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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (15443)	6/9/2007 8:35:02 AM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 22250

> whenever "Al Qaeda" appears Uncle Sam cannot be far behind (6) news.yahoo.com >>In Iraq, U.S. spotlights al-Qaida Inside the bloody kaleidoscope called Iraq, the list of enemies and allies is long, shifting and motley, running from "revolution brigades" and Baathists, to Salafists, secularists and suicidal zealots. But one group alone gets routinely tagged "Public Enemy No. 1" by the Americans. Nine out of 10 times, when it names a foe it faces, the U.S. military names the group called al-Qaida in Iraq. President Bush says Iraq may become an al-Qaida base to "launch new attacks on America." The U.S. ambassador here suggested this week al-Qaida might "assume real power" in Iraq if U.S. forces withdraw. Critics say this is overblown, and possibly a diversion. Some 30 groups now claim responsibility for attacks against U.S. and government targets, said Ben Venzke, head of the Virginia-based IntelCenter, which tracks such statements for the U.S. government. Despite this proliferation of enemies, the U.S. command's news releases on American operations focus overwhelmingly on al-Qaida. During the first half of May, those releases mentioned al-Qaida 51 times, against just five mentions of other groups. When other groups tangle with U.S. forces, they're often described as "al-Qaida-linked," mainly those in the Islamic State of Iraq, an alliance that is dominated by the terror network. If not, they're tagged "criminals," "secret cell networks," or with similar nonspecific names. Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, strong Kurdish ethnic minority, secularist Sunni Muslims and others would suppress any real power bid by the fringe Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaida, al-Fayadh said. "The people who are fighting al-Qaida in Iraq are the Sunnis themselves," he noted. ... some see more manipulative motives. Bush's warning about al-Qaida and Iraq "serves mostly to buttress the administration's claim that Iraq's problems are the work of outsiders, and not the result of the administration's mismanagement of the occupation and internal Iraqi factionalism," said Steven Simon, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.<<