On Friday I published an email by TPM Reader SM which noted how the most major media outlets now appear to be referring to nearly everyone fighting US troops in Iraq as ‘al Qaeda’. I want to point your attention to a follow-up to that post by Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald provides a nice detailed analysis of recent reporting on Iraq that strongly points to what most of us probably assumed: namely, that there’s no reason to believe that the folks now dubbed ‘al Qaeda’ are any other than the folks formerly called ‘insurgents’. Particularly look at the second half of Glenn’s post, including the update, where he notes how reporters with a good track record of not being bamboozled by administration claptrap appear to be resisting the rhetorical al Qaidization of the Iraqi insurgency.
Now there is one more detail I’d like to add to this discussion. On Saturday morning, TPM Reader AK sent in an email calling attention to this passage in an article in the Times, whose Michael Gordon appears to be one of the top Qaedization offenders …
Jalal Jaff, a Sunni Kurd, who lives just behind the street where the bomb exploded and raced to the scene to pull people from burning cars, turned his head away on Tuesday as he passed the parking lot with more than a dozen destroyed cars, only their charred frames left, the rubber completely burned off their tires.
âHe is a paid terrorist, not a human being,â he said. âThe families will never know which body belongs to their relatives. They were mutilated. They had no faces.â
Like most of the people in the neighborhood, Mr. Jaff blamed Al Qaeda, a term used by Iraqis to refer generally to terrorists. The group operating in Iraq known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia includes many Iraqis but has some foreign leadership.
It’s an interesting passage in that it essentially confirms the point made above — that the only change here is one of labels, that the ‘Sunni insurgents’ and ‘Baathist dead-enders’ are now ‘al Qaeda’ merely by dint of blowing things up. But it also suggests that the change of labels isn’t simply a matter of the US military and American journalists but also appears to be the norm among ordinary Iraqis themselves.
I’m skeptical of that claim. But it is also worth noting that it has long been claimed that the Iraqi government, like the US government, has systematically overstated the role of ‘foreign fighters’ and ‘al Qaeda’ since they too do not wish to see the insurgency as Iraqi and either inter-sectarian or anti-occupation in nature.
Keep watching the press reports on this. Tell us what you find.
