Dahr Jamail isn’t so sure. An independent journalist reporting from Iraq, Dahr Jamail went in search of the illusive Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man the Bush administration raises as the specter of evil every time an attack occurs against civillians or our troops in Iraq. He is the purported mastermind of the terrorists now, a sort of Al Qa’ida James Bond, who strikes where he pleases and alwways manages just to escape the clutches of our forces.
What Dahr Jamail discovered about Zarqawi after the break . . .
First thing to remember about Zarqawi is that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have given him his high profile in the media:
. . . Chatting with a man sipping tea in a small tea stall in downtown Amman, I asked what he thought of Zarqawi. He was convinced that Zarqawi was perfectly real, but the idea that he was responsible for such a wide range of attacks in Iraq had to be “nonsense.”
“The Americans are using him for their propaganda,” he insisted. “Think about it — with all of their power and intelligence capabilities — they cannot find one man?”
. . . The Bush administration has regularly claimed that Zarqawi was in — and then had just barely escaped from — whatever city or area they were next intent on attacking or cordoning off or launching a campaign against. Last year, he and his organization were reputed to be headquartered in Fallujah, prior to the American assault that flattened the city. At one point, American officials even alleged that he was commanding the defense of Fallujah from elsewhere by telephone. Yet he also allegedly slipped out of Fallujah either just before or just after the beginning of the assault, depending on which media outlet or military press release you read.
He has since turned up, according to American intelligence reports and the U.S. press, in Ramadi, Baghdad, Samarra, and Mosul among other places, along with side trips to Jordan, Iran, Pakistan and/or Syria. His closest “lieutenants” have been captured by the busload, according to American military reports, and yet he always seems to have a bottomless supply of them. In May, a news report on the BBC even called Zarqawi “the leader of the insurgency in Iraq,” though more sober analysts of the chaotic Iraqi situation say his group, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal Jihad, while probably modest in size and reach is linked to a global network of jihadists. However, finding any figures as to the exact size of the group remains an elusive task.
Yet for all this publicity, despite being a legend in the making, no one seems to really know who he is, where he is, or if he is even still alive at this point:
“I’ve met him here in Jordan,” claimed Abdulla Hamiz, a 29 year-old merchant in Amman, “Two years ago.” However, Hajam Yousef, shining shoes under a date palm in central Amman, insists, “He doesn’t exist except in the minds of American policy-makers.”
. . . In the end, the vast mass of reportage on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi amounts to countless statements based on anonymous sources hardly less shadowy — to ordinary readers — than him. He exists, then, in a kind of eternal netherworld of reportage, rumor, and attribution. It could almost be said that never has a figure been more regularly written about based on less hard information. While we have a rough outline of who he is, where he is from, and where he went until he entered Iraq, evidence that might stand up in a court of law is consistently absent. The question that begs to be answered in this glaring void of hard information is: Who benefits from the ongoing tales of the mysterious Zarqawi?
A good question that: Who does benefit from these tales of Zarqawi? Could it possibly be the Bush administration, desperate to keep the lure of a 9/11 connection with it’s war in Iraq in the public mind’s eye? The same Bush administration already famous for the dirty tricks of Karl Rove and a disinformation campaign in Iraq (as documented by Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner)?
What did Dahr find when he tracked down Zarqawi’s family in Jordan? Is he the mastermind the Pentagon claims, or is he just a former mujahadeen who likely is alread dead? Well, here’s the view of a former childhood companion:
He tells us that Zarqawi left the neighborhood in the early 1990’s to go to Afghanistan, but that he doesn’t believe he is in Iraq. Along with others in the neighborhood, he is convinced that Zarqawi was killed in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan during the U.S. bombings that resulted from the attacks of September 11th.
“His wife and their three children still live over there,” he adds, “But don’t go talk to them. They won’t allow it.” He believes Zarqawi was killed, “100%,” and then says emphatically, “If he is still alive, why not show a recent photo of him? All of these they show in the media are quite old.”
So what does Dahr Jamail conclude about this mysterious, dangerous, and (to Arabs) romantic figure of jihadi resistance to America?
As Bush administration officials have falsely claimed Saddam Hussein had links to Bin-Laden and to Zarqawi, they have also conveniently linked Zarqawi to a Syrian government they would certainly like to take out. Similarly, Bush officials continue to link Zarqawi to the Iraqi resistance — undoubtedly another bogus claim in that the resistance in Iraq is primarily composed of Iraqi nationalists and Baathist elements who are fighting to expel the occupiers from their country, not to create a global Islamic jihad.
Thus, even if Zarqawi is involved in carrying out attacks inside Iraq and is killed at some future moment, the effect this would have on the Iraqi resistance would surely be negligible. It would be but another American “turning point” where nothing much turned.
. . . Whatever the real Zarqawi may or may not be capable of doing today in Iraq or elsewhere, he is dwarfed by the Zarqawi of legend. He may be the Bush administration’s Terrorist of Terrorists (now that Osama Bin-Laden has been dropped into the void), the Iraqi insurgency’s unwelcome guest, the fantasy figure in some Jihadi dreamscape, or all of the above. Whatever the case, Zarqawi the man has disappeared into an epic tale that may or may not be of his own partial creation. Even dead, he is unlikely to die; even alive, he is unlikely to be able to live up to anybody’s Zarqawi myth.
Go read the whole article. Dahr’s description of his journey in search of Zarqawi is the sort of journalism we used to have in our media, but which is all too lacking today by journalists content to foster their administration sources for “news” rather than do the hard work of digging it out on their own.
