The real Keyser Soze
Barnett
¦"Grisly Path to Power In Iraq's Insurgency: Zarqawi Emerges as Al Qaeda Rival, Ally," by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, 27 September 2004, p. A1.
An interesting story recounting the meteoric rise of Abu Musab Zarqawi within the violence-torn reality that is today's Iraq. Zarqawi and our approach to the Iraq occupation are a match made in heaven: we build him up as the superterrorist of superterrorists, and he engages in stunning publicity snuffs. He is now lauded by security officials in the Middle East as someone who is ready and able to take over from Osama bin Laden as the leader of al Qaeda's loose network of transnational terror groups if the latter is caught:
Zarqawi has also been accused by some European and Arab authorities of orchestrating plots to cause mass casualties throughout Europe and the Middle East, including in Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Turkey. But some European intelligence officials say that claims about Zarqawi's reach are overblown. They contend that lengthy investigations have turned up no evidence that he had a hand in some of the attacks attributed to him, such as the bombings in Madrid and Istanbul in the past year.
"He's been centrally elevated to such a position that he seemingly has a hand in everything," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University in Scotland. "Certainly he's a real figure, but he a myth-laden figure, and it's difficult to discern where the lines are."
Zarqawi is often described as a one-legged Palestinian whose uncanny ability to avoid capture has led some people to doubt that he really exists. But according to Jordanian and European intelligence officials, he does exist and he has two legs.
See what I mean about Keyser Soze? In the Cold War we battled a real superpower, so our tendency was to make the Red Army "ten feet tall" in our estimates. Now we battle super-empowered individuals working in transnational networks, and we tend to make them "ten feet tall." |
