May 8, 2006
It takes one to know one
Last week our military released captured video outtakes of al Qaeda in Iraq frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that his public was never meant to see. These were the clippings from his most recent underground video project and our military claims these are the clips he’d hoped to leave on the cutting room floor. It takes a bit of explaining to understand what’s going on, but the gist of the tape is that al-Zarqawi doesn’t know how to unjam his weapon, some of his men don’t know that a gun barrel is hot right after it’s been fired and New Balance are apparently the shoes of choice for Iraqi terror leaders. (Much to the delight of the good people at New Balance I’m sure.)
The storyline is that if al-Zarqawi is such a bungling fool of a soldier why would anyone want to follow him and take part in his murderous jihad. After capturing the tape our Iraqi media friends spread this tape around. Our brave soldiers must have been puffing out their chests at this accomplishment. Their macho opponent was exposed as a fool and brought low in the all too critical fight to look good on Al Jazeera.
This tape will show those naysayers at home too. See, here’s a bit of positive news. We’ve got this guy on the run, we found all his home movies, not to mention his high school yearbook — cheerleading squad and photo club — his dirty laundry, this take out carton from when he ordered Chinese last weekend and in a big coup his lucky red hat. Of course the one thing of al-Zarqawi’s that we don’t have seems to be him.
It’s now more than three years that we’ve been hunting this guy. Our high-tech soldiers have been kicking down doors and angering lots of people, putting themselves in danger and many giving their lives searching for al-Zarqawi. Thus far he’s remained one step ahead. Despite the best efforts of our soldiers and hopefully the best plans of our generals, after three years we really haven’t slowed the bombings in Iraq. They’re not all his doing, but some likely are, and three years of war with someone has got to be enough time for him to have proved himself a notable foe.
But now we’ve exposed this terror leader for a fraudulent soldier and bungling fool. Did anyone over in the military happen to think for a second what this particular propaganda strategy says when reflected back on our military? You see, if al-Zarqawi is really the comic villain we’re now casting him to be, our military must be even more laughably inept. I hate to think that’s the case, but this video seems to reflect poorly on all involved.