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Today's
Stories
June 21, 2006
Greg Moses
Elite Logic at the Border
June 20, 2006
Fred Gardner
The Long War on Aspirin
Omar Waraich
Ode to Joy: Watching Blair Sink
Christopher Reed
Japan Nixes Payments to Its Wartime
Slaves
CP Newswire
Coca Cola Takes a Hit
Jonathan Cook
Israel Engineers Another Cover-Up
June 19, 2006
Bill Quigley
HUD's Bulldozers and the Poor of
New Orleans
John Walsh
Tears of a Clown: Al Franken's War
Mike Whitney
The Zoom Lens War: Bush's Baghdad
Photo Op
Alexander Cockburn
The Left and the Blathersphere
June 16 / 18, 2006
Weekend Edition
Kathy / Bill Christision
The
Power of the Israel Lobby
Joseph Nevins
On the Migrant Trail: No More Walls, No More Deaths
Farrah Hassen
An Interview with Syria's Ambassador to the US, Dr. Imad Moustapha
Greg Moses
The Real Mission of the Uniformed Ghost at the Border
Nicole Colson
"There's No Hope at Gitmo"
John Scagliotti
How MoveOn Wastes Its Donors' Money
Mokhiber / Weissmann
Corporate Democrats
June 15, 2006
Kathy Kelly
Look
Them in the Eye: Honest Abe and the Residents of Ramadi
Norman Solomon
Premature Triangulation: Hillary's Big Problem
Ron Jacobs
Publicity
Stunts as Public Policy
Sam Bahour
Cover Up on Gaza Beach
Ramzy Baroud
Palestine on the Brink
CounterPunch Wire
Death Squads at Colombia's Universities
Gabriel Kolko
Why
a Global Economic Deluge Looms
Website of the Day
Antje Duvekot: Music You've Been Waiting Years to Hear
June 14, 2006
Nicole Colson
"They
Want the Fear Level at a High Pitch": An Interview with Lawyer
Lynne Stewart
Jonathan Cook
Israeli
Law and Order
Joseph Schechla
Bulldozing Palestine: an Open Letter to Caterpillar, Inc.
Michael Carmichael
Bolton at Oxford: Jeered and Taunted
Evelyn Pringle
Karl and George, the Teflon Partnership
Ward Churchill
My Trial By Media: Turning Quibbles Over Footnotes into Felonies
Rev. William E. Alberts
Decoding the Coders of Christ: Jesus the Political Insurgent?
Website of the Day
Marines Iraq Snuff Film
June 13, 2006
Medea Benjamin
Take
Back America Suppresses Anti-War Dissenters at HRC Speech
Anthony Alessandrini
The
Evil of Banality: the General, the New York Times and the Gitmo
Suicides
Paul D'Amato
The
Meaning of Haditha
Dave Lindorff
The Strange Death of Zarqawi: Was He Killed So He Wouldn't Talk?
John Ross
Elections and the World Cup: If Team Mexico Advances, Will Anyone
Show Up to Vote for Lopez Obrador?
Gabriel Garcia
Venezuela and Drug Trafficking: Bush Bashes Chavez Despite Positive
Results
Hilton Obenzinger
DIvestment is a Stand for Equality in Israel
Yitzhak Laor
The Secret of Authority
Juan Antonio Ocasio
Rivera
Puerto Rico at the UN
Jennifer Van Bergen
The
Story Behind Zarqawi's Death: What's the Legality of the Assassination?
Website of the Day
Paul Wright: a Real American Freedom Fighter
June 12, 2006
Paul Craig Roberts
Bush's
Armageddon Wish: a Final End to History?
Patrick Cockburn
The
US Already Misses Zarqawi
Mike Marqusee
Rebranding
a Team: English Nationalism and the World Cup
Lee Sustar
"I
Never Had the American Dream:" Left with No Future by GM and
Delphi
Robert Fisk
Has
Racism Invaded Canada?
Michael J. Smith
Enter Sandman; Exit Kosland
Felice Pace
NPR's Warped Covereage of the MIddle East
Jennifer Loewenstein
Setting
the Record Straight on Hamas
Website of the Day
Our Way Home
June 10 / 11, 2006
Weekend Edition
Robert Fisk
Zarqawi's
End is not a Famous Victory
Diane Christian
Zarqawi's Face
Joe Allen
The American Way of Atrocities: Marine Corps' Killer Virtues
Ralph Nader
Let Us All Praise the Dixie Chicks
Fred Gardner
Tylenol Toxicity Terror
Dave Lindorff
Nothing New About Haditha
Dave Zirin / John
Cox
Will Racism Spoil the World Cup?
Dennis Perrin
Death is Patriotic: Necro-Porn, Live on CNN
Greg Moses
Militarizing the Border: Why Operation Jump Start Worries Me
John Chuckman
Terror in Toronto or Tempest in a Teapot?
Michael J. Smith
Babes in Kosland: Dem Blogfest, Day Two
Roger Burbach
Bachelet in DC: Chilean President Refuses to Back Down to Bush
Ira Moskowitz
Israeli Court Finds Mad-Dog US Prof Libeled CounterPuncher Neve
Gordon
Sam Bahour
The Gaza Air Strikes: Begging for a Response
Seth Sandronsky
Grocery Chains and Bush's Ownership Society: Profits Fall, Stores
Close
Michael Berg
A Father's Day Message: Both Parties Have Betrayed America
Kirsten Roberts
Desmond Dekker and the Music of the Shantytowns
Ron Jacobs
Who's Fooling Who?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Jones, Davies, Engel and Louise
Website of the Weekend
Miles and Trane, So What?
| June
21, 2006
Myth vs. Reality
Al-Zarqawi's Death
Reconsidered
By RAMZY
BAROUD
The
convenient emergence and sudden disappearance of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
signals an end of an era. Though Washington and London insist on
telling us that the ‘good news’ don’t necessary
mean an end to Iraq’s bloodshed, the giddiness in British
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s voice, profusely conveys the greater
hope that Iraq’s occupiers pin on the killing of this obscure
character.
As
a young man, Al-Zarqawi’s joined Afghanistan’s Mujahidin
militias against the Russian occupation in the 1980’s. Following
the Russian defeat, Al-Zarqawi returned to Jordan. He, like other
returnees of various Arab countries clashed with his government
and was sentenced to many years in prison for conspiracy charges
to achieve a regime change. An amnesty by late King Hussein set
him free after spending seven years in prison.
As
odd as it may seem, certainty over the man’s life, legacy
and death ends right here. The rest, concluded with his dramatic
demise is shrouded with inconsistencies, state propaganda and half-truths,
for reasons that will become obvious.
It
has been argued that al-Zarqawi took serious issues with al-Qaeda’s
ideological, tactical or other preferences. Most accounts seem to
suggest an initial conflict between the two groups, a claim further
validating by an alleged letter uncovered by the US military in
Iraq in 2005. In the letter, addressed to al-Zarqawi, Bin Laden’s
deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri warned al-Zarqawi of carrying out more
sectarian attacks against the Shia population, saying that such
violence was eroding support for al-Qaeda.
By
unveiling the letter, the Americans were hoping to establish their
early claim that al-Zarqawi was in fact al-Qaeda’s man in
Iraq. Once again, both al-Qaeda and al-Zarqawi audio recordings
popped up, almost stimulatingly to suggest that such an alliance
was in fact struck.
Again,
if true, this further undermines earlier allegations made by top
US officials that such an alliance had always been there. Murky
‘evidence’ presented by former US Secretary of State
Colin Powell to the United Nations in February 2003 was the first
to propose such a connection, as if the man was foretelling the
future. Powell concluded – in what was later widely recognized
as ‘hyped’ if not altogether concocted US intelligence
in the US administration’s desperate attempt to find its proverbial
‘smoking gun’, thus justifying the war and invasion
of Iraq – that Zarqawi was an associate of Bin Laden who sought
refuge in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Powell’s
case for war had omitted as seemingly immaterial the reports that
al-Zarqawi left Afghanistan in 2001 to join Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish
Sunni group – fighting its own battles in northern Iraq. Al-Zarqawi
apparently chose northern Iraq to avoid an immanent clash with Iraq’s
security forces under Saddam Hussein, as secularist Saddam has historically
clamped down on Islamic activists and had no room, nor need to accommodate
them. Linking al-Qaeda to al-Zarqawi, then to Saddam’s government
was one of the most forceful arguments that the US administration
used to sell their unwarranted war to the public. In retrospect,
such an argument was yet another lie; like others, notwithstanding
WMDs, and proved to be a concoction of the ever lucid imagination
of US neoconservative zealots and their media allies.
But
not that al-Zarqawi, or his myth has yet outlived its usefulness.
To the contrary, the plot thickens when al-Zarqawi – that
once petty criminal of the al-Zarqa town in Jordan – made
his official entry to the Iraqi scene, turning almost immediately
into a mythical menace, along with a few armed men battling two
of the world’s greatest forces: beheading foreigners, slaying
Iraqi police recruits, assassinating government officials, blowing
up religious shrines, attacking worshipers in Shia festivals, detonating
up to three intricate car bombs stimulatingly, always managing to
escape at the last minute, almost always unscathed. One of those
miraculous escapes reportedly took place in the town of Falluja,
where he was apparently hiding. Only after destroying most of the
town and butchering thousands of its people, did Iraqi police, at
the behest of their US commanders declare that al-Zarqawi managed
to evade capture just minutes before a raid on his hideout.
Al-Zarqawi
was the leader of ‘Tawhid wal Jihad’, an Islamic military
group incepted specifically to battle Americans in Iraq.
The
group officially merged with Bin Laden’s in 2004. Bin Laden
named him the Prince of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers,
and business carried on as usual with the world’s most active
terrorist now representing the world’s most notorious terrorist
group, joining hands in a relentless war against “Shia, Christians
and Jews”, as simplistically worded by BBC International world
affairs analyst.
Al-Zarqawi
or his myth, whether incidentally or by design, has perhaps served
as the greatest propaganda tool ever utilized by the Americans,
months before the invasion of Iraq and most likely long after his
passing. He successfully alienated many anti-war camps throughout
the world, notwithstanding many Arabs and Sunni Muslims who, rightfully,
believed that his tactics were savage, un-Islamic and self-defeating.
He gave rise to the widely circulated argument that the US’
war is that between forces of civilization and forces of darkness,
with an Arab Muslim male flawlessly representing the latter. He
concurred the shaky allegation that the source of instability in
Iraq was the presence of foreign Arab fighters, which helped sever
inner-Arab ties and focused the pressure against Syria, accused
of allowing such movement of fighters across its borders. He helped
widen the chasm between Iraqis forces and sects, even those who
believe in the legitimacy of their struggle against occupation.
While
his death may indeed signal an end to various pretexts used and
abused by the US administration, military and media, his absence
nonetheless will have its rewards, however, temporary. One of which
is the very rare opportunity that allowed Bush, Blair and US-installed
Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki to declare the full formation of
the ‘first democratic Iraqi government’ and the death
of a menace, or a myth called al-Zarqawi, both at the same time:
Western TV analysts happily jumped at the opportunity to analyze
the relations between the two innocently timed declarations; US
military generals displayed to journalists - for the sake of transparency
of information - how al-Zarqawi was blown up; Iraqi police too put
on a dancing and firing in the air show for the cameras; the oil
market stabilized a bit and sighs of relief poured in from various
world capitals.
Al-Zarqawi,
or his myth has apparently outlived his usefulness. The Iraq conflict
seems to be going in a new direction, though its success or failure
is unknown. A new media menace will have to be concocted to suit
new US policies in Iraq and around the region. Al-Zarqawi is dead;
another al-Zarqawi is being born.
Ramzy Baroud is the author of The Second Palestinian
Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press,
London).
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