Another Milestone on the Road to Hell

Business as usual in Iraq Monday, as two large bombs exploded in Kirkuk killing 15. Later, a grim-faced Bush announced that the US would 'bring to justice' the newly announced successor to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi who was 'brought to justice' by a 500lb bomb last Wednesday. Against Christopher Hitchen's predictable claim that "Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism", it appears that there remain some issues unresolved.

Not that anybody will much mourn the passing of Zarqawi. A lengthy (and fortuitously timed) article in Atlantic Monthly describes his sordid rise from petty criminal to brutal head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. A relatively late-comer to jihadi circles, Zarqawi was neither intelligent, nor charismatic. Perhaps more than any of the prominent jihadis, his infamy was established by the US. Indeed, as the Atlantic Monthly article reminds us it was Colin Powell himself who, in February 2003 "catapulted him onto the world stage. In his address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, Powell identified al-Zarqawi—mistakenly, as it turned out—as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime."

Zarqawi obviously made an effort to fill the role allotted to him, bringing to the insurgency a brutality that left both local and international audiences shocked. But this too was his downfall. Zarqawi's particular brand of media-savvy nihilism seems to have been too destabilizing and anarchic for the mainstream insurgency. In a process that we have described here before, the jihadi's vision of zealous self-sacrifice for the cosmic cause can have little to offer established societies with social and material needs. Alexander Cockburn reminds us on Counterpunch, that Zarqawi dies isolated and largely undefended.

But Zarqawi and the other militants never clearly aimed to integrate themselves with, and help, the Iraqis. They are in Iraq living out their own fantasy of clashing civilizations, sacrificing political goals and even themselves for a victory whose only measure can be some internal ethic. Just as in Afghanistan, where they were more often than not at loggerheads with local mujahadeen, the complex battlefield to which they have taken the jihad is contingent; the political situation of the indigenous society is a potential obstacle to be negotiated on the way to fulfilling a larger purpose. In this sense the jihadis are the mirror image of the US occupation--fighting a war in somebody else's name in order to escape the moribund nature of their efforts at home. Each 'milestone' of this war, as Zarqawi's death is claimed to be, marks out another measure on our own road, not that of the Iraqis.