The Daily Background

I’ve written a few times the general confusion about who US troops are fighting in Iraq. Take this for instance, which I wrote in March:

“You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror,” President Bush said in a 2006 interview.

The idea is that we are ‘fighting al Qaeda in Iraq’ and that therefore withdrawing or redeploying from Iraq would mean that we were running away from terrorists. And, as their saying goes, it’s better to ‘fight them there’ rather than ‘fight them here.’

But there is a central problem in this argument, that people have been pointing out for some time now. And that is that most of the incidents of violence that American soldiers in Iraq are being exposed to– i.e. most of the people ‘we’re fighting’– aren’t al Qaeda or non-Iraqi terrorist groups. The vast, vast majority of anti-US forces in Iraq are Iraqi insurgents, not terrorists.

This issue is an important one, particularly when you consider how hard this Administration has workred to conflate al Qaeda with Iraq and now the Iraqi insurgents. Glenn Greenwald wrote about this dangerous conflation yesterday:

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term “Al Qaeda” to designate “anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq” is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as “Al Qaeda.”

E&P and TPM have also been noticing this trend.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog