Al-Zarqawi's gamble

"Foreign bombers behind Baghdad blasts" reads the headline.

TWO of the suicide bombers who staged attacks in Baghdad during the Iraqi election were Syrian and Chechen, an interior ministry source said today.

The source also said some attackers had been detained during the day. "We have arrested some people, but I cannot give figures or nationalities."

Several suicide bomb attacks, most by individuals who carried belts packed with explosives toward polling stations and other targets, were carried out during the election.
Well, the 'insurgency' is now very much looking like it's all over bar the shouting. The Iraqi people are now informing on the terrorists in greater and greater numbers, and the reason why appears to be a relatively simple one. A high-stakes game, al-Zarqawi gambled the farm. Unable to meet the Marines in open conflict, increasingly harried and stretched, the Jihadis turned on the only target they could tackle with any real success: they declared war on the Iraqi people.

The strategy was an obvious one. By upping the hardship suffered by the people themselves, they knew they could rely on the Western media (the Vietnam example no doubt uppermost in their minds) to do exactly as they did: harangue us with images, both real and verbal, of how badly everything was going, how wrong it all was, and how unwelcome the coalition's efforts truly were. The idea, of course, was to see GWB hurled out of office, the obvious result being a steady weakening of US resolve until they finally withdrew altogether. As was widely predicted, this would have been a tremendous win for the terrorists.

Game: Jihadis.

However, al-Zarqawi's gamble started coming badly unstuck the moment GWB was re-elected POTUS. And what made his gamble all the more heady was that the Iraqi people themselves were beginning to realise that his real war, the one of bullets, knives, bombs and blood, was actually with them, not the coalition military.

With the US election result, al-Zarqawi's bid for the hearts and minds of the West had failed where it counted. However, in their desperate bid to win this all-important Western campaign, he and his crew had, as a direct consequence, already comprehensively lost the hearts and minds campaign where, given the US election result, it now counted the most: on the ground in Iraq.

Game: Western coalition.

The group of Iraq's al-Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed overnight it had carried out 13 suicide attacks to "spoil the party". The Internet statement could not be independently verified.
This was al-Zarqawi's best and last shot. His last stand is yet to come.

Who wants to bet it will be an Iraqi bullet that takes him out?

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