The Bush Administration is happy that Zarqawi is dead. Truth is I'm not exactly crying over the guy either. As they said as a joke this morning, he probably found his 70 virgins -- and they were all men who he had killed. I can't understand why he wasn't caught, or even arrested sooner. I remember hearing CIA types complaining that they had him in their sites in 2002, and 2003, and never were allowed to catch him or kill him. He's been really useful to this administration. I'd say he's been the classic useful idiot.
You know what I mean by "useful idiots." They are the not so bright people whose ambition and stupidity make them foils for the ambition and duplicity of others. Ozama Bin Laden is not a useful idiot. He's got money, power and smarts. But Zarqawi started out poor, ambitious, and denigrated as not very bright by all who knew him. I'm sure a lot of what he did was to prove himself in someone's eyes; his fathers(?), mothers(?), villagers(?), Osamas(?), certainly not God's(!!!???!). This made him the perfect useful idiot.
And what a perfect idiot he was. He should have known that the people egging him on have their own agendas and would give away his position to a predator drone or f16 eventually. He was hated, and used by the Iraqi insurgents. They never forgot the way his foreign fighters were too undisciplined to fight smart in the early days when the US kicked them out of Fallujah. They'd stir up trouble, kill civilians, and then run and abandon their comrades. The insurgents are a more disicplined lot. They know that they can melt back into the arms of their country-men when a conflict doesn't go their way. All they need to do is to survive until the US is gone and they will have won their way. Insurgents are sometimes terrorists, but they see themselves as freedom fighters.
Zarqawi and his ideologues were only welcome when they were fighting and staying out of the way -- but they kept getting in the way. The insurgents don't need foreign money, they are using stocks of explosives and weapons they looted long ago. The Shiites don't need an insurgency but are helped from Iran. The Sunnis need help, and they are probably getting it covertly. I don't know if that is a fact, and if I did know I'm not sure I'd be allowed to report it. We are being played as useful idiots ourselves. The Saudis, Yemenis and other wealthy Sunnis and Wahabis, are probably playing a double game against us. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the ones who ratted out Zarqawi, but it could have been anyone.
He'd served his usefulness in stirring up insurrection, sectarian violence and hate. Bush Needed brownie points. Zarqawi was stirring things up too much with the Shiites (just a week ago he called on Iraqis to attack Shiites). The Sunni tribal leaders want power, I don't know if they really want all that mythical Calliph crap. It was time for Zarqawi to go. Like Kennedy, Martin Luther King and dozens of others out there, we'll never know the whole story -- unless it serves someone's purpose to reveal it.
Which reminds me of the other "dangerous person" I'm thinking of. On the home front, the administration is pushing its war against the first, second, fourth and fifth amendments, (hell the whole constitution) and Arlen Spector is finally waking up a little. He is outgunned, so he backed off his threat today to subpoena Telephone company executives. Dick Cheney says the only crime in those wiretaps was in the secret of them being revealed. We are supposed to trust authority and that these guys will look out for our civil liberties the way they did the principle of one man one vote or our pocketbooks. As I said Cheney and the Bin Laden's are not useful idiots, they are millionaires. I understand that they know each other too. Osama is the nasty little cousin the Osama's don't want to talk about, but these guys know him too. We once thought that he was our useful idiot. In the 80's we, through and with the Saudis and Pakistanis funded him to fight the Soviets -- but he sure showed us who the idiots were. (I remember those deals, laws were broken, investigations half heartedly conducted, ties to drugs, third world dictators (Sandinistas and Somocistas, and Red or White El Salvadoreanos) a lot of shennaggans). People should have gone to jail but were pardoned. Now one of those people is running the whole secret police; Negroponte was working deep undercover back then.
I keep thinking of the book Cats Cradle. Could our President be a secret Islamic Jihadist? Is he our Mohammeden candidate? It would explain a lot. Or is Osama Bush's Bokonon? Given the insanity of our country that seems even more likely. The ice nine is in his hands. I guess Zarqawi was a Wampeter.
Bokonon Glossary*
Foma: Harmless untruths
Granfalloon: ''a false karass, [...] a seeming team that [is] meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.''
Karrass: ''team [of people] that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing.''
Wampeter: ''the pivot of a karass, around which the souls of the members of the karass revolve.''
Chris