Saintperle

6/16/06

Was Osama bin Ladn the one who dropped a dime on Wowie Zarqawi?

Very interesting article in the June 19th New Yorker by Lawrence Wright.
The gist of it is that the death of Zarqawi is GOOD for Al Quaeda...

Among those quietly celebrating the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last week, no doubt, were Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leaders of Al Qaeda, who have watched their nominal ally wreck the standing of their organization among Muslims around the world.

After Zarqawi began his bloody operations in Iraq, in 2003, support for suicide bombings—the signature of Al Qaeda since the destruction of the American embassies in East Africa, in 1998—plummeted in Islamic countries. Muslims surveyed in the 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Project reported in substantial numbers that Islamic extremism was a threat to their own countries...

Zarqawi was the herald of a new generation of terrorists whose roots were in street crime, not in Islamic militancy. A former thief and sex offender, he memorized the Koran while he was in prison, and began issuing fatwas and calling himself “sheikh...”



Hmmm, talk about "Unintended Consequences."


You can read the entire essay here

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