George F. Will: Zarqawi ... arguably the worst terrorist in history
The dust having settled -- 500-pound bombs can raise, and even manufacture, a lot of dust -- it is time to give the devil his due. To understand the diabolical genius of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that pornographer of violence, begin with this:
He was a primitive who understood the wired world and used an emblem of modernity, the Internet, to luxuriate in gore. But although he may have had an almost erotic enjoyment of the gore, it was also in the service of an audacious plan. And he executed it with such brutal efficiency that he became, arguably, the most effective terrorist in history.
That appellation still suits Osama bin Laden because, as the animating mind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he pulled the world's superpower into a war that provided the occasion for Zarqawi's rise to world prominence. Still, Zarqawi set out to prove that a central premise of the U.S. intervention in Iraq was -- is -- false. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that he decided to make it false. But if he could falsify it, it never was quite true.
The premise was that Iraqis are primarily nationalists and only secondarily sectarians. Zarqawi's wager was that explosives, used with sufficient cruelty, could blow that premise to smithereens. He may have succeeded. If so, the February bombing of the Askariya shrine, although the blast itself killed nobody, may have been the most deadly explosion since the planes hit the twin towers because it provoked sectarian violence that may now constitute a social firestorm.
A firestorm occurs when a fire becomes so hot that rising heat pulls in cold air, an influx of oxygen that feeds the fire. A firestorm is self-perpetuating because, in effect, the fire becomes its own fuel. If Iraq's sectarian violence has reached that point, Zarqawi had made himself somewhat superfluous.
It is sometimes charged that journalism, which considers the phrase "good news" an oxymoron ("We don't report the planes that land safely"), is missing the good news from Iraq. But so pervasive is the violence, and hence so dangerous has Iraq become for journalists, that the Wall Street Journal, hardly a hostile observer of the U.S. undertaking in Iraq, thinks the bad news might be underreported....
Read entire article at Wa Po
He was a primitive who understood the wired world and used an emblem of modernity, the Internet, to luxuriate in gore. But although he may have had an almost erotic enjoyment of the gore, it was also in the service of an audacious plan. And he executed it with such brutal efficiency that he became, arguably, the most effective terrorist in history.
That appellation still suits Osama bin Laden because, as the animating mind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he pulled the world's superpower into a war that provided the occasion for Zarqawi's rise to world prominence. Still, Zarqawi set out to prove that a central premise of the U.S. intervention in Iraq was -- is -- false. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that he decided to make it false. But if he could falsify it, it never was quite true.
The premise was that Iraqis are primarily nationalists and only secondarily sectarians. Zarqawi's wager was that explosives, used with sufficient cruelty, could blow that premise to smithereens. He may have succeeded. If so, the February bombing of the Askariya shrine, although the blast itself killed nobody, may have been the most deadly explosion since the planes hit the twin towers because it provoked sectarian violence that may now constitute a social firestorm.
A firestorm occurs when a fire becomes so hot that rising heat pulls in cold air, an influx of oxygen that feeds the fire. A firestorm is self-perpetuating because, in effect, the fire becomes its own fuel. If Iraq's sectarian violence has reached that point, Zarqawi had made himself somewhat superfluous.
It is sometimes charged that journalism, which considers the phrase "good news" an oxymoron ("We don't report the planes that land safely"), is missing the good news from Iraq. But so pervasive is the violence, and hence so dangerous has Iraq become for journalists, that the Wall Street Journal, hardly a hostile observer of the U.S. undertaking in Iraq, thinks the bad news might be underreported....