I won't try to go into this in detail since there is a full court press in the blogosphere on this good news. But I do have a few observations.
First, given that Zarqawi had written that once democracy came to Iraq the jihadis could not win, why didn't Zarqawi flee Iraq to fight in another location? It is good news if he really could see no sanctuary and no alternative to fighting and dying in a lost cause inside Iraq.
Second, while killing Zarqawi is not itself a sign of victory, the fact that we were able to track him down is a sign we are winning. This was no lucky shot. We tracked him with intelligence leads. Those leads are the sign of winning. Killing Zarqawi was the result of winning in Iraq.
Third, did our military also do a little clever psychological warfare operation by killing Zarqawi's reputation before killing him by mocking his weapons skills in the home video we released?
If we knew we were on his trail and likely to kill him soon, we'd want to stop him from gaining martyr status. We may have given him just enough doofus status to make him just another dead stupid jihadi. Major General Caldwell said we've been on this particular trail for six weeks--beyond the time we publicized the blooper reel.
So we killed Zarqawi and his reputation. This will surely hurt recruiting if nothing else. It is one thing to head off to fight in Iraq for the celebrity Zarqawi. Quite another to join up with some unknown Abu Bob fellow. You won't even get a dozen raisins for this in Paradise.
Score one for the good guys.
UPDATE: One, Zarqawi lived long enough to know that Americans killed him. Excellent. I was worried that he could have died thinking that the stove exploded or something terribly domestic like that.
And two, even if Zarqawi becomes a martyr for some nutballs is no reason not to fight--and win, more importantly. Wrote Lileks:
As I noted on the Hewitt show: it’s possible, as one NPR commentator noted, that Zarqawi will have great inspirational power as a dead man, a martyr. Perhaps. It’s also true that some people still celebrate Hitler’s birthday. It’s more significant that the German banks don’t close down because it’s still a national holiday.
Not too many Leftists complain that some fringe nuts worship Hitler and so we just made a martyr of him. And given the job we did on Zarqawi's weapons skills, he may just be another failed nutjob that nobody remembers in twenty years.
Zarqawi? Didn't he sleep with Paula Abdul on American Idol?
