Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Open Source: Cole with Wright

Here is the transcript of my appearance Monday evening with Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker on Chris Lydon's PRI show, Open Source, to discuss radical Islamism and Iraq after Zarqawi.

posted by Juan Cole @ 6/20/2006 02:01:00 PM

3 Comments:

At 8:50 PM, Blogger Abhinav Aima said...

The U.S. authorities had claimed to have made a great deal of progress in destroying Al Qaeda in Iraq after tracking down and killing Al Zarqawi... Diaries found at Zarqawi's hideout were said to have provided lists of names and other information that had led to hundreds of raids across Iraq on suspected Al Qaeda targets...

Yet, despite the thousands of troops deployed in the search since Friday, along with the aerial drones and aircraft surveillance of the area, these assailants were able to ambush, kidnap, kill and hide the bodies of these two soldiers, and lay boobytraps, without being detected...

Something doesn't add up here...

 
At 9:38 PM, Blogger johnMccutchen said...

Great minds Juan

Thank God He Got Zarqawi?


JIM LEHRER: Now, more on the people who today claimed responsibility for the soldiers' kidnappings and deaths. Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. He's written extensively on al-Qaida and is author of the forthcoming book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Alexis Debat is a senior fellow at the Nixon Center, former official in the French defense ministry. He's also a terrorism consultant for ABC News
...

JIM LEHRER: Is going after these American soldiers a shift in what the recent strategy was under Zarqawi?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: Yes. Zarqawi was really targeting Shiites; he was not really after the Americans. His goal was to provoke a civil war.

And I think that both bin Laden and Zawahiri looked at that as a losing strategy. And Zawahiri cautioned him about this and said, you know, are you going to try to kill all the Shiites? Has this ever been possible? He really was opposed to this particular plan.

If we have one of Zawahiri's men in control now of al-Qaida in Iraq, then I think what we will see is a recalibration of the strategy. They will be focusing on American troops; they will not be focusing on the Shiites.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?

ALEXIS DEBAT: Absolutely. I think the fact that he targeted American soldiers, also the fact that there's no videos.

Remember, in the letter that surfaced a few months ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri criticized Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for his gruesome videos on the Internet, and namely the Nick Berg video. So no videos this time, which that could be an indication that al-Qaida in Iraq is going to be much -- run much closer to al-Qaida central's goals.

Also, al-Masri was very much involved, apparently, in setting up networks abroad. So the two parts, the pillars of the recalibration that Mr. Wright was talking about would be a greater focus on American troops in Iraq and also a greater focus on operations abroad.

NewsHour Interview


Doin a heckuva job Georgie

 
At 9:50 AM, Blogger John Koch said...

US authorities went to great lengths to publicize the face and name of Abu Ayyub Al-Masri. He got a more glitzy debut than the ministers of defense or interior!

Three questions:

1) Is there any independent record of the career of this individual? Was he ever cited in the Arabic media or insurgent documents?

2) If the US has such good information, why was he not already eliminated?

3) Have no Iraqi nationals ever been cited as members of "al Qaeda in Iraq"?

 

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