On March 31, 2003, a week after George Bush launched his illegal invasion, I wrote a column entitled “The six day war: Why America has already lost its war against Iraq.”
Here’s a relevant portion:
”The only remaining unknowns are how many months or years it will take America and Britain to figure out that they have already lost, and how many people will die in the interim. From the beginning, Bush Administration rationales for this invasion have been based on the premise that Americans (and their faithful canine companions, the Brits) would be welcomed with open arms by both Iraqi civilians and soldiers…
Never mind.
It was evident by the middle of last week, and has become increasingly evident each day since — even through the muddle of U.S. media coverage and frantic spinning in Washington and London — that Iraqis do not want the Americans in their country. Period. We are not welcome….It seems to have never occurred to Bush and his advisors that people who hate Saddam wouldn’t automatically welcome America.…
What it means is that even with all the firepower in the world — especially with all the firepower in the world — the United States cannot win this war. The Pax Americana that Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, and their ilk envisioned for Iraq — and eventually the whole region — simply cannot be achieved through brute force alone. That’s what we’re starting to see already….”
I bring this up now because Iraqi Prime Nouri al-Maliki Minister (aka Washington’s Exile Thug of the Week) has announced the apparent assassination Wednesday night by U.S. forces of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the designated satanic figure blamed by the Pentagon and White House for much of the carnage in Iraq over the past couple of years.
So what?
Needless to say, this will play as a huge media story, particularly in America. By the time you read this, President Bush will have stood behind another podium, cameras rolling, and solemnly pronounced that Iraq has turned yet another corner, that this is yet another milestone on Iraq’s inexorable march to freedom and democracy and yada yada ya. Meanwhile, on the ground in Iraq, an American funhouse where countless corners have already been turned to no avail, Zarqawi’s death will make no noticeable difference at all.
That’s because, since the beginning of his public notoriety, Zarqawi has been an American fiction. His death is yet another myth. Oh, Zarqawi the man was real enough, and presumably (hopefully we’ll see a body, right?) his death is, too; he was responsible for a great many unsavory deaths, and few outside the world of jihadism will mourn his passing.
But Zarqawi has always been most significant as a concept, both for America and for that portion of the Islamic world enraged at America. And there will be someone to replace him. There already is; we just don’t know the name yet, because there are so many to choose from.
Washington made Zarqawi. He first came to prominence in the orchards of Dick Cheney, cherry-picking division, as the tenuous sole link between Al-Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was nonsense, of course, but when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 Zarqawi used that Washington-bestowed pedigree as a sort of street cred to recruit jihadists to his cause. He thus became what Washington had originally insisted he was when he was not. Just as Iraq became a haven of terrorists after the invasion, but was not until that time.
Zarqawi took full advantage. On the Muslim street, he became arguably a more mythic figure than bin Laden, because while Osama hid in some cave in the Pakistani mountains, Zarqawi was where the action was, taking the fight directly to the infidels. Even the Americans said so. Thing is, for all the attention the White House (and its obedient American media) has subsequently bestowed upon him, Zarqawi and his forces, with their kidnappings and car bombings and beheadings, were never more than a minor part of the resistance in Iraq.
Zarqawi was useful to the Bush administration. Originally the insurgency was not blamed on him; it was blamed on the Baathists, the so-called “bitter-enders” who were irrationally loyal to Saddam. All that was supposed to end when U.S. forces killed Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, in July 2003. That was the first of the post-Mission Accomplished “turning points,” just as the surge in violence that came after their deaths was the first of many “temporary” surges written off by Washington as what Cheney would later label “last throes.” The capture of Saddam was another of these points, a presumed huge military triumph that supposedly heralded the end of the Iraqi resistance — all somehow being orchestrated from a spider-hole — and the onset of True Democracy.
When that didn’t pan out, the American public got its first heavy dose of Zarqawi as the all-purpose terrorist, personally responsible for all mayhem befalling Iraq’s liberators. Zarqawi became a figure Washington could demonize, always an essential for a good pro-war propaganda campaign, and a difficult task in a war with a murky, invisible foe. But the foe was and is murky and invisible precisely because the vast majority of the people fighting the American occupation in Iraq are nationalists, not foreign jihadists. When they’re not planting roadside bombs or launching mortar attacks, they fade into a general population that broadly supports what they are doing.
And these days, the attacks on American and British forces are themselves only part, and far from the largest part, of the bloodshed. The vast majority of the carnage now is coming with the steadily escalating sectarian civil war, a civil war in which the U.S. is giving massive amounts of weaponry and support to one side through its creation and arming of Iraq’s army and police forces. Those forces are heavily infiltrated by the same sectarian Shiite militias whose death squads terrorize Sunni neighborhoods, often in uniforms, taking away and executing Sunnis.
All that is an uncomfortable narrative for Washington. It’s much easier to blame all the bloodshed on “the terrorists,” preferably “the foreign terrorists.” Hence, the utility these past years of the Jordanian Zarqawi. And now, we can posture that we have achieved some major victory by assassinating him. Just like we “won” when Uday and Qusay were killed three years ago, or when Saddam was captured in December 2003, or when Fallujah was crushed in April 2004, or when Fallujah was crushed even more brutally in November 2004. And so on.
The Iraq violence at this point isn’t primarily about taking aim at the Americans, though the endemic sectarian violence is very much a product of Bush’s Folly. Even the violence that is aimed at the Americans is coming primarily from nationalists. And even among the jihadists, Zarqawi will be replaced by someone else, just as the Israelis have been assassinating PLO and Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders for decades to no avail.
Creating martyrs just motivates even more potential martyrs. The problem was never Zarqawi, just as it has never been one or another resistance figure in Palestine. Just as with Israel and Palestine, the problem in Iraq is an illegal, brutal, and exploitative military occupation of a place the U.S. has no business being in.
It was true in March 2003, and it is still true now: Violence against American forces in Iraq will end the day the last U.S. forces leave Iraq. Not a moment sooner. No matter who we kill, and no matter how many we kill, along the way.