I like to think, with no real justification, that it comes from the name of the unofficial Kurdish national drink, arrak, which is a bit like Uzo but milder. Not that I ever violated General Order #1 or anything....
Probably related to Turkish raki, which is related to ouzo (but don't ever tell a Greek that).
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Regarding al Qaeda in a post-US-withdrawal Iraq, I have to agree with DR again.
al Qaeda is not solely anti-US; we may currently be their main focus because we're trying to fight back, but they would still be fighting if the US vanished from Earth tomorrow.
They want a Caliphate. They want the Saudi regime replaced. They want the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan. The want a strict form of Sharia imposed..
This is a point that is very often lost sight of and can probably not be overstated. Recall that the biggest bones of contention OBL had with the US were the support of corrupt regimes, by which he meant secular (not to say they aren't corrupt in our sense of the word, but OBL means they aren't Islamic states) and the stationing of US troops in Arabia - this to OBL trumps any amount of dead Iraqi babies or Palestinian collateral damage. It's the reason for his falling out with the Dar al-Saud and the big reason for 9/11 - which is why 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. He wanted to drive a wedge between the US and Riyadh.
This means that while the US is the main target of al-Qaida, its defeat isn't the ends in itself, just part of the means since it's the biggest obstacle to their goal of (for starters) a return to the Caliphate which Garratte has already mentioned. In a way, 9/11 was just tangential to what is a power struggle inside the Islamic world between modernity and barbarianism. Since Iraq was the center of the pre-Ottoman Caliphate, it's recapture from the infidels in a jihad is a duty for the most radical of the "faithful". Coalition troops are the infidels now, but tomorrow after the withdrawal, "infidel" will mean Shi'ites, the secular-minded, and "collaborators" in the Palestinian tradition. It's too bad the Bush administration was as incompetent as it was, or it would have seen this ingredient to the occupation and either not gone to war at all, or seen to it to use this to their advantage by turning Iraq into a bug-zapper for would-be jihadis. That's a whole other ball of wax though.
Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal was the perfect ground for al Qaeda. Iraq after a US withdrawal will be less perfect but still favorable.
If Iraq isn't, Somalia sounds like it will be very soon. I would imagine irridentist al-Qaida would prefer to be among Arabs in the traditional center of the Caliphate in Baghdad, but if they cannot, Mogadishu never seemed too hostile to them. Also, Afghanistan wasn't the first choice - OBL only went there after he wore out his welcome in the Sudan. The Horn of Africa is just his kind of place.
