Via the AP: No. 2 al-Qaida leader in Iraq arrested

Iraqi forces have arrested the second most senior operative in al-Qaida in Iraq, and the group now suffers from a “serious leadership crisis,” the national security adviser said Sunday.

While such an arrest is undoubtedly good news, I have to wonder about the severity of the leadership crisis in question, given that the death of Zarqawi and several of his lieutenants didn’t seem to accomplish as much as was hoped that it would.There is also the niggling problem that al Qaeda in Iraq isn’t the biggest problem in the country at the moment, significant as it undoubtedly is.

While I like to think that this arrest will mean something substantive on the ground, I have become somewhat jaded as to whether they represent a likely significant improvement on the ground.

Some details on the individual in question from the story:

Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, known as Abu Humam or Abu Rana, was arrested a few days ago, Mouwaffak al-Rubaie said, adding that his arrest also led to the capture or death of 11 other top al-Qaida in Iraq figures and nine lower-level members.He

was the second most important al-Qaida in Iraq leader after Abu Ayyub al-Masri, al-Rubaie said. Al-Masri succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike north of Baghdad on June 7.

This sounds like a very significant event–and hopefully it does represent a substantial degradation of al Qaeda in Iraq’s ability to operate.  However, it seems unlikely at this point that it will have a substantial effect on the overall violence.

Update:  It seems that James Joyner had a similar reaction to the news:

Dead or arrested terrorists are always good news. Still, I would think we’d have learned by now to stop claiming that it will make a huge difference in the group’s ability to wreak mayhem. The level of killing did not drop after Zarqawi’s death and, if al-Saeedi has been in custody “a few days,” it certainly does not seem to have had any effect on the level of violence.