JORDAN AND ZARQAWI….The LA Times reports that Jordan was instrumental in helping us track down and kill Abu Musab Zarqawi:
Until November 2005, when Zarqawi operatives crossed the border into Jordan and bombed three hotels in Amman, killing 60 people, Jordan’s intelligence service had barely operated in Iraq.
After the bombings, Iraq became, and remains, Amman’s primary security worry….With the permission of Iraq’s fledgling government, Jordanian operatives flooded the war-torn country, cultivating informants and working the periphery of the Zarqawi network to find ways into the organization, a Jordanian official and intelligence experts said.
The Jordanians may or may not be exaggerating their role. Who knows? But it goes to show that insurgencies have the same kinds of problems as counterinsurgencies: if you use too little force you can’t maintain the fight, but if you use too much force you create new enemies where none existed before. It remains the case that the United States doesn’t seem to have a clue how to win the war in Iraq, but at least it’s still possible that al-Qaeda will help the insurgents lose it.
UPDATE: In related news, Marc Lynch reports that the Jordanian government has arrested four members of parliament who public mourned Zarqawi’s death.
