Iraq resistance battles "Zarqawi"; Sunni fighters defend Shiites. posted by Richard Seymour

Someone e-mailed this to me. It's a story from the Washington Post about how Iraqi Sunni resistance fighters are taking up arms against a group described as "Al Qaeda in Iraq", allegedly the new name of Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, a group associated with the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Here's a passage or two:

Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers.

Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said.

...

Statements posted on walls declared in the name of the Iraqi-led Mohammed's Army group that "Zarqawi has lost his direction" and strayed "from the line of true resistance against the occupation."

A grateful Shiite resident of Ramadi said he was not surprised at the threats by Zarqawi's followers or the defiance of them. "So many ties of friendship, marriage and compassion" bind Shiites and Sunnis in Ramadi, said Ali Hussein Lifta, a 50-year-old air-conditioning repairman and a resident of Tameem.

This is not the first such story I've posted. Patrick Cockburn has written about how the resistance is cracking down on the extreme Wahabbis, while the Telegraph featured a story about it which said the US were "delighted" by it.

This story in the Washington Post, however, manages to exhibit almost every tic that Chomsky would identify as corporate propaganda. For instance, "Zarqawi" is identified as the "insurgent leader", which he is not; "the insurgency" is conflated with the activities of "Al Qaeda in Iraq", which it should not be; as "the insurgency" is so narrow and extreme, Washington can be described as hoping to break "mainstream Sunnis" from it, as if most Sunnis are not already fully behind the resistance; we are not told that it is resistance fighters who are taking on "Zarqawi" until the second page of the story; the article seriously suggests that it was threats from Zarqawi's tiny outfit that cause Sunnis to boycott the January elections etc etc.

All of these - let's be kind and call them factual errors - have been introduced casually into the story as framing devices. They fix the narrative as one of Sunnis being wooed by nutters, failing to realise the essential good that the occupiers intend, then slowly realising that they must fight the extremists etc.

Not so much Manufacturing Consent as Manufacturing Acquiescence.