And he was fire director at Hama, too!

As Daimnation! notes, a few weeks back we had the rumour that Iraqi interim president Ayad Allawi had been chopping off the hands of insurgents. That rumour having failed to gain traction, we now have one in which Allawi is shooting people out of hand. Next, I suppose, we’ll hear that Allawi has WMD or worse, has contributed to the RNC.

What’s bizarre is that right on the heals of the Joe Wilson fiasco we have the Left once again accepting wild rumours at face value. The funniest bit was over in the comments at Atrios where one of the believers states that she’s tired of being right about all of this. I suppose the Left is correct about this just like they were about

• The death of imperialist armies in Afghanistan
• The brutal Afghan summer
• The brutal Afghan winter
• The fierce resistance of the Iraqi people
• The debacle of the Stalingrad like defense of Baghdad
• The hundreds of thousands of civilan deaths during the invasion of Iraq
• The massive Shiite uprising in support of Al-Sadr
• Joe Wilson

Oh yeah, I’m convinced now.

But what I wonder is whether this is agitprop by Allawi or his allies. It would work out rather well for him, wouldn’t it?

• Since he didn’t actually do it, it can’t be proven so the downside from official displeasure is limited¹.
• The people who this would affect will believe it regardless of proof so it’s just as effective as the actual act.
• It will keep the pro-oppression factions obsessed with a false trail, thereby providing cover. No real scandal is likely to be as juicy as a fake one like this. The completely lack of facts hasn’t stopped any of these types of rumours before. Look at how for how long the following rumours have lasted in Old Media even after they’ve been debunked.
  • The “sixteen words”
  • Joe Wilson
  • The plastic turkey

If this is a psy-op by Allawi, I say “you go, boy!”.

---

¹ Obviously a Kerry administration wouldn’t require anything like real proof, but if Kerry gets in Allawi is on his own anyway so no marginal cost there.