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.

As you say, your military killed Zarqawi – at least twice. Oh, but they did sooooo much more:

After they killed him the first time, but before they killed him the second time, they grievously – perhaps mortally, they said at the time – wounded him. Immediately after said grievous wounding Zarqawi traveled on his one leg (or was it two? They could never get that straight) and with near-fatal abdominal wounds, all the way from western Iraq to the eastern border, whereupon he entered Iran and sought and received refuge from the Iranians (amazing, since he had issued numerous screeds against the apostate Shi`as, whom he vowed to remove one and all from the face of the earth).

Also do not forget how they kept “capturing or killing” Zarqawi’s “top leutenants” one after the other after the other until most of us lost count at around 4,651 of them. Zarqawi seemed to be able to produce an endless supply of leutenants for the U.S. military to capture or kill – one of many amazing, magical powers.

Considering that he was a semi-analphabet street thug, he also managed to produced a number of amazingly literate documents some in very high level literary Arabic, only to have them duly discovered and revealed, usually at very convenient moments, by the U.S.

And then there was his apparent ability to be in several, often very distant, places at once – we all marveled at that, too.

But we’ve arrested the top al Qaida leader in Iraq. How many times have we arrested him now?

We arrested the top al Qaeda leader in Iraq in

• September 2006

• February 2006

• November 2006

• August 2006

• al Qaeda leader in Iraq Zarqawi killed in 2005, and then again around June 8, 2006

Feel free to add on….

Osama=Superman

Never mind the “most capable” part, calling them an affiliate is ludicrous enough. A few people have suggested the franchise analogy, but that implies more of a relationship than is really there. You can’t even use the analogy of a brand. They are, at best, an Al Qa`eda knock-off.

By all reliable accounts they are responsible for only a minuscule part of the violence, and have never been very well tolerated by the majority of Iraqis, including the true resistance, who are focusing their attacks on the occupation.

Of course, it is difficult to tell based on what we hear from the U.S. military, the Bush regime, and their stenographers in the media, but the group responsible for committing and provoking the great majority of the violence are the foreign fighters from the USA. Polls show consistently that Iraqis understand this very well.