You have made an important contribution to this thread.

First, the makeup of the power struggle in Iraq is very much more complex than even the most open minded western information source implies. You talk of a “resistence movement” in place to obstruct the Allied invation.

Second, you are quite right to highlight the ‘figurative’ misinformation designed to punctuate cartoon charactures, such as Zarqawi. From an intellecual position, It would be more interesting to hear what some of the incumbant “terrorists” have to say and whether any or all of their “demands” on a human level (at least) are reasonable.

The way this propaganda campaign is being conducted, the intellectual should ask who are the goodies and who are the baddies.

To finish, I use this as an example. If God became angry (something I am led to believe is impossible) and reassigned all Americans to Iraq and all Iraqis to America. Thus America was in civil war and Iraq was at war, peacefully. How would Americans feel about their situation? How would Americans feel about being occupied by “friendly” oppressors?

Musharraf, a U.S. ally, signed a truce last September with tribal leaders in North Waziristan and touted it as a way to fight terrorism by isolating militants.

President George W. Bush was initially supportive of the deal. Tenth months on, his spokesman said it had failed.

“President Musharraf attempted to engage in … carrot diplomacy with tribal leaders in the tribal areas and it didn’t work,” Snow said.

Maybe we ought to bomb the White House first for allowing al Qaeda to escape to Pakistan to rebuild its base and asking Musharraf to reach a truce with them too.

Dems suck?

You don’t need that much bandwidth to say so.

And I just remembered also that twice he, who hated and wanted to destroy everything and everyone to do with Shi`ism even more than he hated and wanted to destroy America, twice formed alliances with “firebrand Shi`a cleric” Muqtada Sadr. One of those alliances was actually a three-way with arch Saddamist, and sometime “insurgent” leader, `Izzat Ad Duri - certainly and interesting set of bedfellows to say the least.

At least once Zarqawi and the Iranians were in bed together, too (that doesn’t count the time he took refuge in Iran after being wounded by the U.S.), and I have a vague recollection that at one time there was an alliance that included Zarqawi, Iran, and anti-Iranian “firebrand cleric” Muqtada Sadr, but don’t hold me to that one.

I did NOT make any of this up. It was all announced by the U.S. military, and duly, and unquestioningly reported by the stenographers of the U.S. media.