On Friday, I noted the growing controversy over the authenticity of the Zawahiri letter. Reading the commentary here and elsewhere over the weekend has left me more comfortable with the authenticity of the letter: there are some oddities, but they aren't *that* odd. The Shi'i inflected salutation is sometimes used by Sunnis (though not as universally as some commentors claim), and (as Anna in comments points out) calling Hussein "Imam" isn't uncommon in Egypt. There are still good arguments on the side of the doubters (as in this New York Sun piece I found after writing the first draft of this post) but I think that Peter Bergen has the better points in this New York Sun piece - especially on the continuity between this letter and earlier Zawahiri texts.
Here's my current working theory: the letter was an authentic communication within al-Qaeda that was never intended to be a private letter to Zarqawi. A key bit for me is that some people have noted a form of this letter circulating in jihadi forums over the summer. Walid Phares - who considers the letter authentic, and whose views tend towards the more hawkish - noted the other day that the speech had been circulating among the chatrooms and that "the moderator a week ago didn't seem reading some extremely secret letter, but a "strategic document" from al doktor." That suggests that Zawahiri wanted to get this message across to Zarqawi, but didn't necessarily have a direct or reliable means of communication to him. So it was distributed through channels - electronic, personal, and otherwise - by which Zarqawi would definitely learn of its contents. (UPDATE: since writing this post, I've seen that Salamah Nemaat of al-Hayat had the same theory: "he thought the letter was written by Mr. al-Zawahiri, but it was not meant as a private correspondence but as an extended press release." Nemaat said: "This was not meant to be sent privately to Zarqawi, this was meant to clear their names publicly... My guess is that this was meant for some kind of media or Al-Jazeera.")
That would explain the somewhat didactic quality of the letter, which some critics have noted: the careful spelling out, point by laborious point, of a strategy which presumably is common knowledge among Islamist leaders. If the letter was intended to circulate publicly, then such an explicit approach makes much more sense. It would also explain the oblique, odd lines like "give my regards to Zarqawi if you see him."
One last point: if my theory is correct, then John Negroponte and the Bush administration did Zawahiri a *huge* favor by publicizing the letter so widely. Instead of it being buried in obscure chatrooms, it has now been distributed very widely indeed, and its message made available to a far wider range of people to think about and contemplate. It also allowed the whole text, rather than just the bits discussed in the chatrooms, to be read by all. This might weaken Zarqawi, by highlighting one more in a series of jihadists questioning his strategy (see: Maqdessi)... while strengthening Zawahiri. Whether that's a good thing is a rather bigger question than the simple one of the letter's authenticity...
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