Shameless Self-Promotion

Two pieces of self-promotion:

(1) My new piece on Hezbollah, al Qaeda and the new Zawahiri tape is up over at the WeeklyStandard.com. As readers of this blog know, my opinion - based on countless facts - is that state actors have played a large role in al Qaeda's rise. There are folks inside the U.S. intelligence community who do not like to hear this because it conflicts with their paradigm for understanding Islamist terrorism. But the facts are what the facts are. In this case, it is easy to demonstrate that Iran, via Hezbollah, has had a developed relationship with al Qaeda since the early 1990's.

(2) I participated in a forum with Michael Ledeen, Andrew McCarthy and Dave Gaubatz over at FrontPageMagazine.com about the 500 chemical weapons shells and other evidence collected in Iraq. I think it makes for an interesting read. In general, I think the WMD story is more complicated than most realize. While I think the discovery of the 500 chemical weapons shells is significant, I don't think it is incredibly significant. It is just one more data point in a very complicated picture. The material found in Saddam's documents is very significant, I would argue. They paint a very startling picture of how the insurgency in Iraq began and the role that Saddam's regime played in bringing the various groups that make up the insurgency together.