Beheading the Hydra

Insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, another so-called “turning point” in the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Ellen Knickmeyer writes in the Washington Post that “Critics of the U.S. military’s campaign in Iraq have accused American commanders of making their own use of Zarqawi, exaggerating the foreigner’s importance to suggest that the insurgency has been thrust upon Iraqi Sunnis more than it has been led by them.”

Even if this were not true, the effect of killing one leader in an insurgency/civil war has an uncertain effect on the ground, at best. The capture of Saddam Hussein himself, two and a half years ago, was supposed to have undercut the insurgency, as were the deaths of his sons, Uday and Qusay, three years ago: the violence in Iraq has of course increased horrifically since we passed those supposed milestones.

In April 1943, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, head of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was shot down by U.S. warplanes over Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. Despite the fact that Yamamoto was exponentially more important to the Japanese than Zarqawi was to the insurgency (Yamamoto was the architect of the Japanese war plan, and given the island-hopping nature of combat in the Pacific, its chief prosecutor), the Pacific war dragged on for more than two years after his death–and this at a time when the United States was fully mobilized for war.

Today the minds of U.S. politicians are not on war, but on writing discrimination against gays into the constitution, and cutting taxes for the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans.

“Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay said in 2003, just as the insurgency in Iraq was coming into malignant flower.

After the constitutional amendment against gay marriage died in the Senate, Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas said “We’re making progress, and we’re not going to stop until marriage between a man and a woman is protected.” This comes at the end of a month with more than 1,200 military, civilian and police deaths among Iraqis and coalition forces.

Future generations will think that giants strode the Earth in our time.

E-Mail Follies

Those of you who had e-mail messages to me bounce today, please resend them—I’m using a workaround through Gmail while Verizon, my ISP, lumbers towards the problem (which seems to be with their suddenly hypersensitive spam filters; two hours of my life I’ll never get back).