Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 7:53:10 PM
Best of the Web has an amusing take on the NYT's insistence on "Al Qaida in Mesopotamia" being "mostly homegrown":
Boilerplate Gone Wild
From a New York Times report on Iraq:
Seizing on the desperation of Sunni insurgents, foreign
fighters were able to entrench themselves in the neighborhood. Those
fighters, who Ahmed said were aligned with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a
mostly homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says
is foreign-led, were not only brutal in battling Shiites but also in
enforcing control over Sunni residents.
You almost have to admire the New York Times for sticking to its
guns and continuing to use the "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" trope when
George W. Bush has been out of office nearly six months. But the
reference to AQIM as "mostly homegrown" is especially awkward here,
given that the whole paragraph is about "foreign fighters."
However, they miss one interesting aspect of this excerpt. They recognize that the focus is on the foreign fighters, but miss the other half of the equation. If AQIM is foreign led, and is staffed with foreign fighters, exactly where do the "homegrown" people figure into it at all? By this definition isn't the French Foreign Legion a native insurgency in north Africa?