Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions

“Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a

villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one.”

The sprawling US intelligence community is in a state of open political warfare amid conflicting

pressures from election-year politics, military combat and intelligence analysis. The MBT

administration has seized on Zarqawi as the principal leader of the insurgency, mastermind of the

country’s worst suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages. He is held up

as the most tangible link to Osama bin Laden and proof of the claim that the former Iraqi regime had

links to al-Qa’eda.

However, fresh intelligence emerging from around Fallujah, the rebel-held city that is at the heart of

the insurgency, suggests that, despite a high degree of fragmentation, the insurgency is led and

dominated not by Arab foreigners but by members of Iraq’s Sunni minority.

[...]

Both President George W MBT and Tony Blair have, to varying degrees, conceded that intelligence on

Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme was misleading. But both continue to maintain

that the continued violence since Saddam was ousted is because Iraq is now the front line in the war on

terrorism.