The Media’s Zarqawi Dance

Zarqawi was pure evil. No one who has watched the horrifying video of Nick Berg’s savage beheading would dispute his utter depravity, and no one who has seen his broadcasts can deny the depth of the hatred he has for the West. Even al-Qaeda told Zarqawi to lay off with the beheading of so many Iraqis. The silencing of Zarqawi is a milestone, a sign for the doubters that we are winning this war even though there are some who would sabotage our victory.

The media, especially, has always been on the side of sedition. With conduct that is, at best, horribly biased and at worst, giving aid to the enemy, their pieces are staring us in the face every day, looking to define a war to millions of people half a world away. They have such a solemn responsiblity to report the truth, and yet they choose to report their opinions thinly disguised as “fair reporting.”

Case in point: This story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, called “Slaying The Myth,” claims that Zarqawu’s image was not only false, but manufactured by the U.S.

“The myth of al-Zarqawi,” whines the editor, “as the leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, a foreigner who symbolized al-Qaida’s engagement in the country, was exactly that: a myth. And it was a myth created, in large part, by the American government he had sworn to fight.”

Not content with just that, the author goes on to close with this gem:

Will al-Zarqawi’s death (the US air strike also killed a woman and child, among others) lead to the collapse of the insurgency in Iraq? The short answer is “No.” But, perhaps, now that he’s dead, the White House will finally be forced to face reality in Iraq, not myth.

Note the mention of the woman and child killed in the raid (now reported to not have been in the raid after all). That’s how you get people’s attention now, you know. Make sure to talk about women and children being killed. Never mind that the idea of women and children being active and willing combatants hasn’t been new to U.S. troops for, oh, about 37 years, give or take. One is left to wonder how the media missed the memo on that.

Atlantic Monthly has a classic “Damn the U.S.” piece about Zarqawi’s life this month as well.

Everyone I spoke with readily acknowledged that as a teenager al-Zarqawi had been a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp in Zarqa’s underworld. He was disruptive, constantly involved in brawls. When he was fifteen (according to his police record, about which I had been briefed in Amman), he participated in a robbery of a relative’s home, during which the relative was killed. Two years later, a year shy of graduation, he had dropped out of school. Then, in 1989, at the age of twenty-three, he traveled to Afghanistan.

As you can see, Zarqawi has basically been a piece of trash since his voice changed.

In the summer of 2003, three months after the American invasion, al-Zarqawi moved to the Sunni areas of Iraq. He became infamous almost at once. On August 7, he allegedly carried out a car-bomb attack at the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Twelve days later, he was linked to the bombing of the United Nations headquarters, in which twenty-two people died. And on August 29, in what was then the deadliest attack of the war, he engineered the killing of over a hundred people, including a revered cleric, the Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, in a car bombing outside Shia Islam’s holy shrine in Najaf. The suicide bomber in that attack was Yassin Jarad, from Zarqa. He was al-Zarqawi’s father-in-law.

Okay, we get it. The guy was unredeemable. That’s why he’s dead. So why did author Ms. Weaver feel the need to base her entire article on the premise that the U.S. flat-out lied about Zarqawi’s influence and stature?

“Even then—and even more so now—Zarqawi was not the main force in the insurgency,” the former Jordanian intelligence official, who has studied al-Zarqawi for a decade, told me. “To establish himself, he carried out the Muhammad Hakim operation, and the attack against the UN. Both of them gained a lot of support for him—with the tribes, with Saddam’s army and other remnants of his regime. They made Zarqawi the symbol of the resistance in Iraq, but not the leader. And he never has been.”

He continued, “The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result, sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Your government is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Western and Israeli diplomats to whom I spoke shared this view—and this past April, The Washington Post reported on Pentagon documents that detailed a U.S. military propaganda campaign to inflate al-Zarqawi’s importance. Then, the following month, the military appeared to attempt to reverse field and portray al-Zarqawi as an incompetent who could not even handle a gun. But by then his image in the Muslim world was set.

Just once, I’d like to see a fixture of the MSM report the news with a pro-America bent. (If you’re going to be biased when reporting, the least you can do is bias in favor of the truth, right?)

UPDATE: The WaPo has a nice little blurb hidden in the folds of this article about Zarqawi’s autopsy:

An Iraqi man raised questions about al-Zarqawi’s death, telling AP Television News that he saw U.S. soldiers after the airstrike beating an injured man resembling the dead terrorist until blood flowed from his nose.

[General] Casey said the claim was “baloney.”

“He died while American soldiers were attempting to save his life,” Casey told “Fox News Sunday.” “So the idea that there were people beating him is ludicrous.”

It just never ends, does it?

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