The Guardian 28 June, 2006
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
The killing of the "terror chief"
At the beginning of June the Bush Administration was in deep trouble: its occupation army in Iraq was going the same self-destructive way as their predecessors had in Vietnam.
News reports too frequently began: "In more bad news for President Bush, there are claims tonight of yet another massacre of civilians by US troops in Iraq". Meanwhile, the number of American deaths also continued to grow.
As US authorities failed to keep a lid on the execution of 24 Iraqi civilians by US Marines in Haditha, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki publicly denounced the US military for a callous disregard for Iraqi life, claiming that atrocities had become a "daily phenomenon".
He charged that American forces "do not respect the Iraqi people.... They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion or a hunch."
So, little wonder that the US leadership seized on the killing of Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to divert attention elsewhere and to shore up the US military’s image as an effective fighting force.
Taking their lead from Pentagon press releases, the capitalist media usually identified Zarqawi as "Bin Laden’s terror chief", neglecting to mention that the terrorist acts he engaged in usually benefited the US.
He began his career with Bin Laden in Afghanistan, using US-supplied weapons to fight against the Afghan revolution and the Soviet forces who had come to its aid. Even after the US had supposedly turned against Bin Laden, US leaders continued for their own ends to boost the image of his organisation, Al-Qaida.
After the gloss had warn off Bin Laden, Zarqawi, a suitably fanatical Sunni Muslim fundamentalist, made an excellent replacement poster boy for "international terrorism".
US Secretary of State Colin Powell used unsubstantiated connections between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi to try to justify the US invasion of Iraq. Later, after the invasion, the Yanks quietly dropped the assertion.
Barry Grey, in an article posted on the World Socialist Web Site, describes activities allegedly carried out in Iraq by Zarqawi which suggest very strongly that, if Zarqawi had not existed, the US would have had to invent him.
For example, Grey notes that "in February of 2004, amid signs that the Shiite population was on the verge of joining the armed resistance being fought mainly in Sunni areas, a public letter, allegedly authored by Zarqawi, called for Sunnis to provoke a civil war with the Shiites.
"Several weeks later, suicide bombings at Shiite mosques in Karbala and Baghdad were blamed on what the US called the ‘Zarqawi network’".
It is not known to what extent Zarqawi was in fact involved in what Grey calls "the numerous atrocities laid at his feet by Washington", but it is clear that his role was to undermine and discredit the Iraqi resistance and, as Grey notes, to "incite sectarian civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites".
Grey describes Zarqawi as "one of those shadowy figures, well known to US Intelligence, whose real allegiance at any given time is difficult to pin down". Nevertheless, Grey has to be correct when he asserts that "he [Zarqawi] represented an extremely reactionary element within Iraq".
It seems the US military, and its attendant intelligence services, had recently been tracking Zarqawi for some time. They claim to have extracted "critical information about his movements" from captured members of Al-Qaida in Iraq.
In the light of the gruesome pictures of torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, and the revelations about CIA "rendition" flights taking political prisoners from Europe to Egypt or other locations for torture, we can be fairly confident about how that "critical information" was "extracted".
But, having learned Zarqawi’s location — a "safe house" outside Baqubah, a town northeast of Baghdad — did the US anti-terrorist forces surround the house and call on him to surrender? Presumably, he must have had a lot of vital information about terrorist activity at his fingertips.
We will never know, for the forces of democracy and justice dropped two 500-pound bombs on the house without warning, killing not only Zarqawi but also five other people, including a child.
Actually, there is some doubt as to whether the bombs did in fact kill Zarqawi, or merely wound him. Before you could say "conflicting accounts", witnesses were telling reporters that Zarqawi was still alive when US troops arrived on the scene.
The witnesses claimed the US troops, instead of taking him prisoner, "beat him to death". This did not stop President Bush at a White House press conference from heaping praise on the "courage and professionalism" of what he called "the finest military in the world".
Bush then went on to blow the story of Zarqawi being the crucial leader of the terrorists in Iraq: "Zarqawi is dead", he said, "but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him."