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Pondering Zarqawi’s Death
Was it the death of bomb ambition?
5 Responses to “Pondering Zarqawi’s Death”
That’s a fair point, despite the execrable NewsMax citation. Zarqawi had declared war against secular Arab states just as did Bin Laden. He also declared open war against Shi’ite Islam, which put Zarqawi even beyond Bin Laden. But the operable statement here is the year: 2004. Zarqawi was a far greater threat in 2004 and early 2005 than he had become by this year. Why? Two reasons, really.
First, he completely alienated many of his one-time supporters by his ruthlessness. The Sunni tribesmen who once sheltered him turned against him in 2005 (as the right-wing blogosphere giddily pointed out many times). I think it is more than plausible that former Zarqawiites turned him in. In fact, it’s pretty much likely that that happened. Zarqawi had literally burned all of his bridges, rendering him a veritable bit player by June 2006.
The second reason he was a much greater threat back in 2004 was that the various elements of Iraqi society had not yet embraced full-on sectarian civil war. At the time the conflict was still relatively simple. Ex-Ba’athists, most of whom were Sunni Arabs, fighting the US and the Shi’ite backed government. The only real complication at the time was the Sadrite uprising, but as an armed affair the Sadrites flamed out by August 2004 (only to regroup as a more powerful force in the elections of 2005). While this conventional insurgency was going on, Zarqawi was desperately trying to murder as many Shi’ite civilians as possible in order to provoke them into overreacting and destablization of the country. The Shi’ites were smart and bided their time…until the elections of 2005 put them in power for the first time. Once that happened, the Shi’ites both within the government (Badr Corps in the Interior Ministry) and outside the government (Sadrite Mahdi Army thugs) enjoined the sectarian conflict and took revenge against the Sunni population writ large. Thus began the War of the Corpses, with dozens of bodies showing up dead each morning. This accelerated across 2005 and then exploded after the bombing of the Askari Shi’ite shrine in Samarra on February 22, 2006 (probably Zarqawi’s last major act, though it’s never been confirmed that Zarqawi pulled it off). From that point on, the War of the Corpses reached new heights, with thousands of political murders ripping apart Baghdad ever since. Neighborhoods across Baghdad and other mixed cities have formed their own militias to protect themselves against sectarian murderers. And mixed areas have become much less mixed in recent months. Zarqawi’s dirty sectarian war has become reality now. He has become irrelevant because he succeeded in this hideous project.
Whether the unity government in Iraq will be able to calm this sectarian war is hard to say. Iraqi leaders have all said the right things. But they’ve been saying the right things for years now. What they do outside the Green Zone is what matters.
I heard something about Zarqawi having a camp in Northern Iraq in 2002 where he was attempting to develop chemical weapons. Does anyone have any more information on this? I don’t recall hearing much about this at the time or during the run-up to the war. Seems to me it would have been a useful tool for administration rhetoric.
OutOfContext,
Zarqawi was operating in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq in 2002, and the Bush Administration exploited that to no end, figuring that the American people couldn’t figure out that Saddam did not control that part of Iraq. Unfortunately, we had a chance to take out Zarqawi but refused to because it would ruin a bogus case for war.
In pondering Zarqawi’s death it seems strange to me that if he was as the administration has made him out to be our top bogey man out there just below Osama and Sadamm one would think that the administration would be preparing the country for reprisals by at the very least upgrading the terrorist threat to whatever color the highest threat level is.
I mean they sure did use that plenty in the run up to the elections before 2004 and the death of Zarqawi sure seems like a bigger deal to me than some of the reasons they upgraded the levels back then.
I wonder why we don’t seem to hear to much about upgrading the color levels these days?
Maybe at the risk of sounding cynical we will start to see more of that around the September, October time frame.
Think about this for a moment.
In the eyes of relgious fanatics especially in the Islam faith, Martyrdom is the fuel that feeds and keeps the fires to their holy Jihad burning.
It makes no sense to us, nor in our all too logical minds does it make any sense…but then again its not “us” believing in it and doing it.