Zarqawi: Bush's man for all seasons.
Topic: Iraq

The WaPo reports:

"The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

A pentagon briefing obtained by the Post says, "Through aggressive Strategic Communications, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi now represents: Terrorism in Iraq/Foreign Fighters in Iraq/Suffering of Iraqi People (Infrastructure Attacks)/Denial of Iraqi Aspirations."

This is not exactly news and its been going on for longer than a year or two. Atimes Online reported back on Oct. 14 2004 that the U.S. was using Zarqawi as an excuse to level Fallujah. At that time PM Iyad Allawi was threatening Fallujah with destruction unless it handed over Zarqawi. Pepe Escobar quotes Sheikh Khaled al-Jumeili, a key Fallujah negotiator, as saying that there were only a small number of foreign jihadis in the city and he insisted that they were not terrorists, but plain mujahideen.

"Zarqawi is just an excuse for them to smash the spirit of the resistance," al-Jumeili said.

Before the invasion Escobar writes that Zarqawi was a nobody, but that:

"Zarqawi stopped being a non-entity on February 5, 2003, when he was spectacularly catapulted onto the global stage - six weeks before the start of the Iraq war - by US Secretary of State Colin Powell's weapons of mass destruction speech at the United Nations. Powell used Zarqawi to link Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'athist regime to the 'Islamic terror network', and thus partly justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq."

He can run but he can't hide. We're going to smoke him out! But not really, because after all the money we've spent on building up this "master of disguise and bogus identification papers," we wouldn't want to see that all go down the drain.

There's always Muktada!