There’s a bad joke circulating about that asks “what do you call a dead Iraqi?� The answer is “an insurgent� (or, alternatively, “a terrorist�). Following disclosure of the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha, this joke is even more tasteless. What brings this revisionist-minded humor to mind, though, is the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi this past week in Iraq. As has been widely reported, U.S. military forces received credible information that the insurgent leader was meeting with his spiritual adviser, Abdel Rahman, in a village west of Baquba and proceeded to drop two 500-pound bombs on the residence, killing Zarqawi, Rahman, and four unidentified others—including two women and a girl aged 5 to 7. No effort was reportedly made to capture Zarqawi alive after he was located. How “the terrorist Zarqawi� (as the president Bush is wont to call him) met his end is perhaps less interesting than how he so quickly managed to achieve such infamy. Writing in the current Atlantic Monthly, Mary Anne Weaver chronicles “The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: How a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America’s nemesis in Iraq.� In her lengthy essay, she writes:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, barely forty and barely literate, a Bedouin from the Bani Hassan tribe, was until recently almost unknown outside his native Jordan. Then, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell catapulted him onto the world stage. In his address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, Powell identified al-Zarqawi—mistakenly, as it turned out—as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Subsequently, al-Zarqawi became a leading figure in the insurgency in Iraq—and in November of last year, he also brought his jihadist revolution back home, as the architect of three lethal hotel bombings in Amman. His notoriety grew with every atrocity he perpetrated, yet Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials remained bedeviled by a simple question: Who was he? Was he al-Qaeda’s point man in Iraq, as the Bush administration argued repeatedly? Or was he, as a retired Israeli intelligence official told me not long ago, a staunch rival of bin Laden’s, whose importance the United States exaggerated in order to validate a link between al-Qaeda and pre-war Iraq, and to put a non-Iraqi face on a complex insurgency? [full text]

As if to confirm the Israeli intelligence official’s assessment, Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post reported in April on how the “Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi�:

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists. For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi’s role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the “U.S. Home Audienceâ€? as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi’s role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain “a very small part of the actual numbers,â€? Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer. In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, “Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will—made him more important than he really is, in some ways.â€? [full text]

How important? At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Zarqawi failed to make the cut on being included among the “most wantedâ€? in Iraq (as featured on the well-publicized playing cards developed by the Department of Defense). Some three years later, the President is describing him as a terrorist mastermind who has been brought to justice. Actually, Mr. Bush’s exact words yesterday were: “I’m thrilled that Zarqawi was brought to justice.â€? Leaving aside the unseemliness of experiencing a thrill at the violent death of a violent man, the use of the term, “brought to justice,â€? is somewhat questionable, given that such typically suggests at least a modicum of due process. In his comments yesterday, which occurred at a joint press conference with the Prime Minister of Denmark, Mr. Bush also said, on a somewhat different matter, “those involved with the Abu Ghraib have been brought to justice. And that’s what happens in transparent societies—which, by the way, stood in stark contrast to the society that Saddam Hussein ran, where there was no justice, where there was no transparency, where people weren’t given a chance to take their case in front of an impartial court.â€? Of course, the terrorist Zarqawi was not afforded the same chance as the soldiers implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal or even Saddam Hussein. Had he been provided such, one cannot help but wonder whether he would have been further unmasked as an overrated thug with violent predilections whose inflated sense of self was only exceeded (and exacerbated) by the inflated notoriety granted him by the Bush administration. But such revelations will not be forthcoming. The execution has been carried out. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.