Another "mission accomplished"

For added emphasis to what I said last night, here's Robert Fisk on the Zarqawi killing:

Yesterday, with an inevitability born of the utterly false promise that the bloodbath in Iraq is yielding dividends, we were supposed to believe that the death of Zarqawi was a famous victory. The American press dusted off their favourite phrase: "terrorist mastermind". No one, I suspect, will be able to claim the $25m on his head - unless he was betrayed by his own hooded gunmen - but the American military, stained by the blood of Haditha, received a ritual pat on the back from the Commander-in-Chief. They had got their man, the instigator of civil war, the flame of sectarian hatred, the head chopper who supposedly murdered Nicholas Berg. Maybe he was all these things. Or maybe not. But it will bring the war no nearer to its end, not because of the inevitable Islamist rhetoric about the "thousand Zarqawis" who will take his place, but because individuals no longer control - if they ever did - the inferno of Iraq. Bin Laden's death would not damage al-Qa'ida now that he - like a nuclear scientist who has built an atom bomb - has created it. Zarqawi's demise - and only al-Qa'ida's killers would have listened to him, not the ex-Iraqi army officers who run the real Iraqi insurgency - will not make an iota of difference to the slaughter in Mesopotamia.

From my vantage point, this is the proper way to view the killing. It means very little, outside of its propaganda function.

Go back to your files on the Uday/Qusay killings, as Alex Cockburn does here. I bet you'll see the exact same tropes back then that are now plastered across the media.

Also, as an FYI, Fisk was interviewed on Democracy Now! on this same topic with Loretta Napoleoni, who has written extensively on Zarqawi, including that FP article I mentioned yesterday. They both have some interesting stuff to say.