Zawahiri and al Qaeda despair in latest message

The Belmont Club:

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The degree of despair can be gathered from the video's choice of metaphor. Al-Qaeda likened the Muslim division over whether to follow it's lead in the Jihad to the debates within Constantinople over how many devils could stand on the tip of a pin while the Muslims were battering the walls with catapaults -- except this time the walls were reversed. The hated Americans were doing the battering and the Muslims were counting the devils upon the pins. Even allowing for hyperbole, it can be fairly said the metaphor does not exude confidence.

May Allah pluck your eyes out if you don't come an join the Jihad!, the video goes. Quite a line that. One may infer on reading this that al-Qaeda has been missing its recruitment targets lately and this video is the equivalent of the America's "Army Strong" pitch, renamed Jihad On It's Last Legs.

Zawahiri urges the "youth" to hurry to Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Palestine and the Atlas Mountains. Support through propaganda (books and cassettes) are not enough. What he needs are sandals on the ground.

As to being "unempowered", Zawahiri continues, can the Islamic State of Iraq be any weaker than the Jihadis in Gaza, who only exist at the sufferance of Israel and who commute to the West Bank only after beings searched? So if those semi-prisoners of Israel can be a government, why can't the boys in Iraq be given the same standing? (These passages were immensely revealing, because they frankly conveyed the fact that despite their bluster, and the media's amplification of it, the bald truth was that Israel could crush their enemies any time, but simply don't. Whether out of decency or fear of Western political correctness is another matter, but clearly not out of a regard for Jihadi battlefield prowess. At least not according to Zawahiri.) Indeed, Zawahiri goes on so long and hard against Palestine and Hamas that I strongly suspect he dislikes the idea of Palestine, were he frank enough to admit it, because it is a competitor for resources for his own project, the Islamic State of Iraq. Shorn of his holy Joe attitude, and Koranic citation, what Zawahiri is actually talking about is men and money, both of which he probably needs. The message is gimme, gimme!

Zawahiri then goes and declares how pure the al-Qaeda in Iraq is compared to Hamas, how unstained by innocent blood. He makes the extraordinary effort to submit its leaders and men to Muslim judicial proceedings -- some kind of Islamic International Criminal Court -- strange that the ICC's writ runs so short that it doesn't even cross the Mediterranean Sea. And my guess on hearing these words is that Zawahiri is heading off the complaints about al-Qaeda's bloody tactics in Iraq. He is saying "I promise to cooperate fully with any investigation". Then he claims that he is being framed by the Mainstream Media, which portrays Hamas so favorably when they are thugs, while his pure warriors are depicted as baby-killers by ignorant correspondents.

Zawahiri's rational for al-Qaeda's intervention in Iraq was to save it from the defeat which overtook Afghanistan. He says so plainly. Thus, he sees it as fundamentally defensive in character; he sees it as blocking an imminent American threat....

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As Rush Limbaugh pointed out this week Zawahiri also undermined the entire Democrat argument against winning in Iraq, by admitting that it is al Qaeda's central front in its war against the world and the US. The admission was so stunning that it has struck most of the left wing blogs mute as well as the left wing senators and congressmen. Indeed, it is hard to imagine Sen. Domenici, a Republican, even paid any attention to it or any other facts on the ground in Iraq as he announced his own despair at our effort in Iraq based on nothing other than some upset constituents. As Gen. Abizaid has noted, Despair is not a strategy.