Al Qaeda Thrives Amid Power Vacuum In Middle East -- Ben Hubbard/Robert F. Worth and Michael R. Gordon -- Boston Globe/New York Times
BEIRUT — The images of recent days have an eerie familiarity, as if the horrors of the past decade were being played back: masked gunmen of Al Qaeda recapturing the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, where so many U.S. soldiers died fighting them. Car bombs exploding amid the elegance of downtown Beirut. The charnel house of Syria’s worsening civil war.
But for all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.
Amid this vacuum, fanatical Islamists have flourished in Iraq and Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda, as the two countries’ conflicts amplify each other and foster ever-deeper radicalism. Behind it all is the bitter rivalry of two great oil powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose rulers — claiming to represent Shi'ite and Sunni Islam respectively — cynically deploy a sectarian agenda that makes almost any sort of accommodation a heresy.
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My Comment: So much for the White House argument that Al Qaeda is in decline. But with no political will or public support in the U.S. (and it's allies) to get involved in the Middle East .... one can only expect the violence to escalate and the growth of Al Qaeda to continue undiminished.
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