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June 25, 2006
Understanding the al-Qaida hierarchy
How did Abu Musab al Zar-qawi go, in a matter of weeks, from a fool fumbling with a machine gun he didn’t know how to use, to the supreme leader of everything that is un-holy in Iraq and beyond?
Simple.
We put a $25 million bounty on Musab’s head, he had a cool name, and we caught him nap-ping and blew up his house with two 500-pound bombs right in the middle of the run-up to our mid-term elections. Most of all, he went from dufus to Ghengis because it was good timing and good politics.
The best thing that has come from his killing is that at least now we have the whole al Qaida in Iraq hierarchy thing straightened out.
It goes like this I think. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a fat guy with a beard, who, if not in per-son at least through pen pal status, knew Osama bin Laden, was signified by Colin Powell, in his dog-and-pony show for the benefit of Congress and the American people during the lead up to the Iraq war, as being a key al-Qaida operative.
It didn’t matter then that he was not actually part of al-Qaida and wouldn’t be for years to come. It didn’t matter later that he was in charge of only a very small fraction of the in-surgents in Iraq.
He was signified, and we put a bounty on his head, which made him a big deal.
So Al — I like to call him Al. Actually I like to call them all Al — So Al then went on TV, since our bounty also made him important to Al-Jazeera, and took credit for killings he may or may not have had anything to do with, and we started hear-ing his name more and more often.
Pretty soon, CNN’s talking heads even started outwardly showing a modicum of weird pride in the fact that they could pronounce his name, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It had a rhythm, a meter, it rolled off the tongue — “On the shores of Gitchee-Goomie; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” yes, by all that’s holy, it is iambic penameter. No wonder it caught on.
Then, less than a month ago, we started seeing video clips of Big Al firing a machine gun to prove how in touch he was with the daily operation of the in-surgency.
Then, a few days later, we got the out-takes and he looked less like a fierce foreign fighter and more like Mike Dukakis in a tank, or George Bush in a jet, or even a new addition to Mad Magazine, Abu Musab al-Newman.
As he fumbled and swore at his machine gun until a lesser person, probably Private Al, stepped in and fixed it for him and let the taping go on, we were systematically told through voice-overs how inef-fectual and insignificant the man was.
We all marveled at his stu-pidity and incompetence, and realized it was al-Qaida itself that was our problem, the leader was just a PR front man.
A handful of days later it was announced that we had killed him — “the top man in al-Qaida Iraq.”
We were immediately told that his death would not com-pletely stop the insurgency, but that it was a big deal, a very big deal.
In effect we were told, like in a line from the Three Stooges, “Bottom man has become top man and then has become bot-tom man again.”
We heard about it first on all the early morning talk shows and news digests. Only later did we find out that the White House knew about his death at 3:45 p.m. the day before. So, I guess they just wanted to hold it for the morning news so it would get better play.
So anyway, the al-Qaida hi-erarchy thing: Here is how it stands.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is re-placed by Abu Ayyub al-Masri who is also called Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, but some sources say he might actually by Abdul-lah bin Rashid al-Baghdadi.
Al replaces Al, but might ac-tually be Al.
Who cares?
The real problem is we can’t tell who is more dangerous to the country of Iraq, the insur-gency or the new Iraqi govern-ment.
And I can’t help thinking, Why don’t we have cool names like this for our own dolts?
We could call George Bush Abu Dubyu al-Finito, and Dick Cheney could be Dodo Shoot Shoot Cause a Boo Boo.
Then, anytime we got tired of them we could just replace them with some guy named Al without missing a step.
That is, of course, as long as it’s not al-Gore.
John Hourihan is wire editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhourihan@ctpost.com.
Posted by todd on June 25, 2006 6:20 PM
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