Zawahiri Speaks Again

The new US embassy in Baghdad is finally ready to open, and MSNBC calls it fortress America. It definitely isn't an inviting structure, but that's done on purpose as rules were drawn up after the embassy bombings to make their facilities more secure against various kinds of attacks.

The aesthetic principles are secondary to security measures with good reason. The US embassies are targets that the likes of al Qaeda have attacked in the past and may well attempt again in the future.

And Zawahiri has emerged from his cave to once again declare that the US has lost Iraq and that Iraq is the most important battleground.

Well, he's batting .500.

He's wrong about the US losing Iraq - the only ones losing are al Qaeda and their fellow jihadis who can't get rid of US forces and who have seen the local population turn against the jihadis precisely because of suicide bombings and violence against fellow Muslims.

He is right that Iraq is the central battlefield - because if al Qaeda can't win there, they can't win anywhere.

It's because of this that the spike in suicide bombings, a possible attempt to recreate Tet, will fail, not because of media coverage which generally spikes as the violence does, but because the locals have seen what the jihadis have done and will not tolerate the violence any longer. This may also be the death throes of the jihadis in Iraq - where the remnants are pushed to desperate measures to maintain any relevance at all.

The spike in suicide bombings also appears to show that Zawahiri isn't exactly able to provide leadership over the Iraqi al Qaeda contingent because it wasn't long ago that Zawahiri said that the suicide bombing missions were becoming counterproductive, which is evident because the Sunni Awakening would not have happened if al Qaeda had not started attacking Sunnis who were formerly open to the idea of working with al Qaeda for not being sufficiently Islamist enough.

Meanwhile, Rusty at the Jawa Report notes that there were actually two wars in Iraq. The first was the one to topple the evil regime of Saddam Hussein. That one has long been over. The second is the one that is currently being fought against the jihadis and al Qaeda. Whatever the merits of the first to attack, and I still believe they were more than sufficient on human rights grounds alone (the mass graves, ethnic cleansing and genocide more than sufficient to warrant action), it is indisputable that we cannot leave Iraq now to the hands of al Qaeda and their coreligionist terrorists.

Most Americans would agree that al Qaeda is the primary enemy facing the US around the world, so ceding the field of battle in places like Iraq or Afghanistan would be catastrophic for US national security, regional stability and disastrous for the Iraqis and Afghan people.