The poor neocons are desperately trying to insert references to Al Qaeda and Iran whenever Iraq is mentioned.
Behold a text book example of how to avoid reality, demonstrated by surge godfather, Fred Kagan. Having soft ball questions lobbed to you from Faux news always helps.
Obviously, since the concept of being in the crossfire of a civil war isn’t playing to the masses, the neo-cons need to insert al Qaeda in as much as possible, even though the Iraq Study Group (.pdf) clearly states that al Qaeda is responsible for only a small percentage of the violence, which does NOT include the Samarra mosque bombing, despite Kagan’s assertions. Note how earlier he warns against assessing the success of the surge, since it’s less than a month old and in this passage says that violence has dropped since the the beginning of the surge, in January. Talk about not understanding the realities on the ground”¦
Isn’t it bizarre how back in March, Kagan’s brother was boasting about the surge working, and now that it has become an utter failure, these deluded liars insist the surge hasn’t officially started. Sadly for the “crazies”, they continue to get slapped by the occasional bout of reality.
Foreign fighters, eh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t get ’em to fuck off. But this is about those other fighters, the massive penetration of ‘Al Qaeda’ and Iran that supposedly has taken place. Here’s the figures that matter: 0.7% of the Iraqi resistance is foreign, and none of them are Iranian. Did you read that correctly? Of the foreign fighters, 45% are Saudi (America’s best fwend supplies lots of suicide attackers), 15% Syrian, and … whoops, no Iranians. Ironically, part of the ramping up of anti-Iran propaganda can be pinned on what Seymour Hersh called “The Redirection”, in which the US is attempting to break the emergence of what it calls ‘The Shi’ite Crescent’. How does it do so? By funding several Sunni jihadist outfits – oh, and guess who we’re told they’ve got links to. Still, no need to ponder these matters for too long when there is bombing to be done, and bowels to evacuate (which adds resonance to the phrase “let’s bomb the shit out of them”), and the Amreekan ruling class is baying for war on Iran. How ill named the ‘war on terror’ is for all that.
We can expect to see Kagan, Kristol and Lieberman going to great lengths to avoid these findings.… These madmen have been pining for war with Iran for too long, and now that they are close enough to a confrontation with Iran to smell it, none of them are going to allow inconvenient facts to get in their way.