Zarqawi, or someone just like him, is dead

I posted on Zarqawi 's death yesterday at the DetNews along with the rest of the world. I think one of the best posts on the subject I saw was by Chris Floyd, who put Zarqawi's life and death into historical context . It's a must read in full but here's a couple of quotes to get you interested.

Zarqawi, the notorious shape-shifter who, according to grainy video evidence, was able to regenerate lost limbs, speak in completely different accents, alter the contours of his bone structure and also suffered an unfortunate binge-and-purge weight problem which caused him to change sizes with almost every appearance, was head of an organization that quite fortuitously dubbed itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" just around the time that the Bush Administration began changing its pretext for the conquest from "eliminating Iraq's [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction" to "fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here." [...]

Despite its fortuitousness, the reputed death of the multi-legged brigand came as no real surprise. After all, approximately 376 of his "top lieutenants" had been killed or captured by Coalition forces in the past three years, according to press reports, and some 5,997 lower-ranking "al Qaeda terrorists" have been killed in innumerable operations during that same period, according to Pentagon press releases. With the widespread, on-going, much-publicized decimation of his group, Zarqawi had obviously been rendered isolated and ineffective – except of course for the relentless series of high-profile terrorist spectaculars he kept carrying out, according to other Pentagon press releases. [...]

At every turn, the Bush team had painted a picture of Saddam Hussein as a powerful dictator able to threaten the entire world. They had implied, insinuated and sometimes openly declared that he was in league with al Qaeda. But this wildly successful psy-ops campaign would have been undermined by a raid on Zarqawi, which would have exposed the truth: that Saddam was a crippled, toothless despot who had lost control of much of his own land and couldn't even threaten vast enemy armies within his own borders – much less his neighbors or the rest of the world. It would have also exposed the fact that the only Islamic terrorists operating on Iraqi soil were in areas controlled by America and its allies – which, now that Mr. Bush's invasion has opened the whole country to extremist terror, is still the case.

And the punch line is a killer. There was a $25 million bounty on Zarqawi's head which Bush vowed to pay.

So if Bush does decide to pay off the informants -- and it's his money, after all, not Maliki's; in fact, in today's Iraq, any money that Maliki's government might still have left after three years of occupation rapine is Bush's money too -- but if Zarqawi's rumblers are paid off, then it's likely that Bush will be forking over $25 million to Iraq's Sunni insurgents. That will certainly keep them flush with IEDs for a long time to come. It's FUBAR every which way you turn in Bush's Babylon.

And speaking of Zarqawi's head, how fortunate that they bombed the house he was in, into cinders and yet his head is intact and recognizable? For all we know he really has been dead for months or years and they made a really good dummy. Of course, I've been thinking that could be true about Bush for a long time too.