The Discerning Texan

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke

Thursday, August 16, 2007

AQ Message for Congress: This Bomb's For You UPDATED

Ralph Peters has a superb column up today about the intended target audience for Al Qaeda's recent attack in Kurdistan: the US Congress. Never mind that the Kurdish attacks really illustrate the dire straits in which Al Qaeda finds itself since the onset of the surge; this is supposed to be cover fire for the Democrat Left to wail and moan. The media (CNN, for example) is already playing this up as just another aspect of the "civil war"--which is anything but. So we must remain diligent to get the truth to the people, above and beyond the din of the Marxist, Islamist-appeasing left and the media that props it up. Peters goes yard here:

The victims were ethnic Kurd Yazidis, members of a minor sect with pre-Islamic roots. Muslim extremists condemn them (wrongly) as devil worshippers. The Yazidis live on the fringes of society.
That's one of the two reasons al Qaeda targeted those settlements: The terrorist leaders realize now that the carnage they wrought on fellow Muslims backfired, turning once-sympathetic Sunni Arabs against them. The fanatics calculated that Iraqis wouldn't care much about the Yazidis.
As far as the Thieves of Baghdad (also known as Iraq's government) go, the terrorists were right. Iraqi minorities, including Christians, have been classified as fair game by Muslim butchers. Mainstream Iraqis simply look away.
But the second reason for those dramatic bombings was that al Qaeda needs to portray Iraq as a continuing failure of U.S. policy. Those dead and maimed Yazidis were just props: The intended audience was Congress.
Al Qaeda has been badly battered. It's lost top leaders and thousands of cadres. Even more painful for the Islamists, they've lost ground among the people of Iraq, including former allies. Iraqis got a good taste of al Qaeda. Now they're spitting it out.
The foreign terrorists slaughtering the innocent recognize that their only remaining hope of pulling off a come-from-way-behind win is to convince your senator and your congressman or -woman that it's politically expedient to hand a default victory to a defeated al Qaeda.

This war is ours to win. The only people who can lose it are your Congressmen and Senators. Please see that they don't.

UPDATE: Peters has another column up in the Post, in which he points out that the media missed the whole point on President Bush naming the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorism organization:

THE media missed a big one yesterday.
They ran with the story that the Bush administration will soon designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps - a major troublemaker in Iraq - as a terrorist organization. But they didn't look past the public-consumption explanation that the move lets our government go after the Revolutionary Guards' finances and the international companies that cut deals with Tehran's thugs.
The real reason for the move is to set up a legal basis for airstrikes or special operations raids on the Guard's bases in Iran.
Our policy is that we reserve the right to whack terrorists anywhere in the world. Now we have newly designated terrorists. And we know exactly where they are.
This doesn't mean we won't go after their money, too. The Revolutionary Guards have built up a financial empire - they're religious fanatics, but, in their version of Islam, "greed is good." Hurting Iran's assassins in the pocketbook reduces their ability to export terror.

Labels: Congress, Defeatocrats, Iraq, Media Bias, Media War, Surrender Caucus, The Left, War Successes