Is Zarqawi Really the Culprit?

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4466324/

March 6 - The stark fact is that we don’t even know for sure how many legs Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi has, let alone whether the Jordanian terrorist, purportedly tied to al Qaeda, is really behind the latest outrages in Iraq. What is clear is that the Iraq conflict has elevated suicide bombing as a weapon of war to a scale never before seen, not only in numbers of victims, but in numbers of attackers, and their ability to field large number of suiciders at the same time.

Aside from the evidence suggested in a letter attributed to Zarqawi intercepted by officials earlier this year, we don't really know much more now than we did when Secretary of State Colin Powell made the case before the U.N. Security Council for war in Iraq in February, 2003. In that presentation, Powell cited Zarqawi’s presence in Baghdad—where he may or may not have gotten an artificial limb fitted after a wound suffered in Afghanistan—as, if not a smoking gun, at least a smidgen of a powder burn linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. The letter so neatly and comprehensively lays out a blueprint for fomenting strife with the Shia, and later the Kurds, that it's a little hard to believe in it unreservedly. It came originally from Kurdish sources who have a long history of disinformation and dissimulation. It was an electronic document on a CD-ROM, so there's no way to authenticate signature or handwriting, aside from the testimony of those captured with it, about which the authorities have not released much information.

The other problem with Zarqawi is his history of working for the Iraqi regime, and also apparently with the Iranians. That's a pretty hard trick—Iran was a bitter enemy of the Saddam Hussein government. Then again, Ansar al-Islam, the Iraqi jihad group, has allegedly had some Iranian support, even though its main role was to do Saddam's bidding in its war against the more mainstream Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Is Zarqawi Ansar al-Islam, or al Qaeda, or both? And even if he is, what really connects him to this week's bombings, except an impulse to find a bete noire, to put a face on the faceless terror. The commanding general of the 1st Armored Division, which patrols Baghdad, said in a briefing March 4 that “it's far more than a supposition and far less than empirical evidence” to say that Zarqawi was involved in the blasts Tuesday. “It's a very educated guess.”

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