The Zarqawi bogeyman

The Washington Post reports what you'd have to be an idiot not to have realized on your own: as part of a broad-ranging PSYOPS campaign, the US military establishment has purposefully built up Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a larger than life "terror mastermind" in the hope of a) discrediting and/or fragmenting the insurgency in Iraq amongst Iraqis and b) boosting support for the Iraq war within the US, by implicitly linking it to the "war on terror."