The Times is so hostile to the Iraq War, and the president, that it has been waging a campaign in its news coverage. One example, is in today’s paper. It says:
There has been heated debate since the start of the war about the nature of the threat in Iraq. The Bush administration has long portrayed the fight as part of a broader battle against Islamic terrorists. Opponents of the war accuse the administration of deliberately blurring the distinction between the Sept. 11 attackers and anti-American forces in Iraq.
I am currently reading the Douglas Feith book, War and Decision in which he discusses what was known and how the decisions were made to respond to 9/11. It is clear that they did not at first know who the planners were but everyone assumed it was Usama bin Laden and al Qeada. They had been at war with us for years and we had made ineffective pin pricks as our only response. As time went on and al Qeada records were captured in Afghanistan, it became clear that Iraq was NOT part of that conspiracy. However, they had to decide what to do with Saddam. He was hostile and had WMD (chemical) that he had already used on enemies (the Iranians) and on his own people (the Kurds). He was evading the cease fire terms that had ended the First Gulf War and was shooting at US and British planes that enforced the “no-fly zone.
The Times is so desperate to discredit the war we are now fighting in Iraq, they lie about who the enemy is.
The entity Mr. McCain was referring to — Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, also known as Al Qaeda in Iraq — did not exist until after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The most recent National Intelligence Estimates consider it the most potent offshoot of Al Qaeda proper, the group led by Osama bin Laden that is now believed to be based on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
This is true and we have always known it although Zarkawi is known to have lived openly, and therefore with the approval of Saddam, before the invasion. He later became the leader of al Qeada in Iraq until we killed him. He was a Jordanian.
It is a largely homegrown and loosely organized group of Sunni Arabs that, according to the official American military view that Mr. McCain endorses, is led at least in part by foreign operatives and receives fighters, financing and direction from senior Qaeda leaders.
This first clause is not true. The Sunni insurgency is now ended except for a few terrorists who fight for money and not ideology, similar to the gangs that infest Los Angeles. The suicide bombers, the last and most difficult to eliminate, are nearly all foreigners, some exceptions being involuntary such as the mentally retarded women who were blown up in a pet market in Baghdad a month ago.
The Times even twists its news coverage to emphasize the negative. Michael Gordon is a respected reporter but his editors in New York decide where, and with what emphasis, his stories are placed in the paper.
Juan Cole is a far left professor who was turned down as a possible department chair at Yale. He is a ferocious critic of the war and therefore a favorite of the far-left. Here he is as the sole authority for the Tmes.
But some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”
That is simply not true. The leaders of the Islamists know what the Times is saying and try to help by inventing names to suggest they are correct. They made up a person called Omar al Baghdadi to make it seem as though the insurgency was homegrown. And the Times fell for it. Of course, the wish is often father to the thought.
Anyway, don’t believe what you read in the Times. Maybe that’s why their stock has fallen by 2/3 since the war began.