Once more about AQI...

Once again, there's an American on the BBC talking about the new strategy in Iraq. Abul Abed in Ameriya is essentially a warlord on the Somalia model - and he's our man there, to stand up against AQI and make the town safer. Granted, it seems to be working on the local level, but at the risk - closer to the guarantee - of undermining the new, central democracy that until very recently was our last actual excuse for being in Iraq. It seems like our strategy now is to create a fractured, warlord-ridden country that says the right things.

In the words of a Sunni sheikh who's joining up, "It's just a way to get arms". He describes the process like this:

"The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al-Qaida. It will create a series of warlords. It's like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants."

But the point of this post is to note that the American soldier who was talking to the BBC reporter made a reference to AQI which was then identified as "al Qaeda". Not "al Qaeda in Iraq" (or Mesopotamia), but just "al Qaeda". Period. (Full stop, if you prefer.)

This is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst. AQI is not al Qaeda. It's a young group that has little to do with the organization hiding out in Pakistan now and nothing to do with the group that attacked the USA back in 2001. Pretending otherwise is a good way to keep Americans agitated, but it's not any less dishonest than ... well, attacking Iraq over 2001 was in the first place.