Breathtaking Bureaucracy

clipped from www.cnn.com That Iraqification of the network is what perhaps enabled al Qaeda to foresee its demise years before the Americans did. Documents from 2005 and 2006 show that top-ranking leaders feared the imposition of strict religious law and brutal tactics were turning their popular support base against them. One memorandum from three years ago warned executions of traitors and sinners condemned by religious courts "were being carried out in the wrong way, in a semi-public way, so a lot of families are threatening revenge, and this is now a dangerous intelligence situation." That awareness led al Qaeda to start killing tribesmen and nationalist insurgents wherever they began to rally against it, long before America ever realized that it had potential allies to turn to. Yet those same practices that accelerated al Qaeda in Iraq's undoing were breathtakingly documented.