Mother Jones gets it, when do you think the democrats will get it?

[dude1394]

I have to give credit to Mother Jones magazine for being willing to accurately analyze what is going on in Iraq. Too bad the "grey lady" is too busy playing politics.

So how many of the democrats "get it"?

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feat...-extended.html

Al Qaeda in Iraq: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Bush administration propaganda notwithstanding, Al Qaeda was not a factor in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. But it is now—and any withdrawal plan needs to deal with the demons we helped create
.......

Before joining forces with bin Laden, Zarqawi's group, though only a relatively small part of the overall insurgency, undertook a series of strategically significant operations that deterred the international community from taking on a greater role in stabilizing Iraq. In August 2003 his group bombed the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad, killing the U.N. special envoy to Iraq and prompting the United Nations to withdraw. And in November 2003, one of Zarqawi's suicide bombers killed 19 Italians, mostly paramilitary police, in the southeastern town of Nasiriya. Zarqawi's ability to deploy suicide bombers allowed his organization to launch more ambitious attacks than other insurgent groups and was a key contribution to Iraq's slide into chaos.

But Zarqawi's biggest impact in Iraq was in provoking sectarian warfare between its Sunni and Shiite communities. On August 30, 2003, his group exploded a massive car bomb outside a Shiite mosque in Najaf that killed 125, including one of Iraq's top Shiite clerics, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim. In early 2004, the U.S. military released a letter it said had been written by Zarqawi to Al Qaeda associates that noted that provoking Shiite attacks on Sunnis was crucial to bolstering the Sunni insurgency. Sunnis in Iraq, the letter stated, "have little expertise or experience" in fighting and "for this reason…most of the groups are working in isolation with no political horizon." It went on, "The Shia in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting them and hitting them in [their] religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their hidden rancor. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death at the hands [of the Shia]."

Zarqawi's strategy to attack the Shiites—which was continued by his successor Abu Ayyub al-Masri after he was killed in June 2006—has, unfortunately, proven wildly successful. The tipping point in the slide toward full-blown civil war was the February 2006 attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a sacred shrine for the Shiites, which triggered a more intense cycle of sectarian strife that has killed tens of thousands and caused more than a million to flee their homes. According to the U.S. military, that attack was masterminded by Haythem Sabah al-Badri, a former member of Saddam's Republican Guard who joined Al Qaeda after the U.S invasion and rose to become the Al Qaeda leader for the Samarra area. Badri was killed in a U.S. air strike in August.