In a story just posted on
MSNBC, U.S. authorities are contradicting rumors that sprouted yesterday that Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the Al Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, was killed in a raid on a Mosul safe house. The official position is now that they `just missed him.'
Despite the fact that the U.S. has eagerly trumpeted the killing of seemingly dozens of Zarqawi's `lieutenants', they do not seem eager to embrace the suggestion that Zarqawi himself might be dead.
I wonder if this reluctance stems from the fact that the official U.S. version of the Iraqi insurgency depends heavily on the presence of so-called foreign fighters, even though most published analyses of the composition of the insurgency indicates that the number of foreign fighters amounts to only a few thousand at best.
If they did not have Zarqawi laying claim to the most bloody acts of terrorism in Iraq over the last few years, it would be a lot harder for the U.S. to sell this version, and downplay the importance of Baathist and native jihadi participation in the insurgency.
Perhaps if there were no Zarqawi, the U.S. government would have had to invent him (or someone like him). Certainly, they had ample opportunity to take out his camp in the Kurdish region of Iraq before the war, and chose not to.