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Mr. Zarqawi's Brilliant Tactic

Christopher Hitchens has a must-read column up today in the WSJ, that points out the insanity of blaming 'Iraq's Imminent Civil War' on Bush:

In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden.... Zarqawi wrote of Iraq's largest confessional group [the Shi'ites] that: "These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger."

Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. "Civil war" has replaced "the insurgency" as the proof that the war is "unwinnable." But in plain truth, the "civil war" is and always was the chief tactic of the "insurgency."

In point of fact, by taking up this cry and pointing it against President Bush, the left has now - unwittingly for the most part, but not I imagine, entirely - allowed itself to become the very instrument of Al Qaeda, pointed at the breast of the West.

Useful idiots, indeed.

At Belmont Club Wretchard notices a similar phenomenon:

It was Zarqawi and his cohorts themselves who changed the terms of reference from fighting US forces to sparking a 'civil war'. With any luck, they'll lose that campaign too.

posted by Alcibiades @ 9:45 AM