INSURGENT IRAQby Loretta Napoleoni
English
Published: Seven Stories Press
2005
“[A] tantalizing search to disentangle the threads of legend and reality in the strange tale of Abu Mos’ab al Zarqawi.”
- Noam Chomsky, Linguistics Professor and Political Activist
“Loretta Napoleoni unravels the myth about al-Zarqawi and shows us the real man and what he stands for.”
- Ahmed Rashid, “Far Eastern Economic Review”
INSURGENT IRAQ: AL-ZARQAWI AND THE NEW GENERATION
BY LORETTA NAPOLEONI
On February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke before members of the United Nations to justify the forthcoming war in Iraq. Powell claimed that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were allies, and that Abu Mos’ab al Zarqawi was the crucial link between them. Today we know that there was no alliance between al Qaeda and Iraq, just as we know there were no weapons of mass destruction. From Powell’s fallacious claims, sprung one of the most compelling myths of the “War on Terror.”
In Insurgent Iraq: al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, Loretta Napoleoni provides an unparalleled look into the “outright fabrication.” She explores the climate in which Iraq’s most notorious insurgent opened a new front in the modern jihad and how he, with the help of the war, was able to do what Osama bin Laden could not: spread the message of jihad into Iraq. Napoleoni examines the insurgency and the multitude of forces that continue to shape it.
“The terrifying myth of al-Zarqawi allowed the Bush administration to reinforce the false notion of America’s popularity in the Muslim world, a popularity supposedly boosted by its commitment to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq,” Napoleoni says. “For average Americans, the Iraqi resistance is not represented by citizens rebelling against the yoke of occupation, but by al-Zarqawi, an evil man, and his bunch of religious fanatics.”
Insurgent Iraq provides a detailed look at the events that propelled the working class, uneducated Jordanian known as Abu Mos’ab al-Zarqawi into power. She examines how his rise in Iraq has helped instigate the escalated violence between the Shi’ites and the Sunnis, and she warns how al-Zarqawi’s agitation of internal conflict in Iraq could ultimately push the country into outright civil war with strong ethnic and religious divides.
Napoleoni provides a mindful discussion of the numerous factions at work in the country, offering a much-needed understanding of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq has catalyzed the cultural, religious and political divides within the country, creating a more volatile landscape.
Insurgent Iraq is a must read for anyone concerned about the alarming reality that “what we have created may be beyond our ability to subdue.”
