Tale of two so-called "nations"

Yassir abu Hilala, writing today Thursday Oct 19 in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Ghad, says yesterday's AlQaeda parade in Ramadi didn't have any practical significance, being merely part of the ongoing "public relations war." He backs up to tell us a little of the history of the group that has functioned in Iraq, starting after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, initially as a more or less nameless group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then as "Unity and Jihad", until eventually Zarqawi pledged allegiance to Bin Laden, and the group became known as "AlQaeda in the land of the two rivers".

What follows is interesting. People talked about the fact that Zarqawi wasn't Iraqi, and neither were Bin Laden and his circle, and there were questions whether the leadership understood the ins and outs of the Iraqi situation. The result was the formation of the Mujahideen Shura (advisory) Council, nominally headed by an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi by name, and supposedly open to Iraqis. But operations (including financing and "conceptual" issues) remained in the hands of AlQaeda, i.e., the foreigners. Here is where it might start to dawn on the astute reader what Hilala's point is: This problem of public-relations Iraqization is exactly the issue that the Americans have faced.

Resuming, when Zarqawi died there was a natural expectation that his successor as head of operations would be an Iraqi, but instead the successor was Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, who is Egyptian. So this issue of Iraqization continued, and the next move in that direction was the recent announcement about the Alliance of the Mutayyibin whose point was that AlQaeda was joining itself with tribal leaders. The writer explains that in pre-Islamic times, there was a ceremony of washing the hands in perfume (Tayib) before making important alliances, and there are aspects of the old stories that apply here, supposedly giving the name resonance and importance. (If I could follow the details I would offer them here, but I fear getting it wrong). (NOTE: A fellow blogger kindly posted an explanation with background of the "perfumed hands" reference here). In any event, the Mutayyibin Alliance was preparatory to this announcement about the Islamic Nation, supposedly, or in a public-relations sense, the culmination of the Iraqization of the movement. And naturally, the head of the Islamic Nation has a good Iraqi name: Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

The parade yesterday didn't mean much in practical terms, and certainly the geographic scope of this is very narrow. But then so is the Green Zone, Hilala notes. They each have their Green Zone and their public relations apparatus, the "nation" in the Green Zone and AlQaeda's "nation". What is certain, says Hilala, is that what we don't have in Iraq is a real nation.