The Atlantic Magazine Article on Al Zarqawi

The Altantic Magazine has a great story on Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. This article talks about how Zarqawi was mainly insigificant until Colin Powell mentioned Zarqawi in the United Nations speech. Even after that he was not really that important to the insurgancy in Iraq. The author of the piece went to the hometown of Zarqawi and talked with people who either know him or had heard of him. One of the people the author talked to was a man who fought in the Soviet-Afghanistan war of the 80's. This man mainly recounted his stories about how Arab men acted at the beginning of this current war in Iraq. He claimed that men were giving large amounts of money to the people who were going fight in Iraq. He even told the story of a boy around the age of thirteen or fifteen who begged and pleaded to go to fight in Iraq and then when they refused him he begged and pleaded with them to take the $200,000 his family had given him.

Shortly after these stories about how the insurgancy is being financed the author moves on to the life of Zarqawi. The author traces Zarqawi's life and the things he did. Do you think the American people would have cared so much about Zarqawi if they had known he was a barely literate Arab man who had been fired from his job as a video store clerk. Yes, according to the author even though Zarqawi had a police record, was a bully, and may have been a pimp, he could barely read and was fired from his job as a video store clerk. The story goes on to allow foreign intelligence agents to point out that Zarqawi was never in charge of the insergancy in Iraq and was never as big of a threat as the Bush Administration made him out to be. One of the intelligence agents was from Jordan. I did not read the whole story, but the parts I did read were really great and informative. It is hard to believe that Zarqawi returned to Jordan to attend his mother's funeral and the United States government did not arrest him. I hope to read the rest of the story later. I contend everyone at DU and even everyone in America should read this article.