"The evil that men do lives after them." -- Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."
DETROIT -- One death dominates the news from Iraq, while the deaths of thousands of others are far more emblematic of the horrible truth there. Killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will do little to halt the sectarian violence our invasion and military occupation of Iraq have unleashed. But the daily death toll and the moral catastrophe of Marines allegedly murdering innocent civilians in Haditha and other atrocities are shaping an unending future of violence for the Iraqi people and growing hostility toward the United States.
President George W. Bush's mad experiment in nation-building, freedom through violence, permanent military bases in Iraq and the arrogant attempt to forcefully reshape the political landscape in the Middle East are supreme failures. The people we claim to liberate are locked in the chains of fear and routine brutality.
Lost in the American media gushing over the assassination of Zarqawi and inflation of its importance is a report that the central morgue in Baghdad has been receiving more than 1,000 bodies each month this year.
The Inter Press News Agency reports that the level of carnage overwhelms the process of identifying and cataloging the dead: "The smell of death is all around the morgue. That and the crowds of crying families searching for their dead are now a ubiquitous sight around the morgue."
"The difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues," Bush reminded us after reading Zarqawi's death notice. Difficult? No, futile. Necessary? No, contrived.
Zarqawi was viciously successful in inflaming sectarian violence, and his brutal legacy assures more bloodshed. But it was the invasion that gave him his opportunity. Zarqawi played an important role in Bush's prelude to invading Iraq and his subsequent shifting reasons and justifications for the war.
The United States had ample opportunities to remove Zarqawi the bloodthirsty beheader long before he became responsible for the slaughter of thousands, and a major terrorist figure. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug turned religious fanatic, was holed up with his band of non-Iraqi Islamic extremists in Kurdish Northern Iraq, territory out of Saddam Hussein's control. The Busheviks used Zarqawi to help justify the invasion of Iraq and tolerated his terrorist operation to sell the phony reasons for war.
In March 2004, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported that the White House had nixed three separate Pentagon requests to attack Zarqawi's camp, located in a no-fly zone where he was an easy target. The CIA and military intelligence believed Zarqawi -- actually a rival of bin Laden -- was plotting to mount terrorist attacks in Europe. Miklaszewski said the Bush administration refused to pull the trigger because that would have jeopardized the planned full-scale invasion of Iraq. Zarqawi's link with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was tenuous at best. Zarqawi originally dubbed his hit squad "The Monotheism and Holy War Group" -- far too much of a mouthful for the media. After the invasion, he declared his group of murderers was now "al-Qaeda in Iraq." The Busheviks were ecstatic over Zarqawi's new branding. As convenient as Zarqawi was before the invasion, he proved even more useful for the Busheviks afterward as justification for the aggression.
The insurgency in Iraq will long outlive Zarqawi, and Baghdad's morgue will continue to have strained refrigeration and gurney gridlock. The new government and new interior minister will never be able to quell the insurrection as long as American occupation forces are there.
When Bush decided to whack the hornet's nest in Iraq, there were predictable consequences. The Middle East is a far more unstable and dangerous place than before Bush's crusade. The mad adventure spawned more terrorism and made our nation less secure.
Zarqawi succeeded in exploiting Iraq as a base for instability in the Middle East and fostering antipathy between the Sunnis and Shiites, which is spreading in the region. The U.S. invasion of Iraq exacerbated and enabled that volatile conflict, which will not end with Zarqawi's death and will result in more deaths for the Iraqis and the American troops caught in the middle.
"My vote against this misbegotten war is the best vote I have cast in the United States Senate since I was elected in 1962," Sen. Ted Kennedy recently told the Massachusetts Democratic State Convention.
Sen. Russ Feingold, a possible presidential candidate, told a crowd in New Hampshire he never bought into Bush's war of choice and said, "I didn't just write an op-ed piece about it. I voted against it."
However, other Democratic presidential hopefuls, like Sen. Hillary Clinton, still argue voting to support the war was correct. And then we have that insufferable windbag, Sen. Joe Biden, also a presidential contender, who wanted to "give credit where credit is due" for the hit on Zarqawi.
"I have my differences with the way the administration is conducting this war," he said, "but the elimination is, I believe, a turning point, comparable to the capture of Saddam Hussein, the first Iraqi elections, the second Iraqi elections, the formation of the first Iraqi government and the formation of the second Iraqi government. This is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it is, I believe, the end of the beginning. And no, I didn't plagiarize that. I made it up my own self." At least he's taking full credit for his tortured verbiage.
His last quest for the presidency in 1988 went into meltdown when he was caught "borrowing" full paragraphs from the speeches of Neil Kinnoch, then the British Labour Party leader. Biden should continue plagiarizing Kinnoch, a perceptive politician with wonderful Welsh wit and wisdom. "I would die for my country, but I could never let my country die for me," Kinnoch once said.
How many supporters of the war are allowing America's moral authority to perish with the blood of innocent Iraqis and brave young Americans? Certainly, none named Bush or Biden are doing the suffering.
Kinnoch also said, "The enemy of idealism is zealotry." Biden, like so many other Democrats, accepted Bush's blind zeal to wage an unnecessary war to seek out phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. While Bush and Biden see "progress" in Iraq and a "turning point" in Zarqawi's death, Kinnoch knew how such minds worked, once noting, "You cannot fashion a wit out of two halfwits."
Zarqawi's evil lives on with the horrible war people like Bush and Biden provided for his successors.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 13 2006 |