Not So Distracted

Christopher Hitchens on Zarqawi and Iraq:

For some reason, I have not recently been hearing that the war in Iraq is "a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida." Perhaps this mantra became harder to chant after Zarqawi went to all the trouble to certify his gang as "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" and to receive Bin Laden's official franchise. Then again, if one wanted to argue that al-Qaida would not be in Iraq if we were not, one had to confront the fact that Zarqawi was actually there first. And that while he was there, he could in theory have had a chat with Abdul Rahman Yasin, the man who mixed the chemicals for the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and then (released by the FBI) went straight to Baghdad. Or perhaps kicked back with Abu Abbas, organizer of the ocean liner hijacking that resulted in the murder of American Jew Leon Klinghoffer, who when arrested by the Italians had to be released because when on hijack duty he carried an Iraqi diplomatic passport. Failing that, what about chewing the fat with Abu Nidal, assassin of several PLO diplomats and mastermind of the mass slaughter at the Rome and Vienna airports? Yes, it's true that there are more foreign gangsters in Iraq today, but they are no longer living in government hospitality homes, and they are being killed at the rate of dozens every week. And, yes, it hasn't yet been shown that any of them—except of course Zarqawi and his friends—were ideologically linked to the events of Sept. 11. But the intervention in Afghanistan was to make up for that atrocity. The intervention in Iraq was partly designed to forestall the next attack. Now I'm told that it has only made the jihadists more angry. Should I try to think of a policy that would have made them less so?