Al Qaeda is not al Qaeda in Iraq - Bush wants them confused

James Wimberly reports on the way the testimony from Petreaus and Crocker dropped the phrase "al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) in favor of the less accurate "al Qaeda."

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is an organization created in Northern Iraq by the Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The organization was originally named Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Group of Monotheism and the Holy Struggle). There has never been a close association between AQI and al Qaeda. AQI has no record of attempting to attack Americans in America and no known capability or motivation to do so.

Confusing the two groups serves only to justify the lies used to drag America into the unnecessary war in Iraq. It is a Republican ploy to attempt to avoid responsibility for the greatest single foreign policy blunder ever made by an American President.

So what? Here's what, from TPM:

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents have accounted for most of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq. There likely has been some reduction in Sunni insurgent violence against U.S. troops in Anbar this year, and in fact the U.S. strategy of joining with the Anbar Sunnis against al Qaeda in Iraq is probably part of the reason Petraeus is downplayng the Sunni insurgency at the moment.

But whatever the short-term exigency, this has been a conflict marked by our inability, unwillingness, or idealogical aversion toward accurately identifying our enemies. Even the use of the blanket term "enemy" is misleading in a conflict with multiple competing interests, where alliances come and go, and in which the enemy of thy enemy is not necessarily thy friend. [Snip}

...the strategic and tactical miscalculations arising from the misidentification, to put it charitably, of the competing groups there crippled whatever chance there was of the U.S. effort succeeding.

An strong argument can be made that the confusion of various enemy groups and conflation of them into al Qaeda is (and has been) a propaganda tool used by the Bush administration to fool the American public into believing that there was a legitimate 9/11-related reason for invading Iraq in the first place and then for convincing the American public to keep troops in Iraq when the mismanagement of the occupation by Jerry Bremer and the CPA allowed the insurgency to develop. But there is more.

This administration is filled with decision-makers who believe their own propaganda, chief among them being Bush himself.

Don Rumsfeld felt that the American military was the most powerful in the world because it could deliver combat power anywhere in the world and take out targets almost anywhere. Unfortunately, combat power does not win a counter-insurgency. In fact, the inappropriate use of that combat power has the effect of alienating the population who has to be convinced to oppose the insurgents. That means that a counter-insurgency is at its base dependent on large quantities of accurate and honest Intelligence.

When the decision-makers doesn't understand the nature of the war they are fighting and depend on what their own propaganda says to make decisions in the war, then the insurgents can be expected to win.

That's why it is critically important to distinguish between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. The Bush administration has shown repeatedly that it cannot make those fine distinctions. That is why Petreaus and Crocker were on Capital hill the last two days trying to dress up conflicting statistics to show that there is "Light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq. But it's a road show selling a charade.

With someone else as President besides Bush and with Dick Cheney absent, the occupation of Iraq might possibly have muddled through to a result that would not be so starkly a total failure as the occupation of Iraq has shown itself to be. We'll never know. With them there, there is no possibility of anything that can even be papered over to resemble success.