MORE AGIT-PROP

This stuff plays very well with the LGF and Freeper crowd:

Rumsfeld warns of Islamic superstate
if U.S. leaves Iraq too soon
By Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Mon, Dec. 05, 2005

Speaking at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Rumsfeld warned that al-Qaida leaders such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden would seize power in the wake of an American withdrawal and turn Iraq into the kind of terrorist safe haven that Afghanistan was before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Moreover, Rumsfeld said: "Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East, and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia. This is their plan. They have said so. We make a terrible mistake if we fail to listen and learn."

"The message that retreat would send to the free people of Iraq and to moderate Muslim reformers throughout the region and the world would be that they cannot count on America," Rumsfeld said. "The message it would send to our enemies would be that America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, and it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere."

What's different now is that the press is less likely to settle for being mere stenographers:

The message is similar to the domino theory that U.S. officials used 40 years ago to muster support for the Vietnam War by arguing that abandoning South Vietnam would allow the communists to conquer neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

Much as the original domino theory overlooked the tensions between the Soviet Union and China, the power of nationalism and the appeal of prosperity, Rumsfeld's remarks neglected the deep animosity between Sunni Muslim extremists such as bin Laden and Iraq's Shiite majority. It also discounts the differences among predominately Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia.

A Sunni-dominated caliphate is unlikely in Iraq, where Shiites make up 60 percent of the population, said Akbar Ahmed, the chair of Islamic Studies at American University, and a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Kingdom. While fundamentalists on both sides say they like the idea of clerical government, Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting one another.

"It's like saying the Christians will be united under one banner," said Ahmed. "It sounds nice, but whose banner will it be?"

Establishing a caliphate is al-Qaida's stated purpose, but it's "highly unlikely" that the group will succeed anywhere, said Emily Hunt, a terrorism analyst and a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.