Thursday, June 08, 2006

Financial Times Editorial - Zarqawi's demise is a psychological boost

Financial Times Editorial - Zarqawi's demise is a psychological boost
Published: June 9 2006 03:00 | Last updated: June 9 2006 03:00. Copyright by The Financial Times

The death in a US air strike of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an ultra-violent jihadi with views bordering on fascism, who was thought extreme even by the leaders of al-Qaeda, is an occasion for unqualified celebration. Whether it will amount to "an opportunity for Iraq's new government to turn the tide in this struggle", as a jubilant President George W. Bush put it yesterday, is altogether another matter.

Zarqawi was a specimen for psychopathology as much as a study in radical Islamist politics. His utter disregard for human life and taste for slaughtering captives like animals raises him high in the annals of barbarism. But what, unfortunately, cannot be denied is that he was good at what he did.

The US occupation forces in Iraq knew little about him - for a long time they did not even know whether he had one leg or two. But their propagandists built him up into a demonic force, personifying the foreign fighters alleged to be the backbone of the insurgency. The risk now is that his demise will be hyped into a decisive victory.

It is a satisfying blow against the perpetrator of some of the worst outrages of the past three years, and it should rightly give coalition forces and the elected Iraqi government a psychological lift. But so did the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 - also acclaimed as a "turning point" - whereas the main point to keep in mind about Zarqawi is that the sectarian war he sought is well under way.

Until February, there were signs the tide was indeed turning against the jihadi wing of the insurgency, which was explicitly targeting Iraq's majority Shia Muslims in an attempt to start a sectarian war that would suck in Shia Iran and Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbours. Mainstream insurgents, nationalist, neo-Ba'athist and tribal, turned against these Sunni supremacist extremists.

The jihadis responded with a tactically perfect blow, destroying the Shia Askariya shrine in Samarra, stampeding Sunni and Shia back into their ghettoes and precipitating open sectarian war. The death toll in this mutual ethno-religious cleansing is now frequently more than 60 a day.

Longer term, the bungling of the occupation and the astuteness of Zarqawi has incubated a lethal hybrid of extreme Islamism and irreducible nationalism that could end up haunting the Islamic world and its relations with the west for generations.

There may, however, just be a chance for the government of Nuri al-Maliki, the Shia Islamist prime minister, to get a grip on the anarchy that has enveloped Iraq. Mr Maliki finally secured broad parliamentary approval yesterday for a new security team, drawn from the Iraqi army the US fatally disbanded. Only if he can bring the defence and interior ministries, previously bastions of re-badged militias pursuing partisan agendas and sectarian war, under central control will Iraq have really defeated Zarqawi.

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