[lit-ideas] Al Zarqawi
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 13:10:11 -0400
A Good Day's Work
Why Zarqawi's death matters.
By Christopher Hitchens
The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is excellent news in its
own right and even more excellent if, as U.S. sources in
Iraq are claiming, it resulted from information that derived
from people who were or had been close to him. (And, if that
claim is black propaganda, then it is clever black
propaganda, which is also excellent news.)
It hasn't taken long for the rain to start falling on this
parade. Nick Berg's father, a MoveOn type now running for
Congress on the Green Party ticket, has already said that he
blames President George Bush for the video-beheading of his
own son (but of course) and mourned the passing of Zarqawi
as he would the death of any man (but of course, again). The
latest Atlantic has a brilliantly timed cover story by Mary
Anne Weaver, which tends to the view that Zarqawi was
essentially an American creation, but seems to undermine its
own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that,
Zarqawi wasn't all that important.
Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking
of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able
to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single
day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the
last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose
his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying
the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic
envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin
operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim
outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to
declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in
a document of which Weaver (on no evidence) doubts the
authenticity, has been the key innovation of the insurgency:
applying lethal pressure to the most vulnerable aspect of
Iraqi society. And it has had the intended effect, by
undermining Grand Ayatollah Sistani and helping empower
Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.
<snip>
Most fascinating of all is the suggestion that Zarqawi was
all along receiving help from the mullahs in Iran. He
certainly seems to have been able to transit their territory
(Herat is on the Iranian border with Afghanistan) and to
replenish his forces by the same route. If this suggestive
connection is proved, as Weaver suggests it will be, then we
have the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran directly sponsoring
the murderer of their co-religionists in Iraq. This in turn
would mean that the Iranian mullahs stood convicted of the
most brutish and cynical irresponsibility, in front of their
own people, even as they try to distract attention from
their covert nuclear ambitions. That would be worth knowing.
And it would become rather difficult to argue that Bush had
made them do it, though no doubt the attempt will be made.
If we had withdrawn from Iraq already, as the "peace"
movement has been demanding, then one of the most revolting
criminals of all time would have been able to claim that he
forced us to do it. That would have catapulted Iraq into
Stone Age collapse and instated a psychopathic killer as the
greatest Muslim soldier since Saladin. As it is, the man is
ignominiously dead and his dirty connections a lot closer to
being fully exposed. This seems like a good day's work to me.
http://www.slate.com/id/2143305/
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