Profile of the supposed mastermind of the Madrid bombings and Nicholas Berg’s murder by two Nixon Center analysts, whch concludes:
“Historically speaking, the dynamic of revolutionary movements favors the most radical faction–the Jacobins, not the Girondists, the Bolsheviks, not the Menshiviks. If this dynamic prevails in contemporary Sunni terrorism, Abu Musab al Zarqawi represents the future.”
— Weekly Standard
— Weekly Standard
Significant in my reading is that this analysis by conservative anti-terrorist hawks essentially concludes, as I have, that administration claims that he is “al Qaeda-related” are empty rhetoric. Indeed, the entity of “al Qaeda” has no fixed meaning except to western thinkers desperate to have an enemy they can grasp by naming it. Instead, there is a shifting alliance of zealots opportunistically coalescing when their missions conveniently converge.
