Zarqawi is dead: next boggyman please...
Topic: War on Terror

Wow, they finally got him, Zarqawi is dead! Boy, I haven't been this excited since they got Uday and Qusay. We've really reached a turning point now.

I remember back on April 11 the WaPo reported that:

"The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq...The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

Hmmm...but they're not overstating his importnace now, right? Gosh, to listen to watch the media today you'd think they'd actually got the guy responsible for 9/11, the reason for the whole war on terror to begin with.

Rummy says this won't end terror but,

"let there be no doubt, the fact that he is dead is a significant victory in the battle against terrorism in that country, and I would say worldwide, because he had interests outside of Iraq. He was an integral part of the war on terror."

Yes, integral. Weren't they just making fun of Zarqawi a few weeks ago because he couldn't figure out how to fire his weapon? How did this nobody suddenly become such an "integral" part of terrorism world wide?

Before the war, while Zarqawi was hiding out in Kurdish controled Iraq back in 2003 hanging out with Ansar al-Islam, a groupd of about 400 fighters who hated Saddam, he ws pretty much a nobody, but...

According to Atimes Online:

"Zarqawi stopped being a non-entity on February 5, 2003, when he was spectacularly catapulted onto the global stage - six weeks before the start of the Iraq war - by US Secretary of State Colin Powell's weapons of mass destruction speech at the United Nations. Powell used Zarqawi to link Saddam Hussein's secular Ba'athist regime to the 'Islamic terror network,' and thus partly justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq."

And he has been used like this ever since.

How much of a difference is the death of a guy who is a figment of Rummy's imagination ---who can't even figure out how to fire a gun ---going to make in Iraq at this point.

Just this week the LA TimesLA Times reported:

"Excluding the capital's nearly daily bombings, new Iraqi government documents show that more Baghdad residents died in shootings, stabbings and other violence in May than in any other month since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003."

'Excluding daily bombings,' hense not having to do with Zarqawi and his suicide bombers. The vast majority of killing going on over there is between native Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites. And most of the Sunnis dying are dying at the hands of the Interior Ministry, the guys we're backing.

And then there's Muqtada al-Sadr who has a militia estimated to number 146,000 troops. How on earth is the death of a marignal leader like Zarqawi, of one of the smallest groups of insurgents in Iraq a major victory?

This is complete bull crap, and naturally, the media is eating it up and asking for more.