2 Little, 2 Late.Why the Bush Administration Does Not Deserve Credit for the Death of Another Al-Qaeda No.2.

In the wee hours of the morning, while our nation slept, the US military dropped the bomb heard ‘round the world. As the sun came up we learned why the Bush administration decided to cancel yesterday’s briefing by Zalmay Khalilzad to the Senate regarding progress in Iraq. They wanted to wait till they finally had some progress to report.

In recent months, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the man who ran Al-Qaeda In Iraq, and who Don Rumsfeld calls the man with the bloodiest hands in the world (his closest competition), had turned up the heat. In his attempts to foment a civil war in Iraq between the Shia and the Sunni, thousands of innocent Iraqis have died, as well as our own men and women in uniform. Today, their deaths have been avenged by a cooperative of American and Iraqi forces, assisted by Jordanian intelligence. These men and women deserve the fruits of their labor; peace, rest, and the gratitude of three grateful nations. That said, in our attempt to show our thanks to these brave people, we must not forget how Al-Zarqawi became Al-Qaeda’s top killer and Osama’s No.2.

As my friends at SoapBox4Truth.org know, I have long chastised the Bush administration for their handling of Iraq, and in particular, the whole “Saddam/Osama” connection. It never added up to me. It always made more sense to me that Osama would rather overthrow Saddam than work with him. Though many believe that Al-Zarqawi’s role in Iraq was to make ricin and cyanide for use in ops in Europe, I have since expanded my ideas about his presence. To understand what the hell I’m talking about, I’ll have to let you in on what I was thinking in the early post invasion.

This is probably one of my earliest rants on Al-Zarqawi. I’m not sure of the date but I know that it was written in late ’04.

I have one big problem with Bush and the way he took the U.S. to Iraq. Many Bush Administration officials (and private think tanks that contribute to the formation of Bush administration policy), are well documented facilitators of the now defunked government of Saddam Hussein. I do believe that it was the responsibility of the U.S. government to "clean up our mess" so to speak. The problem is not that we went TO Iraq, it's WHO went, and the bullshit reasons they gave for doing it.

In Afghanistan, the CIA, many, who just returned to the job after helping Reagan to defeat President Carter (October surprise) who fired them, trained, funded, and equipped bin Laden's Mujahadeen. At the same time they were arming both sides of the Iran/Iraq war. When Saddam found out that the U.S. was secretly allowing the arming of Iran, He began to distrust his U.S. contacts (Rumsfeld was the most visible). Latter, he decided to take Kuwait, sighting that they were angle drilling to tap oil in Southern Iraq. Fearing, some think, that Saddam would move on Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden offered his army of Mujahadeen fighters to the Saudi royal family. He explained that his forces could infiltrate the Baath party hierarchy with ease, and take Iraq before Saddam could even give the order to invade the Kingdom. The Saudi royal family refused and called in the U.S. who, with an oil man sitting in the White House, saw it coming and jumped at the chance to have a permanent military presence so close to the world’s largest fully operational oil fields. This is when Osama turned his rage against America. If it wasn't for the U.S., he could have been the man in charge of Iraq. Not only did it still have a working infrastructure, unlike Afghanistan, which was destroyed during it's war with the Soviet Union, it also had one of the biggest stockpiles of military hardware in the Middle-East (at least until we pulled up next door).

Let's get one thing strait, fuck Saddam, and double fuck Osama. They can eat goat balls with Tabasco in Hell for all I care. The problem is, bin Laden never took his eyes off Iraq. As soon as Saddam got wary of the U.S., it became impossible for Osama to get to him. That whole thing about Ansar-al Islam and Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi in the north, If Bush was so worried about it, We could have taken care of it with a small Spec-Ops force backed by the Kirdish Peshmerga. It wouldn’t be that difficult, it was in Kurdish controlled territory inside the British/U.S. no-fly zone. Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq to work with Saddam, if any thing they were still trying to get Saddam, and take over Iraq and co-opt the country for use as a base similar to Afghanistan. The big difference, It came with a standing army of well over 7 million troops, it was armed to the teeth, and the population would have loved him for getting rid of the Baath party. Besides, according to Cooperative Research, Zarqawi’s group, originally al-Tawhid, was in competition with al-Qaeda for funding and recruits.

The Bush Administration fucked this war up from top to bottom. Fuck weapons of mass destruction, all he had to say to the world was, "Either we take Iraq, or Al-Qaeda does. It's our mess and of course it's our job to fix it, but the more force that we can bring to bare, the more innocent Iraqi's we can save." So, what did he do? He went in on the cheap, failed to secure the world’s largest stockpile of unsecured weapons in the world, and effectively handed 1/3 of Iraq over to Al-Qaeda by failing to have the boots on the ground to secure the borders. Then (and you have to question this) he personally invited Al-Qaeda to fight us in Iraq. Now, the only way to achieve a political victory in Iraq against the Al-Qaeda funded insurgency is to show the world how many Muslims the insurgents are killing. These are the lives we could have saved if we had a President who was less of a simpleton (whether by nature or design), and more of a man willing to except responsibility.

Since then, we have learned much about the mind set of the Bush administration during the lead up to the war. We have learned that they were promoting faked intelligence in the form of the Niger Documents, outing CIA operators, and basically conducting the war from the time they took office. They even tracked down Abu Nidal in Baghdad who was later found with a full clip from an AK-47 in his chest. But today, as it seems to many people, including many retired Generals, CIA and Intelligence officers, and the troops on the ground, and many up and coming Fighting Dems running for Congress this fall, the deceptions of the Bush administration go far beyond covering for a few disastrous mistakes. In my view, they had something like this in mind all along, but their was one problem. Bin Laden knew it was coming, because he saw it all before.

Raw Story has reposted an old MSNBC piece on Al-Zarqawi incase a refresher is needed.
I hope that one day we can finally put all of the pieces together. I still believe that shutting down both Al-Qaeda and the Neo-Cons is the only way to win the true war on terror. The death of Al-Zarqawi will save lives, but it won’t end the war. This all could have been avoided years ago if Bush would have just waxed him before the invasion.

Who knows why he was in Iraq? It could have been Bin Laden’s attempt to get rid of a rival by putting him in the US cross hairs, or a back up plan incase Bush got cold feet on Iraq, or it was his attempt to lure Bush into Iraq. What ever the reason, Bush and his war cabinet dropped the ball.

After reading the latest Vanity fair piece, The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed, one point jumped out at me. The whole time that Bush and Co. have been crying “Failure of Intelligence”, it may have been a black propaganda success. But I have a slightly different view. Their black op may have succeeded in getting them their war with Iraq, but it left us open on our flank, and al-Qaeda took advantage with a gut shot named Al-Zarqawi.

Don’t let Bush claim this as his victory. Keep in mind that he was basically handed to us by his own organization. Al-Zarqawi and Bin Laden never really saw eye to eye in the first place. Al-Zarqawi basically muscled his way into the position he had in the first place. I just hope that Cheney and his buddies don’t inhibit our abilities to exploit all of the new pocket litter by planting fake docs tying Iran to some Communist Russian plot to raise Karl Marx from the grave to cover for DeLay and Abramoff.

Long live America,
and long remember our heros.