yesterday i read that a web site had posted that zarqawi is wounded. as juan cole pointed out, this really isn't new news. ever since february, it has been rumored that zarqawi was injured. while it is news for a pro-zarqawi web site to admit he is hurt, this isn't technically speaking, a new development. just a confirmation of an earlier one.
anyway, it's probably only a matter of time that zarqawi is killed or captured. but i wonder whether it will make much of a difference to the insurgency. zarqawi is probably not in contact with most of the people fighting u.s. forces. if he were in contact with that many people, he would have been found by now. most of the insurgents are acting fairly autonomously, maybe indirectly getting orders from Z, or maybe not. probably most are not.
the bush administration likes to personalize these conflicts. in afghanistan bin laden was the face of al qaeda and mullah omar became the personification of the taliban. the bad guy in iraq was saddam hussein, until he was captured, then it became zarqawi. i'm not saying that any of these guys are innocent or don't deserve the administration's characterization of them, i'm just noting that this seems to be the administration's strategy of dealing with political and social movements: assigning the blame for virtually everything they do on a single individual and then going after that individual.
there are some real advantages to this strategy. it reduces a potentially complex problem to a well-defined achievable goal (i.e. getting the leader). by assigning the blame to the leader, it implicitly absolves the followers, thus creating the opportunity for reconciliation once the leader is gone. and i don't think there is any ethical problem with assigning blame for the crimes of a group to the group's leader. the buck stops there, after all. through roughly the same logic i hold bush personally responsible for what his administration does
but there are also disadvantages. personifying a conflict can be misleading. remember when the insurgency was supposed to die out once saddam was captured? if anything, the insurgency has gotten worse since then. in fact, arguably, taking out saddam may have helped cement cooperation between former baathists and islamic fundamentalists (the latter was not a fan of saddam). plus after building hope that the fighting will die out after a leader is captured, it can be demoralizing when things don't turn out that way. there's nothing worse than seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, then getting there and discovering that it's not a way out after all.
personalizing a conflict can also raise morale for the other side when the leader gets away. the illusiveness of bin laden and mullah omar helps fuel their mystique and it makes the u.s., supposedly the most powerful country on earth, look ineffective. that's the flip side of defining clear goals. it's also clear when you don't achieve them.
i realize that i'm kind of talking out of both sides of my mouth here. on the one hand (mouth?), i say that getting zarqawi will probably not effect the insurgency, and then on the other i say that not getting mullah omar or bin laden does make a difference because it has given a PR coup to the other side. but that's just it. i think both are right. by personalizing a conflict, it creates a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. if we personalize and succeed in capturing the persona, it runs the risk of revealing that the characterization was wrong. if we fail, it runs the risk of adding to the prestige of the person were are after.
whether zarqawi is really injured or not, doesn't really matter. the fact is, he has been blamed for virtually every suicide bombing and beheading in iraq since saddam was captured (indeed, he was even accused of personally cutting off nick berg's head. although it's not clear to me how such a definitive statement could ever come out of that video). if and when zarqawi is captured, the bombings and killings will probably continue. and i'll wonder whether anything was ever served by turning him into the face of the iraqi resistance over the past year.
