Good (news bad news) Friday: Zarqawi is dead! But…

It’s not often that reports and commentaries on a major news event are so comprehensive that they render my thoughts (almost) redundant. But such is the case with yesterday’s news that American forces have finally killed al-Qaeda’s master-terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Clearly this is good news – if only for the psychological shot in the arm it gives all Iraqis who have been suffering under Zarqawi’s reign of terror for the past three years. But the bad news is that this inoculation offers them (and their putative American liberators) no protection from physical harm whatsoever!

Indeed, as early as six months ago, I had already become so fed-up with jingoistic cheerleading and backslapping by government officials – after news that American forces had killed yet another assistant to a top associate of Osama bin Laden – that I wrote this article deriding their (groundhog) irrational exuberance. Because I knew back then what is so self-evident today, which is that cutting one head off the one-thousand-headed monster that al-Qaeda has become will have little or no impact on the infernal insurgency and sectarian violence still raging in Iraq.

But here are some final thoughts on the celebrated capture or killing of “high-profile targets of interest” like Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay:

The Americans offered a reward of $25m for “actionable” information on Zarqawi, and similar amounts in the case of the Husseins. And President Bush seemed all too eager to tell the world that Iraqis provided such information in each case.

Yet how do we know if any of that money was ever paid out? Can we take Bush’s word: a president who signs into law a bill forbidding the torture of foreign detainees, then immediately signs a secret executive order instructing the U.S. military to use “all means necessary” to extract “actionable intelligence” from them? And if you’re the Iraqi who “turned” on these guys, to whom are you going to complain if the Americans stiff you? On the other hand, if they paid you this bounty, you probably wouldn’t want any of your neighbors finding out about it (which means you’d have to rely on the Americans to scurry you and your family into a squealers-protection program…in exile).

Now, how’s that for a catch 22….

But following this reward-money trail through U.S. high command into an Iraqi hand would be a good assignment for some of the many journalists now reporting speculation about what’s going on in Iraq from their embedded hotel perch in the “Green Zone”.

NOTE: If you’re a first-time reader, you can be forgiven the impression that I’m an inveterate pessimist. But regular readers are well aware that – far from being a pessimist, I have consistently offered sober assessments of and pragmatic solutions to the challenges of rebuilding Iraq, an example of which can be read here.

ENDNOTE: Click here to read my syndicated column – published today at CNN – on the remarkable leadership the prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines showed by dismissing local criticism and defying the Chinese to honor his country’s longstanding friendship with Taiwan.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic insurgency