Iraq's Most Wanted

I have a deck of the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards from when the war in Iraq started.

Actually I have more than one deck, but that's only because I was the one who placed the group order for everybody at work when there was a special price, and they sent me twice as many as I ordered. I called the company and they said to keep the extras, because it wasn't worth their trouble to get them back.

I loved the idea of the cards, because it was a great way to keep the names and faces of the bad guys in front of our military men and women who were hunting them. And it gave people a sense of just how important each wanted person was.

But now Iraq's National security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie has announced their list of the top 41 most wanted people (Yesterday's AP report at Breitbart here). You'd think they could add eleven more bad people and make their own deck of cards. Instead of camouflage on the back of the cards, they could put the Iraqi flag or some other picture that says, "These are Iraq's Most Wanted."

I felt optimistic when I read about Iraq's new list. Our deck of cards contained the names of the people most wanted by the American military for the purpose of deposing Saddam Hussein and eliminating the threat of a Baathist return to power. As important as that list of 52 names was at the time, it was still an American list.

This is an Iraqi list. The people of Iraq elected leaders to form a government, and now that the government is in place, that group of leaders has come up with their own list of people who are a threat to the new Iraqi way of life.

Saddam Hussein's wife and eldest daughter are among 41 people on the Iraqi government's most wanted list, along with the new leader of al- Qaida in Iraq, a top official announced Sunday.

National security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie also said the former al- Qaida boss, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been buried secretly in Baghdad despite his family's demand that the body be returned to Jordan. Al- Zarqawi died June 7 from a U.S. airstrike northeast of Baghdad.

Al-Rubaie told reporters the government was releasing the most wanted list "so that our people can know their enemies."

"We have contacted all the neighboring countries and they know what we want. Some of these countries are cooperating with us," al-Rubaie said. "We will chase them inside and outside Iraq. We will chase them one after the other."

I like this attitude. The more Iraq does for itself, especially without looking like it's consulting with the US (and it doesn't look like they consulted with us on this), the more credibility their government will have with its own people and with the rest of the world.