It may seem odd for an old lefty like me to be to be the one to propose this, but if there is indeed a campaign to wipe out Iraqi intellectuals, no one seems to have considered the obvious suspect.

I have absolutely no evidence for this, one way or the other, but the only people with anything to gain by the systematic elimination of the human infrastructure of this country is the same agents who are doing everything they can to destroy the physical infrastructure: the insurgency itself.

It is their goal to frustrate American plans for Iraq, and they have shown themselves capable of inciting civil war, blowing up mosques, destroying national assets, and punishing anyone who collaborates with the American authorities or their allies. It is their job to have America fail, and if they can't force the USA out they will do every thing they can to cause them to fail by preventing them from doing anything. As I mentioned earlier, radical Islamic/Arab nationalism cannot afford an American puppet state in the center of the middle east. It is worth any price to them to stop it from happening. Killing college professors is no different from blowing up pipelines or killing police recruits, or indescriminately executing Sunni's and Shias in an attempt to start a religious civil war.

I'm not beieng pollyannaish about this, I know the USA and Mossad are perfectly capable of committing murder to further their political goals, we did it on a vast scale in Nam with Phoenix, the Israelis have been playing a tit-for-tat murder game with their enemies for decades. But the Al-Quaida types certainly have a motive, and have demonstrated the capability and the ferocity. And they know the neighborhood a lot better than we do.

What is really ironic is that these people are still a fringe group, and other, more moderate Arabs like Al-Jazeera (yes, they are moderate, by Arab standards) are as incapable of thinking their guys could do this as we are of thinking ours could. The reports of this leaking in would probably be reflexively blamed on the US and Israel.