Winning the war on al Qaeda requires understanding and eliminating their appeal. Otherwise, they can easily recruit terrorists faster than we can kill them. Central to al Qaeda's appeal is their claim that America is waging war on Islam. Exhibit A for this claim is the war in Iraq. Thus, winning the war with al Qaeda requires, among many other things, that Americans understand how Arabs view the war in Iraq so al Qaeda's claim we can be effectively countered.
One of the best expositions of the Arab view I've seen is 'Iraq is a war-torn nation' by Faruq S. Ziada. If you want to win the war with al Qaeda, I strongly suggest you read it, whether you agree with the author or not.
A note on the war deaths figures: the figure Ziada uses appears to be the high end of a estimate made based on Iraq-wide interviews a year or two ago and extrapolated to the present. Americans are accustom to a much lower figure based on either the low end of the same study or figures based solely on newspaper reports, which are known to be a significant undercount.
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