Yesterday, the president, speaking from the Rose Garden, sounded like he had excellent news.
“I asked the Generals to go up to Capitol Hill to brief members of the House and Senate on our strategy for victory, on our operations in Iraq. They updated me on what recently took place in Baghdad, in which Iraqi and coalition forces tracked down and killed Abu Azzam, the second most wanted al Qaeda leader in Iraq. This guy is a brutal killer. He was one of Zarqawi’s top lieutenants. He was reported to be the top operational commander of al Qaeda in Baghdad.”
We’ve been hearing for months about various No. 2 and No. 3 men in al Queda, but maybe different people keep getting promoted and we keep getting them?
It turns out, according to Newsweek, that Bush’s claim was, like so many of his Iraq claims, not quite true.
[V]eteran counterterrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann said today there are ample reasons to question whether Abu Azzam was really the No. 2 figure in the Iraqi insurgency. He noted that U.S. officials have made similar claims about a string of purportedly high-ranking terrorist operatives who had been captured or killed in the past, even though these alleged successes made no discernible dent in the intensity of the insurgency.
“If I had a nickel for every No. 2 and No. 3 they’ve arrested or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d be a millionaire,” says Kohlmann, a New York-based analyst who tracks the Iraq insurgency and who first expressed skepticism about the Azzam claims in a posting on The Counterterrorism Blog (counterterror.typepad.com). While agreeing that Azzam — also known as Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohamed al-Jawari — may have been an important figure, “this guy was not the deputy commander of Al Qaeda,” says Kohlmann.
Three U.S. counterterrorism officials, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, also told Newsweek today that U.S. agencies did not really consider Abu Azzam to be Zarqawi’s “deputy” even if he did play a relatively high-ranking role in the insurgency.
The characterization of Abu Azzam as No. 2 to Zarqawi is “not quite accurate,” said one of the officials.
There’s no doubt that Abu Azzam was a dangerous guy. But is it really necessary for Bush to label every killer Americans find a top al Queda lieutenant? The president’s credibility on Iraq been damaged enough; these exaggerations aren’t helping.