Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (81467)	10/28/2004 3:15:33 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793850

THE NEW ENEMY OF HUMANITY Christopher Hitchens JUST try this thought: what if the battle against Abu Musad al-Zarqawi is now more significant than the hunt for Osama bin Laden? Consider: bin Laden hasn't been heard of, even in one of those scratchy and inconclusive audiotapes of his, for many moons. Whereas we keep seeing the masked figure of Zarqawi as he saws off captured civilians' heads. And we keep seeing the other evidence of his work, as he murders women doing laundry for US forces, blows up the UN office in Baghdad, destroys ancient Iraqi Christian churches at the opening of Ramadan, kidnaps a veteran Anglo-Iraqi woman humanitarian, explodes bombs on school buses and shoots senior Shia clergymen outside their places of worship. The last part of that might be the most significant one: a letter carried by a known Zarqawi associate, with the excellent name of Ghul, was intercepted some months ago. It was addressed to bin Laden, and it proposed that the easiest way to destroy any post-war settlement in Iraq was to incite a civil war between Sunni and Shia. The latter were described as useless heretics whose deaths would be no loss anyway. (This is worth bearing in mind every time you hear about offence to Muslim susceptibilities). Who is this man and how has he become so dangerous? He is originally a Jordanian, perhaps of part-Palestinian origin, who first set himself to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy. Known for his extreme tendency to violence, he did some hard time in a Jordanian jail and won an additional reputation as an especially ruthless "boss" and enforcer among the inmates. Upon release he went to Afghanistan and was part of the top echelon of those who used Taliban rule as a cover for their global jihad. Possibly injured as he escaped the collapse of the Taliban regime, he seems to have gone to Iran before showing up in Baghdad a few months before the Coalition did. During that time, according to the Jordanians, he got hold of nerve gas and chemical weapon shells with which to try to blow up Jordan's security services HQ. He also helped launch a mini-war against the Kurdish leadership in northern Iraq, who were then living outside Saddam Hussein's direct control. His organisation was then called Ansar al-Islam, or fighters for Islam. It has since mutated to its newly-minted name "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia". This coincided with a recent website proclamation of loyalty to bin Laden. It seems probable it was actually more like a rival bid to take over a world-wide franchise. As well as being led by a psychopath and a sadist, this new group seems to have excellent knowledge of the inside of various Baghdad buildings, of the home addresses of senior Iraqi civil servants, and of the whereabouts of large deposits of explosives and cash left over from the previous regime. Why should one be surprised by this? It is hardly likely that a wanted Jordanian refugee terrorist could enter Iraq on his own, or on the initiative of a lowly officer, and make a freelance living under what was then a ruthlessly controlled police state. Zarqawi, in other words, also represents the "werewolf" version of the old Baath system, in particular of the wing once known as "Fedayeen Saddam". THIS brutal militia, made up of many foreign fundamentalist elements as well as locally recruited ones, has gone underground and become the most deadly and ruthless Islamic terrorist force in the world. What was Zarqawi's reply when accused by the Jordanians of getting his hands on some stray shells stuffed with WMD material? Nonsense, he proclaimed - if we had had them we would not have wasted them on you! We would have exploded them in an Israeli city by now. We had all better hope the vast amount of high explosive that "went missing" during the invasion has not wound up with him. Until recently, it has been surprisingly easily accepted that there is scant evidence for any tie between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But it begins to look rather as if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in person and in action, IS that tie. (And probably always was: why should a consecrated jihadist have spent so much time trying to kill Saddam's deadliest enemies in Iraq, the Sunni Muslim Kurds?) Osama bin Laden is at best in hiding in a remote and inaccessible part of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Zarqawi, meanwhile, is in a no-quarter fight with the West and democratic Iraq to take over, or simply destroy, a vitally important country with direct access to the world's energy reserves. It's both too flattering and too trivial to call him an "insurgent". One of the worst terror videos yet released from Iraq shows a large group of defenceless Nepalese workers, moaning in a ditch as Zarqawi's death-squads finish them off one by one. His group's messages always stress that they are at war with the infidel Hindus as well as with all Christians, all Jews, all secularists and all non-fundamentalist Muslims. To call Zarqawi an enemy of humanity wouldn't be stretching it by much. -Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.