Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail – Al Qaeda and its Role in the Iraq Insurgency

The attempts to minimize the role played by al Qaeda in Iraq in the larger Sunni insurgency took a significant step over the past week. Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the New York Times, claimed that the media had become complicit in the government's attempts to paint the entire Sunni insurgency with an al Qaeda brush. Also this week, Malcolm Nance published an article at the Small Wars Journal claiming al Qaeda is being given too much credit for the violence in Iraq. In the article, titled "Al Qaeda in Iraq--Heroes, Boogeymen or Puppets?," Nance claims al Qaeda is but a bit player in the Iraqi insurgency and is largely controlled by the Baathist remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime. To Nance, al Qaeda is both a U.S. Boogeyman and Baathist Puppet…
Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard’s WorldWideWeekly.com - Al Qaeda in Iraq: Not Just a Boogeyman

Roggio just posted what I think is the definitive takedown of the argument put forward earlier in the week by Small Wars Journal contributor Malcolm Nance. Nance's theory is that al Qaeda is basically a bit player in the insurgency--small, but lethal--and that the administration is trying to hype the threat the group poses in order to convince the American people that withdrawing from Iraq would be the equivalent of surrendering in the war on terror. Suffice to say, Roggio isn't buying it…

Nance's essay strikes me as part of a larger, renewed push by the antiwar crowd to discredit the idea that the war in Iraq has any real connection to the war on terror--as Roggio points out, the New York Times put in its two cents last Sunday with a piece by the public editor declaring that "President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda...