Who - and what - was Zarqawi? (by Jeff Weintraub)

The day that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death was announced, perceptive analyses of the man and his significance by Christopher Hitchens and Fred Kaplan appeared in Slate. The Atlantic also put a more lengthy profile of Zarqawi on-line, 'The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi'. The Atlantic article is useful and informative. But both Hitchens and Kaplan highlight some important factors that I think have been obscured in a lot of other commentary, including the Atlantic piece.

A number of observers have pointed out, correctly, that foreign jihadists like Zarqawi seem to make up only a small proportion of the people actively involved in the so-called 'insurgency' in Iraq, which is clearly a loose coalition of elements ranging from Iraqi fascists and home-grown Iraqi Islamist fanatics to ordinary Sunni Arabs who are most interested in expelling the Americans and restoring Sunni Arab supremacy in Iraq. However, this overlooks the fact that those foreign jihadists, epitomized by Zarqawi and his organization, have played a key role in many of the most horrific and effective dimensions of the 'insurgency'. These include suicide bombings (in which the people who actually blow themselves up appear to consist overwhelmingly of foreign jihadist volunteers); the massacre of the UN mission in Iraq, which drove the UN out of the country and discouraged other governments and international organizations from getting involved in the reconstruction of Iraq; the kidnappings and beheadings of foreign workers, technicians, and journalists; the assassinations of important Shiite leaders like Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim; and, above all, the campaign of indiscriminate terrorist murder of Iraqi Shiite civilians, including attacks on mosques and shrines and religious festivals, which has brought Iraq to the verge of all-out sectarian civil war. (On this last point, see Some thoughts on the terrorist strategy of the Iraqi 'insurgency'.)

As Kaplan nicely sums it up:

Make no mistake: The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a big deal, and for reasons beyond justice, vengeance, and crossing out another top mug on the al-Qaida most-wanted chart... For a long time now, analysts and several officials have noted that jihadist followers of Zarqawi's comprise a small segment of the insurgency but commit a larger percentage of the most violent acts. Nobody has been precise about how the numbers break down. I doubt if anyone really knows. At the very least, we may be about to find out.

Hitchens puts it this way:

The latest Atlantic has a brilliantly timed cover story by Mary Anne Weaver, which tends to the view that Zarqawi was essentially an American creation, but seems to undermine its own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that, Zarqawi wasn't all that important.

Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document of which Weaver (on no evidence) doubts the authenticity, has been the key innovation of the insurgency: applying lethal pressure to the most vulnerable aspect of Iraqi society. And it has had the intended effect, by undermining Grand Ayatollah Sistani and helping empower Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.

Both of them are essentially right. There is no question that the kinds of grisly and indiscriminate mass terrorism associated with Zarqawi have been absolutely critical in shaping developments in post-Saddam Iraq.

The real question is the extent to which Zarqawi himself actually played an essential role in planning and carrying out these operations. It does remain possible that his position as a central figure in these terrorist campaigns was, at least in part, a deliberate optical illusion. Along with Juan Cole and a number of others, I think there is a lot of convincing evidence that surviving Ba'athist secret-police, military, and other organizational networks have played a crucial role in organizing and coordinating the Sunni Arab 'insurgency' in Iraq. Even when foreign jihadist fanatics are the ones who actually blow themselves up in suicide-bombing attacks, planning and carrying out these attacks requires effective organization on the ground, which the Ba'athist and ex-Ba'athist networks are well suited to provide. At the very least, they probably play a necessary role in enabling most of these mega-terrorist operations.

(Some analyses by Iraqis and others - discussed here - have suggested that this could help explain why 'insurgent' attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan have been minimal, aside from some very occasional atrocities. It's not enough to say that they have no support there, because they have been able to carry out spectacular attacks in the Shiite south of Iraq, where they also have almost no popular support. Instead, the key factor is that Iraqi Kurdistan is the one part of the country where underground Ba'athist networks have been totally dismantled for a long time. This is plausible.)

It suits the purposes of many groups in Iraq, including not just the Ba'athists but also many of their opponents, to pin the blame for the indiscriminate terrorist murder of Iraqi civilians on foreigners rather than on other Iraqis. So the Ba'athists were undoubtedly trying to use Zarqawi and his organization as front men, to give themselves plausible deniability so they could pretend they weren't directly involved in carrying out these atrocities. If this was Zarqawi's main role, then the Ba'athists can probably come up with another symbolic figure to replace him.

On the other hand, Zarqawi and the other jihadists have undoubtedly been trying to use the Ba'athists in return, and it may turn out that he was a more significant independent actor than the first hypothesis would suggest. The after-effects of his death may help to clarify these matters. Meanwhile, we have to hope that the undeniable political and human damage done by Zarqawi and his organization does not prove to be irreversible. As Kaplan says, we may be about to find out. (Jeff Weintraub)