Glenn Reynolds: [1]
“Violence in Iraq has dropped by 70 percent since the end of June, when U.S. forces completed their build-up of 30,000 extra troops…”
According to the Iraq Interior Ministry.
And bin Laden pipes up and tells his people they’ve been “lax.”
When they haven’t been dead.
Well, yes, of course there is that. But perhaps there’s something deeper going on here, as well. Osama speaks as one who anticipates a large swelling of his ranks, from, shall we say, the rank and file of the Iraqi population. And, for that matter, the Iranian population, and the Syrian, and so on. And, years ago, that might have been true. We certainly had enough of them.
But in looking at the numbers coming back from Iraq , I began to suspect that what’s happening here is BinLaden is losing support. not so much because of his religiously tainted edicts, but the horribly bloody results of them. A point , I think, he tacitly acknowledges when he suggested recently that “mistakes were made”. [2]
Still, he insists that these people have not deserted him, but that they were “lax”. I suppose him saying the truth of this thing would leave him standing nearly alone in his ’cause’.
This is not to suggest that the core of his operation will ever collapse. Zealots, after all, being zealots, never give up in the face of mere fact. Witness the Democratic party in this country. But without the popular support , even of the people that he had a couple of years ago, he and his Al-Qaida would seem to be at best a crippled entity.
Now; if we could only get the Democrats to admit that. (Shrug) I guess not. Like I say, zealots being zealots, never give up in the face of mere fact.