Al Qaeda in Iraq

Interesting piece by the Public Editor in NYTimes. Points out that the US has been disproportionately IDing Al Qaedea as the perpetrators of violence in Iraq in an effort to boost support for the war.

As domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda.

Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College... The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground (Seeing Al Qaeda Around Every Corner).

The article goes on to, quite rightly, point out that the "Al Qadea" that the Bush Administration identifies in Iraq is not, and has never been, the Osama bin Laden "Al Qaeda" that attacked the US on 9-11. The Iraq Al Qaeda didn't exist before the war, it was created by the war and is more-or-less independent of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.

Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation on the ground — and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the world (Seeing Al Qaeda Around Every Corner).

And all this in the context of the President's description of Al Qaeda as the "smallest" threat in Iraq (President Outlines Strategy for Victory in Iraq).