mentioned a proposed
Can-Alaskan gas pipeline, recently signed
for development between now and 2010.
“American workers may look forward to
good paying jobs on the Can-Alaska gas
pipeline. Although they won’t actually
be able to work on the construction, that’s
going to the Canadian/British contractors,
Americans will still be able to serve as
caterers, domestic service, taxi drivers
and pleasure girls for these foreign
workers, and hey, those are good jobs!”
Oh … oh … ! You thought he meant fruit!
(smile, the world is coming to an end)

Posted by: Carrie Underwood | Mar 3 2006 6:15 utc | 35

Call? That might involve using a ‘non-kinetic problem set’ resolution device.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 3 2006 15:27 utc | 37

Fisk permalinked
And it is lovely to see the man remind us how to speak to an audience to prove one’s case:

We know the Americans say we think we’ve recognised him on a videotape. Who recognises him on a videotape? How many Americans have ever met al-Zarqawi? Al-Zarqawi’s mother died more than 12 months ago and he didn’t even send commiserations or say “I’m sorry to hear that”. His wife of whom he was very possessive is so poor she has to go out and work in the family town of Zarqa. Hence the name Zarqawi. I don’t know if al-Zarqawi is alive or exists at the moment. I don’t know if he isn’t a sort of creature invented in order to fill in the narrative gaps, so to speak.

Posted by: citizen | Mar 3 2006 17:24 utc | 39