Note: The following post is a quote:
---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1600146/posts
The Stone Face of Zarqawi (Iraq is no "distraction" from al Qaeda)
Wall Street Journal ^ | March 21, 2006 | CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Posted on 03/21/2006 2:26:56 AM PST by RWR8189
In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention ("to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates" and "accelerate the emergence of the Messiah"), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq's largest confessional group that: "These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger."
Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. "Civil war" has replaced "the insurgency" as the proof that the war is "unwinnable." But in plain truth, the "civil war" is and always was the chief tactic of the "insurgency."
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=local&id=3994444
"Two Deputies Shot During Traffic Stop"
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "LOS ANGELES - Two sheriff's deputies and a suspected gunman were wounded Monday in a shootout that followed a traffic stop in the Florence area of Los Angeles County, authorities said.
Deputies Adam Kirste and Omar Miranda, both 29, were taken to St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, where they were treated for non-life-threatening wounds sustained in the mid-morning shootout, Undersheriff Larry Waldie said.
The suspect, identified as Juan Carlos Campos, 33, was taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for treatment of four gunshot wounds following the 10:15 a.m. shooting near Compton Avenue and 70th Street.
This evening, the sheriff's department reported that Campos was in critical but stable condition, said Deputy Rich Pena."