I won’t lie, Fred Thompson has irked me with his generally cavalier attitude about running for president, but that’s not to say that he doesn’t have a firm grasp of the issues surrounding the war in Iraq. He was blasted over the weekend for saying that “an Al Qaeda smoking ban was one reason freedom-loving Iraqis bolted to the U.S. side.”
But Newsbusters has the goods, and it seems that, according to Michael Yon and CNN, the smoking ban actually played a pretty significant role in turning the locals against AQI. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising really, as David Kilcullen wrote at Small Wars Journal a few weeks ago, AQI managed to alienate its base not through violence and ideology, though one assumes those factors did play a part as well, but through its heavy handed meddling in economic and family matters.
