Be. All that You Can Be. It's Not Just a Job, it's a Hypocrisy
So yesterday the US military forces blew up al Queda's vice president or deputy nutcase or whatever his title was. He was the Dick Cheney of al Quesedia.
Zarqawi is dead. War's over. Let's go home.
Or not.
Because the American people are so highly skeptical of the government these days, someone in the high command (probably not Bush... he's in the high chair, not high command) decided the best way to shut up the skeptics was to give the media a photo op with a framed picture of bloated corpsey head of Zarqawi.
OK... the American public is now aware that he's dead. And there was much rejoicing.
I want everyone... and by everyone I mean the four people who read this... I want everyone to think really hard about this for a second.
How do fanatical extremists react to seeing the dead heads of people they hold in high regard?
Do they:
a: Say, "crap, cap'n is dead... we surrender"
b: Take a few months to reorganize and then return with a new business model
c: Plead no contest and take 30 days in Abu Gravy Train and 5 years no terror probation?
d: Get really pissed off and start blowing things up and killing people.
Ask an Israeli to take that test and see what their experiences have been with killing off terrorist leaders and gloating.
Or maybe ask yourself a question or two... you're not an extremist... you're not a hell bent psychopath.
How did you feel when you saw images of American soldiers or civilian bodies being dragged through a street, beheaded, or burned and hang off a bridge? OK, now take that and mix in some jihad and shake with ice and serve.
I was going to make a joke here about imagine how you'd feel if you saw Dick Cheney's dead head on the news tonight, and how about 70% of the US would be thrilled... but I decided that that was in poor taste. I have no idea what the actual statistic would be.
So al Queda's number 2 is dead. That, in and of itself, is a good thing. He was a bad guy. He was not the brilliant mastermind of all things bad in the world, but his death removes a tactical problem for the US military. That... is a good thing.
The bad thing here is the media hypification of this turkey's dead head.
It shows that the US military still does not understand the war they are trying to fight. They do not understand the enemy they are trying to help with one hand and kill with the other. They are clinging to the old military logic of taking out the C3 (command, control, communications) and then cleaning up the rest later. Cut off the head and the body dies.
The problem here is that we're dealing with a different type of lifeform... these guys are hydras... cut off a head, two more grow back. You can spend an inifinite amount of time cutting off heads.
As Alan Rickman once told Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest... "What does it want? What is its motivation?"
Allen replied that it was a rock, it didn't have motivation.
There is a motivation in Iraq though. Instead of saying "bad guys" hate us because we're free or some other such nonsense, maybe find out why they hate us... and maybe fix the problem instead of the fixing the symptoms.
The US military planners and high command get the FART this week.
In a special award, I'm giving Harry Truman a FART award too. Since he started all of this mess.
Comments
My answer would be "B" or "D". Depends on how they want to take advantage of the politics of killing one of their leaders.
I agree with your analysis 100%. The politics of the killing is not on their side but ours. We are the ones getting all excited over it. To them, this is a "so what" situation. So you killed a leader? So what. In a month or two, hell maybe even right now, the retaliations will start. They will have their Tet Offensive (in this case Tikrit Offensive). While it may not be a miltary success, it will shake up the american people's view of how we are "winning" this war.
Case in point. Zarqawi is killed yesterday early in the morning. By the end of the day, 37 people had been killed in Bagdad. It was business as usual, Zarqawi or no Zarqawi.
Posted by: B. | June 9, 2006 11:57 AM
I don't agree.
Al-Kurani has already been acting in al-Zarqawi's stead for several weeks now.
Zarqawi was slowly getting pressured out by the Coalition forces and he was making more media-friendly strikes, which is to say killing Sunnis and Shia in an attempt to start a civil war. Basically he was killing everyone he could. That's one of the reasons he was ratted out. In his final days, nobody liked this dude. Not even Hezbollah!
An additional problem -- to wit the pictures -- is that there was and is a belief among those who do not support the war, that Zarqawi didn't exist. He was a construct of the Pentagon (yes, a construct of the Pentagon who interfered with the Pentagon's plans ... please don't ask me to understand how this makes sense). Even with the pictures, fingerprints, and scar identification there were people who thought A) He never existed or B) the US didn't really kill him. If you go over to sites like dailykos.com, I'm sure you can find people who believe both.
So this was an upopular guy in charge of 5% to 10% of the insurgency in Iraq, but he was also a very visible front man. He still needed to be killed. And we had no choice but to offer proof.
I mean, geeze, I still have to deal with half-wits who think the 9/11 Pentagon strike was fake. I've given up on trying to convince people that the 2004 Ohio elections weren't stolen.
Posted by: Becker | June 9, 2006 12:54 PM
Well, I can tell ya this much! Marijuana is the way! Let's just all sit around a big round table, smoking dope, ala "That Seventies Show" and laugh about the ignorance and insanity in this world! :)
Miss ya Monty! U2 Becker!
I would say the "B" is BLUE, but methinks BLUE would be a little more harsh and not include himself in the "we" of the U.S.
Posted by: PoundCake | June 12, 2006 8:47 AM
Becker, I agree that toward the end nobody in the Mid-East liked this guy. That's just more support for why this is a "so what" killing for the insurgency/Al-Queda. They will go on fighting no matter what leader we kill. I think we're saying the same thing here.
Posted by: B. | June 12, 2006 4:40 PM
B,
No, we aren't.
This was not a "so what" kill. It did some serious damage to the one area that the insurgency is seeing real victory in Iraq, the media war. Al-Kurani is not as charismatic or daring as Zarqawi and there is less chance he can pull the foreign insurgency together. 5% less bombins in Iraq? I'll take that, thank you very much.
Additionally, the killing of Zarqawi allowed the PM of Iraq to appoint a Defense and Interior minster. These were two very contentious posts that are now filled under the cover of a victory. That is also good news. As Iraq forms, the odds of the government falling apart due to insurgency shrink, but the odds of the government falling apart due to corruption increase. These were very important posts to fill.
My two cents.
Posted by: Becker | June 12, 2006 7:37 PM