A Successful Three-Year Psyop. posted by Richard Seymour

Now, it seems to me that they couldn't have done a better job: news reports need a hook on which to hang their stories, and complex discussions of a vast, geographically diffuse, organisationally decentralised and acephalous movement won't do. Zarqawi's Myth provided that hook. For that reason, the news of his death is almost a negative version of Diana's death - no one will weep, but a proportion of cranks and obsessives, egged on by an hysterical media, really think it matters. All of the observations, questions and caveats being supplied by the media rest on a supposition of Zarqawi's centrality, rely on the narrative eagerly and skilfully supplied by the US military. And of course, everyone will be familiar with the script provided by the propagandists: its all foreign fighters causing the trouble, they're ruining the infrastructure, they're disrupting the 'transfer of sovereignty' that a benign and disinterested army of occupation is readying.

And so:

"Now Zarqawi has met his end, and this violent man will never murder again," Bush said.

But the president also cautioned that al-Zarqawi's death will not quell the ongoing violence in Iraq.

"Zarqawi is dead, but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues," Bush said, adding that that terrorists and insurgents would "carry on without him" and that sectarian violence would continue.

Ditto:

The killing of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air raid is a huge success in the struggle against the Iraq insurgency.

President George W. Bush was right to say Thursday that the death of al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's operational leader in Iraq, was "a severe blow" to the al-Qaida terrorist network worldwide. It was also arguably the most important success so far in the long struggle against the Sunni insurgency in central Iraq.

And:

But other crucial questions, analysts say, are thrown completely up into the air: whether other foreign fighters will show themselves equally eager to slaughter civilians, whether the Sunni insurgency will split into fragments or broaden its base and, above all, whether the Shiite-Sunni killing that Zarqawi's attacks helped unleash can be reined in.

Further:

[H]e gained countless admirers among Sunni Muslims, the majority sect of Islam. These included the influential and the rich. When he personally beheaded the British engineer Kenneth Bigley in October 2004 in the Iraqi town of Falluja, and posted a video of the savagery on the internet, a newspaper columnist in Egypt wrote: “We all secretly love Abu Musab”. Saudi millionaires sent him donations and throughout the Islamic world troubled young men dreamt of joining his band. For tactical reasons, he co-operated with remnants of Saddam Hussein’s deposed Baathist regime.

And:

The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said Zarqawi's death marked "a great success for Iraq and the global war on terror... Zarqawi was the godfather of sectarian killing and terror in Iraq".

Better still:

Some of the more hysterical opponents of the Iraq war liked to suggest that al-Zarqawi did not really exist, that he was some Middle Eastern Mephistopheles fabricated by the clever minds at the Pentagon to give a necessary face and target to an insurgency that was in reality vast, leaderless and unconquerable. Doubtless the conspiracy theorists who saw the CIA’s hand in the September 11 attacks will have no difficulty explaining away the pictures of al-Zarqawi yesterday, but the rest of us should at least take the Iraqis’ word for it.

Even historians buy it:

Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary London, said: “For once I think it is very important. It’s much more important than the capture of Saddam Hussein. In killing him, you temporarily — I stress temporarily — set back the growth of the transnational jihadi network”.

All are agreed, then. Zarqawi was the main man, the top guy in what is variously characterised as the 'insurgency', the 'Sunni insurgency', 'sectarian violence' etc. Aside from being the main man in Iraq, he was centrally important to the "transnational jihadi network". The government may now be able to reach out to the Less Evil Than Zarqawi resistance. However, a new evil mastermind is on his way. There is speculation about who he might be and exactly whether he will be as evil as Zarqawi. Every politician, 'expert', reporter and military official agrees that The Insurgency Is Not Over, But This Is A Setback, But A New Evildoer Will Emerge Anyway.

The first mention of Zarqawi came in February 2003, when Colin Powell brought him up in front of the UN as proof of the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. The story was notoriously riddled with glaring inaccuracies, but acolytes in the media reported this fiction as fact, and a thousand and one columnists chewed their fingernails, contemplating what might happen if this Al Qaeda man got hold of some of Saddam's nukes. Subsequently, after a brief lull, he was promoted to the leadership of Iraq's resistance by military spinners who realised that reducing it to Saddamist 'elements' was old and at any rate less exciting than the idea of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Long before there was any talk of Al Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers, Bush was publicly insisting that Zarqawi was an Al Qaeda affiliate. A series of patently fraudulent documents were 'discovered' which purported to prove a Zarqawi-Bin Laden connection. As Loretta Napoleoni points out in her book Insurgent Iraq, this blizzard of false claims both inflated Zarqawi's importance way beyond any actual weight he had in the resistance, and also had a self-fulfilling quality in that the more the US talked him up the more his name was bruited by a number of opponents of the occupation, and he did eventually declare allegiance to bin Laden and rename his tiny organisation.

What we experience as 'the war in Iraq' is a simulacrum, mediated by military-vetted imagery and embedded reporters. The sheer dependency of Western reporters in Iraq on official sources is compounded by the fact that most reporters can't get about in Iraq, can't move far beyond the Green Zone. There is, even among the better journalists, a willingness therefore to accept enabling narratives, plot devices, decoys and so on. Racist assumptions about Iraqis and a total failure to understand the extremities to which the imperatives of US policy will take the occupiers has been a useful alibi in cementing the grip of these stories. Iraq's legitimate rejection of the occupation, with its armed and unarmed wings, has been studiously reduced to Zarqawi and his group, whose actions have been so contrary to the interests of the resistance that they have alienated local populations and nationalist resistance organisations everywhere they went, often ending up in bloody battle against them.

Malcolm X once observed that whether one is perceived as a monster or a freedom fighter is largely in the hands of who controls the image. "The mau mau," he noted ironically, "weren't image-conscious". They were concerned only with how to free themselves from what we now know to have been an even more brutal and immoral colonial domination than was imagined by anti-imperialists at the time. Having succeeded, within a very short space of time Jomo Kenyatta had become a 'moderate' among the Kikuyu, whom Western leaders prayed would not be overthrown by a more extreme force. "Yes," X chuckled, "they're praying, and they should..."