Is anyone else aware that we are now fighting "Al Qaeda" in Iraq?

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

It appears that there is a concerted effort on the part of shrub & co. to have now morphed Iraq as a battlefield to fight "Al Qaeda".

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050830/wl_nm/iraq_airstrike_dc_6

And in one of shrub's speeches yesterday, bringing the spectres of both Emmanuel Goldsteins up.....

Bush said the Iraqi oil industry, already suffering from sabotage and lost revenues, must not fall under the control of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida forces led in Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. "They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition"

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Thanks for the laugh... shrub never fails to amuse.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

3. One good thing about Katrina, all of this crap isn't being reported on

tv. I wonder what the next justification of continuing the fight in Iraq will be?

[leftchick]

4. he said it was the oil

he admitted it in the speech. The US has to keep the oil out of the hands of the terrists. There you have it!

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

2. We're protecting Iraqi oil from OBL...

...if Bush said it, it MUST be true.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2047311&mesg_id=2047311

:grr:

[Hubert Flottz]

5. What gets me is this!

Here the southern part of the US is torn all to hell and Bush is out the next day still trying to sell his fucking war! Still playing politics!

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

6. The man is a sociopath & he doesn't give a shit about Katrina's aftermath,

only about his goddamn agenda. This is someone who has through his lies, murdered over 1800 of our soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqis. Do you think he cares about the people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama?

[Hubert Flottz]

7. He "DON'T CARE"

The GOP don't care about anything but winning the next election!

[iconoclastic cat]

8. Anyone get the impression from this statement that we're never leaving? nt

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

12. There was never an intention for us to leave. We are building permanent

bases on Iraq. The whole world probably knows except for the majority of the American people. Even our Democratic Senators and Congressmen aren't letting "us" in on it.

[H2O Man]

9. Have you forgotten

how Usama bin Hussein attacked the USA on 9-11 from his Iraqi base?

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

23. Exactly! And the shrub will be able to use 9/11 more frequently

in his "fightin' the terrists there" speeches.

Are the American people so stupid that they'll buy this too?

[Tinksrival]

10. I can just hear his disgusting voice

"heh heh....We can fight more terrorist by creating more terrorist....heh,heh..."

[theflyscotsman]

11. Er...

Apparently, there's a concerted effort by Zarqawi and bin Laden, too: They're the ones who announced it, a couple years ago. Yeah, I was aware, so were all the people who have been making jokes about how there wasn't any connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda until we invaded? Zarqawi was an Al Qaeda goon who fled Afghanistan after invaded and became a refugee in Baghdad, only to find himself stuck again when we went in there too.

[magellan]

13. Zarqawi had no ties to al-Qaeda

He heads his own group, al-Tawhid, which ran in competition with al-Qaeda for recruits for the purpose of installing an Islamic regime in Jordan, Zarqawi's native country.

BushCo knew Zarqawi had built an explosives/poison training camp in Northeastern Iraq long before March 2002. He was operating under our no-fly zone and they did nothing to stop him.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

15. They had many opportunities to get him, and might have, early on

in the war. There were reports that he was killed. A group of local tribesman signed an affadavit to that affect.

[H2O Man]

16. Interesting ....

While it is certainly true that Zarqawi had no ties to al Qaeda before the Bush aggression in Iraq, it has been reported that they have become allied, if perhaps in an informal way. Do you think this is true?

Clearly, the most significant cause of the on-going violence in Iraq is the Bush/Cheney administration. The major opposition to the American presence appears to be organized by the lower levels of Saddam's party. I've read that these people (who are nationalists, and not pro-Saddam), have organized into a "cell" structure not unlike that of the Viet Cong in that other war our administration has forgotten.

The Rumsfeld doctrine has obviously created an opportunity that has allowed a greater influence from Iran to take positions of power in Iraq. The Sadr forces will always beat the Chalabi-types in elections. The more the US attempts to install their puppets, the more opportunity the Zarqawi forces will have for gaining influence.

Thus, it seems possible that the lies the administration has told for years could actually come back to haunt them.

[theflyscotsman]

17. according to...

...my reading, Zarqawi went back to Iraq after he got out of prison in Jordan and opened a training camp in Herat. Bin Laden, however, has publicly named Zarqawi his man in Iraq, and statements from Zarqawi have used the Al Qaeda monicker once or twice that I've seen.

It's not actually a big deal, since apparently bin Laden just sort of "annexed" the group, but it's also hardly anything new.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

19. I personally feel that Bin Laden was/is? a CIA operative. I have

the question mark next to "is", as it is very possible that he has long since died. There were remarkable differences in appearance between the Bin Laden of old and the one that appeared during the 2004 elections. Wag the dog........

[julianer]

18. You are right to correct the previous poster

but I don't think there is any evidence that the camp in Kurdistan was an 'explosives/poison training camp'. Iirc that was a Powell line at the UN.

I also seem to remember that the BBC visited the camp before the war and there was nothing there that fits the description, but I may be mistaken about exactly whose camp it was - Ansah el Sunna, possibly.

[magellan]

20. Sorry, think you may be right

I was getting my information from Cooperative Research, but there seems to be no distinction made about where that particular bit of intelligence originated, which isn't good. But a report on Truth Out, from a captured associate of Zarqawi who was interrogated by the Germans, says:

"...after American forces drove him out of Afghanistan following the 9-11 attacks, Zarqawi for several months ran Al Tawhid out of Iran, using telephones and a network of couriers to pass messages and documents to the German cell and other operatives in Europe."

No reference to Zarqawi operating out of NE Iraq.

I've been poking holes in the Zarqawi/NE Iraq/al Qaeda link excuse for well over a year. Sniffs even more like another outright BushCo lie now.

[magellan]

21. Delete, dupe

[MadisonProgressive]

14. Are they by any chance crossing over from IRAN??

[ContraBass Black]

22. More likley than not, we are fighting Al-Queda in Iraq,

but we got there first and unlocked the door.