Effective Tactics?

A few days ago, the United States was busy running about bragging that it had "dealt a serious blow" to the Iraqi "insurgency" by killing al-Zarqawi with a few bombs.

This morning, we learn who has emerged to replace al-Zarqawi. No surprise, anybody who believed that killing al-Zarqawi was anything more than symbolic has to be blind.

A mere couple of days after Bush does a surprise inspection of his Iraqi client state, this little factoid emerges. How convenient.

There's a couple of things that come to mind here - and they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

First, it seems more than probable that the insurgency in Iraq has multiple leadership figures. They may - or may not - be aware of each other depending upon the structure that has emerged in the last year or two. The relentless pace of car bombings and disruption in the country makes it quite clear that killing one leader isn't removing the head of the organization per se - any more than chopping one head off the legendary Hydra killed it off.

Second, having killed off al-Zarqawi, the United States government created a problem for itself. They no longer had an identifiable "enemy" that they could build up and blame for anything that goes awry in the country. By releasing the name and pictures of this other person, they have once again put fuel into the fires of the propaganda machine that is keeping support for occupying Iraq alive. Once again, they can "blame" a person for all the ills that the occupation is experiencing. A person is easy for people to comprehend - shadowy concepts like "insurgency" are much harder to pin down. Knocking off someone that has been built up in western media as a villain buys not only credibility, but a false sense of progress.

Is the United States "making progress" in Iraq? I'd say that's a matter of perspective. If one measures progress in political terms, it seems unlikely. The government there is fragile, and Talabani's influence doesn't seem to extend much beyond the "Green Zone" in Baghdad. In military terms, one might suppose that the United States has Iraq under control in more or less the same fashion that Germany held France during WWII. It may have been titularly under their control, but that doesn't mean that the people were directly supportive of the occupiers.

Bush's recent "show visit" to Iraq was nothing more than a cheesy photo-op, intended to reinforce the Republicans as the United States moves into "mid-term elections" mode. It creates the false impression that Iraq is making progress towards civil society, while the picture outside of the heavily fortified green zone continues to be one of bombings and bloodshed.