Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

The artificial leg that lied

For events in an 'asymmetrical' military campaign, the life and death of Zarqawi has characteristics that seem to strangely mirror Coalition strategy. This is subtly identified by The Australian's unnamed 'correspondents in Dubai' who write:

'By the time he was killed this week in a US airstrike, Zarqawi was more powerful as a myth than as a man. The killings he masterminded were carefully calibrated to have the maximum psychological effect and feed his legend. His repertoire of violence was a guerrilla version of the "shock and awe" tactics of his American foes. Suicide bombings were planned with great precision but rarely aimed at targets of military value - their symbolic effect was more important. The killing of hostages was also choreographed for maximum shock value and followed a ritual that became grimly familiar.'

This mythmaking seems to be a double-edged sword, cutting the throat of humanitarian values in two directions at once:

'US forces also sometimes found it convenient to feed the Zarqawi myth. Most experts believe his foreign fighters make up only a fraction of the insurgency, but the US military portrayed Zarqawi as its most dangerous foe in Iraq.'

The Washington Post reported earlier this year that the US military mounted a psychological operations campaign to 'magnify the role of Zarqawi' in Iraq's 'insurgency'. However, that wasn't the only magnification. There's also the notional artificial leg that became part of the pretext for the invasion itself:

'He was long said to have an artificial leg, fitted in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's rule - a claim some US officials used to bolster their case that the Iraqi president was conspiring with al-Qaeda. The tale about the leg - like so many of the myths around Zarqawi - turned out to be false.'

The symmetrical commentary also has his death conform to a wider Coalition agenda, with Rummy observing 'on the very day he gets killed, the [Iraqi] government gets formed'.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 12:16 pm ::