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Zarqawi death: Good news for the resistance
By Ameen Izzadeen
There could not have been better news for the Iraqi national resistance than the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the alleged al-Qaeda chief in Iraq. For years, as a cynic, I had refused to believe that there was a Zarqawi. I believed he was either a CIA concoction or, if he existed, he was being used by the CIA, DIA, MI-5, Mossad and other Western espionage groups active in Iraq.

Although Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, the cynicism in me refuses to die. There is more to it than meets the eye. Whoever Zarqawi was, when he was alive, he served the interests of the occupiers of Iraq. For his actions, besides degrading and dehumanizing Islam, created hatred between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites, fuelled sectarian violence and prevented the emergence of a powerful nationalistic resistance to the US-British imperial occupation. This is exactly what the occupiers want — prevent the formation of a grand Shiite-Sunni alliance against occupation. It was when the Shiites and Sunnis were making overtures to each other on the need to form a national Iraqi liberation front that bombs began to go off in Karbala and later in Samara with Zarqawi in questionable video releases calling on the Sunnis to eliminate the Shiites. The Zarqawi moves drew strictures from the al-Qaeda leadership somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

There is not much difference between the types of Zarqawi and the imperial coalition, messing up and bleeding Iraq. Both are "foreign" to Iraqis and illegitimate, too. When things go wrong for the imperial coalition in Iraq, the Bush-Blair leadership puts the blame on the presence of foreign fighters in Iraq, suppressing the fact that there are more than 180,000 foreign coalition troops in Iraq. They say, "The main problem is that there are too many foreigners in Iraq."

One may ask that if troops from the United States, Britain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Ukraine and other US satellite states could roam the length and breadth of Iraq and terrorise civilians, why Arab fighters cannot come to Iraq and help the Iraqi resistance. If the presence of the Arab fighters in Iraq is illegal, then the presence of the imperial foreign troops in Iraq is also illegal. For the invasion of Iraq took place without UN sanction. Didn't UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in September 2004, say, "From our point of view and the UN Charter’s point of view, it {the invasion} was illegal"?

The fact that the United Nations Security Council subsequently adopted a series of resolutions recognizing the role and responsibility of the occupying power and set timeframes for transfer of power to the Iraqis does not make an illegal war legal. But the imperial leadership now points to these resolutions to justify their presence in Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday in a jubilation speech — where he once again underscored Britain's poodle role — took cover behind the post-invasion UN resolutions in an attempt to show that the imperial coalition's presence in Iraq was not illegal. The bottomline is if Zarqawi's presence in Iraq is illegal, so was the presence of the coalition troops, notwithstanding the UN resolutions. He killed Iraqi civilians, so do the coalition forces.

US President George W. Bush in his jubilation speech on Thursday blamed Zarqawi for the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians. But he made no mention of the deaths of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the US troops. There was no mention of Haditha, Tall Afar or Ishaqi. There was no Abu Ghraib either. He praised the US troops' courage and professionalism and described them as "the finest military in the world". I do not know how the 24 Haditha civilians who were gunned down by the Marines would be receiving these words of the commander in chief of a force that is responsible for their deaths. I do not know whether the 600-odd Fallujah civilians who died in US raids would have endorsed these words of Mr. Bush who allegedly manufactured evidence to mislead the American public that Iraq with its weapons of mass destruction posed a major security threat to the United States and the rest of the world and that Saddam Hussein had links with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

If as Mr. Bush said the death of Zarqawi brought relief to the Iraqi people, then the withdrawal of the United States which killed some 1700 Iraqi people in indiscriminate bombings during the initial stages of the Iraq war and contributed directly or indirectly to the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians during the post-invasion period, will bring greater relief to the Iraqi people.

The death of Zarqawi raises more questions than it provides answers. Why didn't the US troops try to arrest him if they could zero in on him to his hideout outside Baquba, north of Baghdad? If he had been arrested, the coalition forces could have elicited vital information to wipe out the al-Qaeda network in Iraq. Probably some people do not want to do it that way, because they believe the Zarqawi cell could be used as a convenient scapegoat. As a cynic, I still do not believe that all the bombings and killings targeting Shiite mosques and civilians are the work of the murderous Zarqawi network. I am yet to find an explanation to the incident where the British forces in Basra after a firefight with Iraqi Shiite militia removed two British spies (in Arab clothes) who were arrested for carrying bomb-making material in a vehicle. The other question is whether the killing of Zarqawi was timed to divert public attention from allegations related to the Haditha killings and the so-called rendition flights that transferred terror suspects to secret 'torture' cells in Europe.

From all the quotes and speeches made in connection with the death of Zarqawi what made sense to me was what Michael Berg, the father of Nick Berg, the US businessman allegedly beheaded by Zarqawi, said. It is people like Michael Berg who make America a better place to live in and dream of. Despite his son's death allegedly at the hands of Zarqawi, Mr. Berg could say "The death of every human being is a tragedy." It is in people like Mr. Berg that we see Jesus Christ come alive, not in Mr. Bush, a born-again Christian who claimed that God commanded him to invade Iraq.

"Revenge is something that I do not follow, I do not ask for, I do not wish for against anybody," said Mr. Berg who, in an interview with CNN, repeatedly refused to voice any pleasure in Zarqawi's death.

"How could a human being be glad that another human being is dead?" he asked, before launching an attack on Mr. Bush, arguing that the US president had imposed as much suffering on Iraq as Saddam Hussein.

"Under Saddam Hussein, no Al-Qaeda (in Iraq). Under George Bush, Al-Qaeda. Under Saddam Hussein, relative stability. Under George Bush, instability. Under Saddam Hussein, about 30,000 deaths a year. Under George Bush, about 60,000 deaths a year," Mr. Berg said adding that "I don't get it. Why is it better to have George Bush as the king of Iraq rather than Saddam Hussein?"

Well, in effect, George Bush is the emperor and Zalmay Khalilizad his viceroy in Iraq. When Mr. Khalilizad, the US ambassador in Iraq, appeared on Thursday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to announce that Zarqawi had been terminated, one need not be an expert on body language to know who calls the shots in Iraq.