The king demanded vengeance and ‘Zarqawi’s woman’ was sent to the gallows

Feb.3, 2015, the day after Jordan’s king arrived in Washington for the official visit

For Abdullah II, it was the latest in a series of exhausting journeys in which he repeated the same appeal for help. His tiny country was struggling with two burdens imposed from abroad: a human tide of refugees from Syria — about 600,000 so far — and the cost of participating in the allied Western-Arab military campaign against ISIS. The trip was not going particularly well.

Members of Congress offered sympathy but not much more; White House officials recited the usual pledges to bolster Jordan’s defenses and struggling economy, but the kind of assistance Abdullah most desperately needed was nowhere in the offing. During previous visits, President Obama had declined Jordan’s requests for laser-guided munitions and other advanced hardware that could take out ISIS’s trucks and tanks. On this trip, there was no firm commitment even for a meeting between the two leaders.

Abdullah was at the Capitol, making a pitch to John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when one of the king’s aides interrupted him.

The monarch stepped into the corridor, and on the small screen of a smartphone, watched ISIS deliver its final statement on the proposed prisoner swap. As video cameras rolled, masked jihadists marched the young Jordanian pilot into a small metal cage that had been doused with fuel. Then they lit a fire and filmed as the airman was burned alive.

By the time Abdullah returned to the meeting, McCain’s aide had seen the video as well. The monarch kept his composure, but ¬McCain could see he was badly shaken.

“Can we do anything more for you?” McCain asked.

“I’m not getting support from your side!” Abdullah finally said. “I’m still getting only gravity bombs, and we’re not even getting resupplied with those. Meanwhile, we’re flying 200¬ percent more missions than all the other coalition members combined, apart from the United States.”

The king continued with his scheduled meetings, but he had already made up his mind to return home. He was making arrangements when the White House phoned to offer 15 minutes with the president. Abdullah accepted.

In the Oval Office, Obama expressed condolences to the pilot’s family and thanked the king for Jordan’s contributions to the military campaign against ISIS. The administration was doing all it could to be supportive, the president assured the monarch.

“No, sir, you are not,” Abdullah said, firmly. He rattled off a list of weapons and supplies he needed.
“I’ve got three days’ worth of bombs left,” he said, according to an official present during the exchange. “When I get home, I’m going to war, and I’m going to use every bomb I’ve got until they’re gone.”

There was one other item of business to attend to before his return. From the airport, Abdullah called his aides in Amman to start the process of carrying out a pair of executions. On Jordan’s death row, there were two inmates who had been convicted of committing murderous acts on orders from Zarqawi. One was an Iraqi man who had been a mid-level operative in Zarqawi’s Iraqi insurgency. The other was Sajida al-Rishawi. Both should be put to death without further delay.

The king foresaw that Western governments would protest the executions as acts of vengeance, even though both inmates had been sentenced long ago as part of normal court proceedings. But he would not be deterred. As far as he was concerned, the appointment with the hangman already had been delayed too long, he told aides.

“I don’t want to hear a word from anyone,” Abdullah said.

That goes with the theory that ISIS, being partly made up of Baath Party loyalists & Baath regime intel officers mixed in with Zarqawi’s palestinian terrorists, would never have joined ISIS if Bremer hadn’t fired the Baathists from their jobs but had simply left them in place.

The problem in believing that, is that you have to ignore the fact that al Dhouri’s intel agency was composed of girl scouts even though he is the one who changed Saddam’s policies from secular socialism to islamicism to appeal to islamists long before our invasion- at least as early as 1996. You also have to assume that the Baath Party was wholly moderate and people belonged to it only because it was the only way to get ahead and never because they actually agreed with its philosophy or leadership. You must assume that being without their formerly cushy government jobs is what radicalized them and made them killers, instead of desire to advance in the radical Baath Party that employed such moderate tactics as murdering rivals, putting the children of dissidents in prison or even in plastic shredders, and torturing the Iraqi olympic team. Yeah- poor babies lost their jobs! It’s the poverty meme as the root cause of terrorism in another form.

It ignores the fact that the half of ISIS that was run by Zarqawi and Krekar were terrorists long before our invasion and some were actually Saddam Hussein;s intel people even then - being used to assassinate Kurdish opposition, etc. They assassinated US AID’s Lawrence Foley in 2002 in Jordan before Bremer even came along to govern Iraq.

Still, few would have ever heard of Zarqawi had Washington not intervened. Bullcrap- we on FR were tracking the SOB since the 1999 Millennium plots when his group was trying to blow up hotels in Jordan in concert with the planned New Years attack on the Los Angeles airport that was stopped when a border agent caught the bomber trying to enter the US from Canada.

His terrorist career was at a dead end when the George W. Bush administration inadvertently made him a terrorist superstar,

Tell that to Lawrence Foley and to the Kurds.

declaring to the world in 2003 that this then-unknown Jordanian was the link between Iraq’s dictatorship and the plotters behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A. He was not unknown
B. According to Obama fan Colin Powell, Zarqawi had set up terror cells in the north of Iraq and in Baghdad at least as early as 2002
C Zarqawi had a training camp that swapped trainees and instructors with a neighboring al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan long before 9/11 but had not as far as anyone knows swore an oath to bin Laden, and this lack of an oath is the only reason the left was able to claim with a straight face that AQ and Iraq;s regime were not connected [ignoring of course the other Z guy Zawahiri now head of AQ who had been visiting Iraq to meet with the regime since 1999.] Since Zarawi wasn't yet sworn to bin Laden they could claim his terror cells in Baghdad were irelevent , never mind his affiliation with Mullah Krekar and his Irai intel officers who were running a European terror cell in Italy which if I recall correctly was connected to 9/11 according to wiretaps made by the Italian intelligence agency where two terrorists discussed bringing back souvenirs from the upcoming 9/11 attack.

Fact is, after Saddam was executed Zarqawi did ultimately swear an oath to bin Laden and it must also be noted, the Iraqi genersl al Dhouri swore an oath to Zarqawi. Maybe Zarqawi with all his AQ connections in Afghanistan didn't swear an oath to bin Laden because he was under obligation of loyalty to another, to his host in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, all along?

Iraq did provide training to al Qaeda in forgery. It had been in communication with Iraq,, sending envoys to meet with bin Laden in Afghanistan or Pakistan and also in Sudan- and so had Iran.

Contrary to the article, the admin's justification for going to war with Iraq had less to do with the terrorist connection though it was what the press found more reportable than the other boring stuff. It had more to do with slipping sanctions, the bribery of the UN and other nations by the regime that resulted in sanctions busting yet still did not relieve the iraqi people because the regime did not pass on oil for food food to Iraqis- instead it sold some of it which was found in Iran and countries further east... and stashed the rest of it, letting its people do without because their misery was useful to the regime's propaganda apparatus for sympathy. The main argument against Iraq stated over and over again was the failure of Iraq to abide by its own cease fire agreement and its obstruction of UN verification of claims it made about the destruction of the inventory, equipment and precursors it admitted it had, its obstruction of inquiries with Iraqi scientists [some who were working in Libya], and the fact that Iraq was proceeding to develop long range missiles in violation of sanctions as evidenced by the construction of a new test stand, etc, and it did in fact turn out that Iraq's long range missile program had advanced further than the Un believed it had.

A subargument ignored by the press was Ira's failure to return prisoners of war from both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War, including some 900 Kuwaiti civilians and 1 American pilot as well as an American it was holding in AbuGhraibh who was only released when the US liberated the prison by force.

>> I don’t think the USA has had the heart to win a war since WWII <<

Respectfully speaking, I gotta disagree with you there.

I maintain that thanks to Nixon’s ferocious bombing of Hanoi in December 1972, we won the Vietnam war. But then because of Nixon’s vulnerability in the Watergate affair, the Congress threw our VN victory away in 1973 and 1974 by cutting the legs out from under our South Vietnamese allies. Because of legislation sponsored by the likes of Senators John Sherman Cooper and Frank Moss, it became illegal for the USA even to send medical supplies to the ARVN. I think there has been no greater disgrace in all of American foreign policy. Even JFK’s Bay of Pigs cowardice pales by comparison.

Then once again, we won in Iraq in 2006-07 thanks to Bush’s “surge” program. But tragically, Obama threw that victory totally away by his stupid and feckless withdrawal in 2011. In my opinion, Obama’s policy in this matter is more-or-less tied with the anti-Nixon VN tragedy for the title of our worst foreign policy disgrace.

(Granted that the recent Iran deal probably will turn out to be yet a worse disgrace. But I’d say it’s just too early now to make a convincing historical judgment.)

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