The American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, has said that the killing of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi last month has had no effect on the level of violence in Iraq. The figures tell the same story: In the four weeks since Zarqawi was so clinically removed, some 800 people have been killed, mostly Iraqi civilians.
That indicates that he was not the major conductor of death that the US government and its allies, including the Iraqi government, had suggested. The belief that he was — which he himself obligingly promoted, such was his love of the limelight and his thuggery — looks like another serious misreading of Iraqi signs, on par with being taken in by Saddam Hussein’s attempts to convey the boastful impression that he might indeed have had weapons of mass destruction.
The Americans and their allies still have to learn that Iraq is not a Hollywood movie. The urge to put a face to the evil there, be it Zarqawi’s or Saddam Hussein’s, to personalize it, to make it the doing of a particular individual who can be vilified, targeted and removed may make selling counteraction to the public at home much easier but it does not solve the problems at hand, as the continuing violence shows. The danger from this Hollywood spin-doctoring of the situation, presenting it as a case of good guys and bad guys, is bound to backfire when the killing does not stop, as it did not after Saddam Hussein’s capture, or after the death was announced of Izzat Ibrahim Al-Duri, the Baathist general who led the Saddam loyalists afterward, or now after Zarqawi’s death. The public is bound to feel cheated.
The removal of particular individuals will not bring peace to Iraq. It is not individuals who are the problem. It is the situation itself. It is the power vacuum that allows mayhem and violence to flourish. A thug like Zarqawi was just one element in the spew of resentment that is Iraq today. Eliminate one and there will be others already there waiting to occupy the same ground, so long as that spew continues.
The fact that the lesson was not learned after Saddam’s removal suggests that it still has not been. Those on the rough end, confronted by the violence, men like Ambassador Khalilzad, Prime Minister Nuri Maliki and Iraqi and Western military commanders may know better, but the worry must be that away from Iraq, the Americans and their allies will now look round for a replacement bad guy to sell their continued presence there to a skeptical public back home. None of this means that Zarqawi should not have been taken out. He was responsible for a good deal of death and destruction, and beyond Iraq. But he was a symptom of the Iraq’s disintegration, which Prime Minister Maliki is trying to resolve, not the cause of it.
Both prime minister and the US ambassador can, however, be thankful for one thing: If there has not been any letup in the violence at least there has not been the massive increase predicted by doom-and-gloom merchants at the time of Zarqawi’s death.
