That's what the US seems to be trying to do in their nomination of Abu Ayyub al Masri as the successor to al-Zarqawi. Or, so argues Loretta Napoleoni in the Foreign Policy blog.
She has some fairly strong arguments that al Masri is not the successor to Zarqawi. We claim that al Masri is a founding member of Al Qaeda, yet he is not on Egypt's list of wanted jihadists nor did he go to Afghanistan early enough to become a founding member. Napoleoni has additional arguments as to why al Masri could not have been the chosen successor; they sound reasonable to me.
Napoleoni feels that it is more likely that there is a battle for the leadership between Abu Abdul al Ramahdi and Abdullah al-Rashid al-Baghdadi. Either one will be better equipped and more tied into Bin Laden than Zarqawi was.
We helped in large measure to make Zarqawi an important player in Iraq. It looks like we are trying to repeat this error.
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