The world’s highest-profile mass killer has finally gotten what
he had coming. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi rose (which is to say sunk) to
a level of squalid wickedness not even mastered by Osama bin Laden,
whose stately visage belied a desire to keep his hands out of the
muck of murder. For Zarqawi this was not a problem. He killed among
the people. The killing he orchestrated, as much as a devil can
orchestrate pandemonium, brought the dilemma of the entire war in
Iraq into the flesh. The mere presence of a man like Zarqawi
heartened the defeatism of those whose crisis in moral confidence
cannot tolerate a situation of misery and injustice touched off by
American military action. As for Zarqawi’s tactical attitude of
nihilism — played out in the lurid dehumanization of random
beheadings and detonations — it seemed as if the terrible price to
be paid for U.S. intervention in Iraq was a living nightmare
itself, drawn from the same irrational evil as the statist
totalitarianism of the 20th century.
But the dilemma of the war — that in order to free Iraq, the
coalition created a realm of murder and despair — came about
courtesy of a man whose very idea of strategy involved exploiting
the weakness and good faith of the liberal project of freedom.
Stretched between monsters of Islam like Zarqawi and the Muslim
angels who have striven for peace, brotherhood, and order in Iraq,
a whole range of varyingly aggrieved citizens found their
complicity suddenly on the market. Enlistment in al Qaeda in Iraq
brought a perverse stability that joblessness could not. The
planting of a roadside bomb brought ready cash. Silence itself —
won by threats if not by payola — was a commodity of war. And true
enough the fabric of Iraqi society itself had no shortage of
threads for Zarqawi to pull. The denominations of Sunni and Shi’a
became through his blood-colored glasses factions of mutual
destruction; the hordes of hardened criminals turned out on the
streets in one of Saddam’s last treasons against his own people
became a field of opportunity. The breakdown of the social
categories that preserved community in Iraq began when the manacles
of the Ba’ath were thrown off. But Zarqawi jumped up and down in
sadistic glee upon the shards of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule.
How much harder, if you break it, to fix it — when you and a
handful of stalwart allies must contend with a man whose only joy
is to inspire irreversible damage.
IT DID NOT, of course, have to turn out that way; the ordeal the
U.S. and Iraq have had to endure in putting the hand of justice to
Zarqawi is the direct result of a crisis of legitimacy beside the
one that has galvanized critics of the war. The massive world
demonstrations against the American invasion on February 15, 2003,
revealed a profound outrage among many peoples for the use of war
as a security policy. But Saddam’s regime initiated the crisis in
the legitimacy of the international order by an obscene defiance of
a decade’s worth of international law; and the fix was in when
France refused, under any circumstance, to support any coercive
enforcement of the most recent, legitimate, and unanimous order set
down by the Security Council — Resolution 1441. The French
government insisted it would apply its veto well short of war.
International law was not to be enforced. It could be said that
what Bush warned against came true on that day — the death of
international law as something the world could take seriously. But
because France did none of the shooting, leaving the Americans with
the global psychic burden of blood on their hands, nobody blamed
Paris. No one denounced Paris. And no one asked the corrupted
cretins behind that disingenuous exercise of pacifism to be held to
account when Zarqawi, who had been there all along, made good on
his life’s calling and started organizing crimes against humanity
on a proud and ongoing whim.
In that way did Zarqawi, more than any other Islamist, put
himself so opportunistically at the peak of the pyramid of
illegitimacy that defined the crisis in Iraq. What fun to tease an
occupying power hoping to play by the rules of war by incessantly
egging on the obliteration of all rules of war! What fun it must
have been to drag anti-Americans, Iraqi and Western, down to the
bottom of the moral slag heap by setting the tone for resistance as
unmitigated barbarism. Zarqawi was the world-historical opposite of
revered rebel Robert E. Lee, who refused to take his tattered army
into the Appalachian hills and begin guerilla operations against
the Union. For Zarqawi, “Mission Accomplished” meant the battle had
just begun. Another crisis of legitimacy for which he can be held
responsible, and perhaps the worst, was this profane mockery of the
laws of armed conflict. Citizens were to be made targets — now,
even to the exclusion of actual soldiers. Combatants were to be
relieved of the quaint, millennia-old obligation of wearing
uniforms. And killing was to be conducted primarily by suicide
operations and by the robotic proxy of the IED — a clever new
acronym for what was once the bane of people for peace everywhere:
land mines. By any standard — particularly that of those most
anguished by the American responsibility for civilian casualties in
Iraq — Zarqawi was an unforgivable instigator of the failure of
others and the most culpable figure in a worldwide movement to
annihilate human dignity.
The great nightmare realization of humanity in violence, which
Zarqawi whored in such soul-sickening fashion, was captured in
novels ranging from All Quiet on the Western Front to
American Psycho. It was Joseph Heller who distilled it
down to a single phrase in Catch-22, at the moment when at
last Snowden confides in Yossarian the terrible secret of his
disembowelment: “The spirit is gone, man is garbage. That was
Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.”
WAR IS A TRAUMA in any age. Zarqawi made of that trauma his true
religion, and of its harrowing a remorseless science. He did so at
a time when a new legitimacy of order — in Iraq, in Islam, in the
Middle East, in foreign relations, and in international law — is
desperately needed and not yet established. He worked actively to
destroy all legitimacies of order, by deploying weapons of
de-civilization not used so frankly for thousands of years. He
exacerbated the standing dilemma of an America deserted by the
United Nations, but left to enforce the integrity of an
international law which too few truly wanted enforced. And he
brought unbearable dilemmas to Iraq’s unfortunates, hopeless souls
not knowing whether it was worse to spare themselves or survive on
complicity in the deaths of Americans and their own unknowing
countrymen. For all these reasons, which shall never cease to be
true, all of us — historians, Americans, Iraqis, Muslims,
Christians, Jews, and atheists — can share a moment of solemn
resolve, joined in the certitude that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, if he
has not received it already, shall face his final judgment.
James G. Poulos is a writer and attorney living in
Washington, D.C. His commentaries are found at Postmodern
Conservative.
