Al Zawahri demonstrates that al-Qaida believes they are in control of the situation in Iraq. He said that we are negotiating with the wrong people, we should be negotiating with them. Please, don’t give the Democrats and the media any ideas:

The deputy leader of al–Qaida said the United States was negotiating with the wrong people in Iraq, implying in a video broadcast Wednesday on Al-Jazeera that Washington should be talking to his group.”I want to tell the Republicans and the Democrats together … you are trying to negotiate with some parties to secure your withdrawal, but these parties won’t find you an exit (from Iraq) and your attempts will yield nothing but failure,” Ayman al–Zawahri said on the video.”It seems that you will go through a painful journey of failed negotiations until you will be forced to return to negotiate with the real powers,” he said, without elaborating.

Then he threw in his two cents into the mix in Palestine:

He attacked Abbas’ proposal to hold early elections to resolve the increasingly violent rivalry between his moderateFatah party and the militant Hamas movement, which dominates the parliament. The situation has degenerated to daily gunbattles in the streets of Gaza.In the clips broadcast by Al-Jazeera, al–Zawahri did not say how the two parties should settle their dispute, but he scoffed at elections, saying: “Any way other than holy war, will lead us only to loss and defeat.”He did not say whom the Palestinians should fight, but previously he has always recommended “holy war” againstIsrael and the West.He described Abbas as “America’s man in Palestine,” and warned that if Palestinians accepted him as their president, it would be “the end of holy war.”In what appeared to be a reference to Abbas and his Fatah party, al–Zawahri said: “Those who are trying to liberate the Islamic territories through elections based on secular constitutions, or on decisions to hand over Palestine to the Jews, will not liberate one grain of sand of Palestine.”

But they aren’t listening to him:

In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum brushed off al-Zawahri’s criticism and defended the party’s electoral policy.”Our Palestinian institutions are in need of reform, and to fix them we need to participate in the parliament and other institutions,” Barhoum said.”We are not responding to al-Zawahri so much as we are affirming who we are as a movement,” Barhoum added.Al-Zawahri’s comments were expected to have little influence in theWest Bank and Gaza Strip. Hamas has distanced itself from al-Qaida, saying its struggle is against Israel, not the West at large.

Updated to add this:(via)Man, don’t we wish this were true? Scott Ott is brilliant.