Everyone is Al-Qaeda!

Greenwald discusses an interesting point, one that I didn't verbalize but was fixed in the back of my head, about how in the past couple of weeks, every US confrontation in Iraq seems to be against "Al-Qaeda" rather than "insurgents". Now frankly I was willing to go along with it because I honestly believed (I should stop right here and hit myself with a stick) the media when they told us that there are Al-Qaeda strong holds that were identifiable with Al-Qaeda and not the numerous insurgent brigades that pop up in the Middle East like hot dog stands. But are they really Al-Qaeda? Greenwald makes the point:

"Are there some foreign fighters in Iraq who have taken up arms against the U.S. occupation who are fairly called "Al Qaeda"? Probably. But by all accounts -- including the President's -- they are a tiny part of the groups with guns who are waging war in Iraq. The vast, vast majority of them are Iraqis motivated by a desire to acquire more political power in their own country at the expense of other Iraqi factions and/or to fight against a foreign occupation of their country. To refer to them as "Al Qaeda" so casually and with so little basis (other than the fact that U.S. military officials now do so) is misleading and propagandistic in the extreme.
Making matters much worse, this tactic was exposed long, long ago. From the Christian Science Monitor in September, 2005:


""The US and Iraqi governments have vastly overstated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq, and most of them don't come from Saudi Arabia, according to a new report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS). According to a piece in The Guardian, this means the US and Iraq "feed the myth" that foreign fighters are the backbone of the insurgency. While the foreign fighters may stoke the insurgency flames, they make up only about 4 to 10 percent of the estimated 30,000 insurgents."

"And in January of this year, the Cato Institute published a detailed analysis -- entitled "The Myth of an al Qaeda Takeover of Iraq" -- by Ted Galen Carpenter, its vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, documenting that claims of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is "a canard that the perpetrators of the current catastrophe use to frighten people into supporting a fatally flawed, and seemingly endless, nation-building debacle.""

I'm still not fully convinced and unfortunately I have to agree with Klein that Greenwald does seem to have an ax to grind with the M$M. Still it doesn't mean he's completely wrong either. In this cluster f-ck we call Iraq who the hell knows who is who. What does remain crystal though is that the US isn't wanted.