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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (77017)	6/11/2006 12:58:31 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Respond to of 81568

Dealing Al Qaeda a welcome blow Jun. 9, 2006. 07:42 AM Osama bin Laden is still at large, almost five years after the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people. So are his chief lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Until they are brought to justice, U.S. President George Bush's "war on terror" will never be considered a success. But the Al Qaeda network has been dealt a meaningful blow with the killing yesterday of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his spiritual adviser Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi in an American air strike in Iraq. The so-called "Prince of Al Qaeda" in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, who is in fact a Jordanian, was notorious for leading groups that killed hundreds of innocent Iraqis in scores of suicide bombings, kidnappings and grisly beheadings. His admirers dubbed him "the slaughtering sheikh." One killer's death will not snuff out Al Qaeda-inspired terror or bring Iraq's stubbornly wide-based insurgency to its knees. But this death deprives Al Qaeda of a high-profile leader, rids Iraq of a poisonous demagogue who fomented civil war by urging his fellow Sunni Arabs to attack "Shia snakes," and shows that the American and Iraqi intelligence services and police are capable at times of infiltrating terror groups. That left Bush celebrating a rare American success in Iraq where the U.S. has 135,000 troops on a mission that polls show 60 per cent of Americans now feel is misguided. "The ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders," he said. While al-Zarqawi's followers predictably hailed him as a "martyr," he murdered so many fellow Muslims that few beyond his immediate circle are likely to mourn his death. Like the arrest of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the hounding of bin Laden into the remote mountains of Afghanistan, al-Zarqawi's end at the hand of F-16 fighter jets and 500-pound bombs serves as a brutal reminder that violence is a dead end. As news of the attack circulated, Iraq's new Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lost no time urging other insurgent leaders to "stop now ... review their situation and resort to logic while there is still time." Faint as that prospect may be, in a conflict that has seen 40,000 Iraqis die since the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam, it is the country's best hope. It comes as al-Maliki yesterday cobbled together a broadly inclusive Shia/Sunni cabinet. He named Abdul-Qader Jassim, a Sunni, as defence minister, Jawad al-Bolani, a Shia, as interior minister, and Sherwan al-Waili, a Shia, as national security chief. For Iraqis, there is no more urgent task than forging a national consensus on the need to restore effective self-government, suppress the insurgency and move forward the day when foreign troops can head home. Al-Zarqawi insisted he was leading a holy war against Christian crusaders and their allies. *In fact, he was a figure who targeted the United Nations, beheaded innocents and stirred civil war within the Islamic community.* His brutal savagery betrayed the very Iraqi people he so falsely claimed to champion. thestar.com