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The Awesome Tony Snow
Posted By Blackfive
From the White House Press briefing this morning:
Q Let me ask you this, because I suppose another way of looking at this is if somebody hadn't flipped, if somebody hadn't tipped off everybody, Zarqawi would not have been targeted. So a lot of this is dependent on another terrorist, perhaps, wanting to see Zarqawi dead so that they could move into the created vacuum.
MR. SNOW: That would be a really stupid terrorist, because the life expectancy of people who have been succeeding these guys, and the life expectancy of being Zarqawi's number two has not been very good. So if somebody was trying to tip off Zarqawi in sort of a Machiavellian attempt to re-jigger things, I think they ought to think twice because what is happening and we've seen this and we've heard reports of it, but I think this dramatizes it the Iraqi people are saying, we've had it with these guys. We've had it. We're not going to take it anymore. And that is an important step. And this is the kind of thing that can reinforce those who want to go ahead and stand up against terror in their midst.
<...>
Q To follow up on this, Tony, can you walk us through, if you can, the actual way this tip came down? Was it
MR. SNOW: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. No operational details.
<...>
Q You've talked about the PR effect of this you talked that it sends a signal and a message
MR. SNOW: Let me I want to be careful. This is not PR. PR is selling soap. This is trying to build a basis for democracy. I really wouldn't want to dismiss what has happened this was not a PR move. This was an important security move going after the guy who amounted to the top field general for terror in Iraq. Go ahead...
Q Is this "the" most positive day in the war in Iraq, overshadowing even the capture of Saddam?
MR. SNOW: I don't know. I really don't. I mean, the President, at the very -- right after September 11th, cautioned people that this was going to be a long war and that the American people would need to maintain their will and maintain their desire to win the war on terror. It is a day where a lot of people can say, okay, we killed a very bad man.
Just to give you a little bit of context on this, Zarqawi moves into Baquba, into an area called HibHib, and what happens -- over the weekend, they found nine heads in a box. They beheaded people and left the heads in a box. They hijack a bus full of students and they slaughter the students. That's what Zarqawi brought to Baquba. So for people in Iraq, I think this sends a powerful signal. Whether it's the most important day or the most positive day, I don't know, but it's certainly a positive development.
jasendorf said:Said previously in the briefing by Tony Snowjob:
So, what we've got here is a "powerful signal" for the people in Iraq... but not "public relations." I get it...
Don't get me wrong... I'm happy that Zarqawi is dead and got what he deserved... but for Tony Snow to say that they're not going to try and make any PR out of it is just hogwash.
dmp said:Here's the 5th Grade Translation:
"Zarqawi was killed because he needed to DIE - NOT to generate positive Public Relations. Zarqawi was eliminated because he's a Fucking Terrorist and deserved Death. Zarqawi was NOT eliminated so the USA or any OTHER country 'looks good'."
My GOD man...What is the GT Score requirement for Sax? You have GOT to be better at comprehension than you seem here.
Dammit!dmp said:Here's the 5th Grade Translation:
"Zarqawi was killed because he needed to DIE - NOT to generate positive Public Relations. Zarqawi was eliminated because he's a Fucking Terrorist and deserved Death. Zarqawi was NOT eliminated so the USA or any OTHER country 'looks good'."
My GOD man...What is the GT Score requirement for Sax? You have GOT to be better at comprehension than you seem here.
You have given out too much Reputation in the last 24 hours, try again later.
theHawk said:DMP, DMP...DMP, you really need to start looking at the world in a more liberal fashion! Everything the government does, especially the military, must be treated as suspect. They aren't there to help people but only to lie and steal from the people they oppress. Get with the times man!
:wank:
Bonnie said:You forgot to add Republican. A liberal administration would never ever do that
Agreed, but progress:Mr.Conley said:I'm glad the guy has been taken out. I kinda wish that we could have captured him so that he wouldn't be made a martyr, but I'm happy.\
What worries me though is who his replacement will be.
In other words, this is a huge victory, but the war against the terrorists isn't over.
fighting words
A Good Day's Work
Why Zarqawi's death matters.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, June 8, 2006, at 2:00 PM ET
The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is excellent news in its own right and even more excellent if, as U.S. sources in Iraq are claiming, it resulted from information that derived from people who were or had been close to him. (And, if that claim is black propaganda, then it is clever black propaganda, which is also excellent news.)
It hasn't taken long for the rain to start falling on this parade. Nick Berg's father, a MoveOn type now running for Congress on the Green Party ticket, has already said that he blames President George Bush for the video-beheading of his own son (but of course) and mourned the passing of Zarqawi as he would the death of any man (but of course, again). The latest Atlantic has a brilliantly timed cover story by Mary Anne Weaver, which tends to the view that Zarqawi was essentially an American creation, but seems to undermine its own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that, Zarqawi wasn't all that important.
Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document of which Weaver (on no evidence) doubts the authenticity, has been the key innovation of the insurgency: applying lethal pressure to the most vulnerable aspect of Iraqi society. And it has had the intended effect, by undermining Grand Ayatollah Sistani and helping empower Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.
Not bad for a semiliterate goon and former jailhouse enforcer from a Bedouin clan in Jordan. There are two important questions concerning the terrible influence that he has been able to exert. The first is: How much state and para-state support did he enjoy? The second is: What was the nature of his relationship with Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida?
For the defeatists and pacifists, these are easy questions to answer. Colin Powell was wrong to identify Zarqawi, in his now-notorious U.N. address, as a link between the Saddam regime and the Bin-Ladenists. The man's power was created only by the coalition's intervention, and his connection to al Qaida was principally opportunistic. On this logic, the original mistake of the United States would have been to invade Afghanistan, thereby forcing Zarqawi to flee his camp outside Herat and repositioning him for a new combat elsewhere. Thus, fighting against al-Qaida is a mistake to begin with: It only encourages them.
I think that (for once) Colin Powell was on to something. I know that Kurdish intelligence had been warning the coalition for some time before the invasion that former Afghanistan combatants were making their way into Iraq, which they saw as the next best chance to take advantage of a state that was both "failed" and "rogue." One might add that Iraq under Saddam was not an easy country to enter or to leave, and that no decision on who was allowed in would be taken by a junior officer. Furthermore, the Zarqawi elements appear to have found it their duty to join with the Ansar al-Islam splinter group in Kurdistan, which for some reason thought it was the highest duty of jihad to murder Saddam Hussein's main enemies. But perhaps I have a suspicious mind.
We happen to know that the Baathist regime was recruiting and training foreign fighters and brigading them with the gruesome "Fedayeen Saddam." (This is incidentally a clue to what the successor regime in Iraq might have looked like as the Saddam-plus-sanctions state imploded and Baathism itself went into eclipse.) That bomb at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, for example, was no improvised explosive device. It was a huge charge of military-grade ordnance. Are we to believe that a newly arrived Bedouin Jordanian thug could so swiftly have scraped acquaintance with senior-level former Baathists? (The charges that destroyed the golden dome of the Shiites in Samarra were likewise rigged and set by professional military demolitionists.)
Zarqawi's relations with Bin Laden are a little more tortuous. Mary Anne Weaver shows fairly convincingly that the two men did not get along and were in some sense rivals for the leadership. That's natural enough: Religious fanatics are schismatic by definition. Zarqawi's visceral hatred of the Shiite heresy was unsettling even to some more mainstream Wahhabi types, as was his undue relish in making snuff videos. (How nice to know that these people do have their standards.) However, when Zarqawi sought the franchise to call his group "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia," he was granted it with only a few admonitions.
Most fascinating of all is the suggestion that Zarqawi was all along receiving help from the mullahs in Iran. He certainly seems to have been able to transit their territory (Herat is on the Iranian border with Afghanistan) and to replenish his forces by the same route. If this suggestive connection is proved, as Weaver suggests it will be, then we have the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran directly sponsoring the murderer of their co-religionists in Iraq. This in turn would mean that the Iranian mullahs stood convicted of the most brutish and cynical irresponsibility, in front of their own people, even as they try to distract attention from their covert nuclear ambitions. That would be worth knowing. And it would become rather difficult to argue that Bush had made them do it, though no doubt the attempt will be made.
If we had withdrawn from Iraq already, as the "peace" movement has been demanding, then one of the most revolting criminals of all time would have been able to claim that he forced us to do it. That would have catapulted Iraq into Stone Age collapse and instated a psychopathic killer as the greatest Muslim soldier since Saladin. As it is, the man is ignominiously dead and his dirty connections a lot closer to being fully exposed. This seems like a good day's work to me.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
dmp said:Yes indeed - Liberals would be upset we never got the chance to create DIALOG with Zarqawi. I mean, we 'never learned what it was WE did which caused his ANGER!"
