High-Level Terrorist says U.S. is "Suffocating" Them

High-Level Terrorist says U.S. is "Suffocating" Them

The real news is AWOL

"By God, this is suffocation!"

That's the quotation of the week -- if not the new year. This exclamation, first reported in The New York Times, expresses the raw frustration of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born terror-master believed to be operating in Iraq and long thought to have been a Saddam Hussein-harbored link to Al Qaeda. His frustration is the result of American success in Iraq.

In a document intercepted last month by U.S. officials, the man believed to be Zarqawi bemoans U.S. resolve -- America "has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes" -- and U.S. progress in building an Iraqi security force. "The problem is," he writes, "you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance. When the Americans withdraw ... they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region." His conclusion? "The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of the land will be the authority. This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts."

No "pretexts" for violence and anarchy, that is.