THE SKIES OVER IRAQ have seen many false dawns in the past few years. Each faint glimmer of Mesopotamian morning — the fall of Baghdad, the killing of Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam, successive elections and referendums — has quickly given way again to the everlasting night of war. The hope engendered by each breakthrough has been mocked so cruelly and so completely in subsequent months that we have become steadily and increasingly desensitised to any good news.
And yet there are some events so singular and so innately benign that they can still pierce the cocoon of cynicism from which all but the most optimistic observers view events in Iraq.The elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the totemic figurehead of the bloody insurgency, is surely one such.
Some of the more hysterical opponents of the Iraq war liked to suggest that al-Zarqawi did not really exist, that he was some Middle Eastern Mephistopheles fabricated by the clever minds at the Pentagon to give a necessary face and target to an insurgency that was in reality vast, leaderless and unconquerable. Doubtless the conspiracy theorists who saw the CIA’s hand in the September 11 attacks will have no difficulty explaining away the pictures of al-Zarqawi yesterday, but the rest of us should at least take the Iraqis’ word for it.
To them, he was all too real. Indeed his personal jihad almost certainly resulted in the deaths of more Iraqis than all the Americans killed by al-Qaeda’s other operatives. Anyone who read of the unrestrained joy of the reporters at the Baghdad press conference where his demise was announced yesterday, or saw images of the Iraqi soldiers celebrating their finest hour so far, could not doubt the status that the man had acquired in the Shia Iraqi mind.
His death does not disarm the insurgency, of course. And who knows what effect it has on their morale and organisation. They are, in the most obvious sense, a bottom-up as much as a top-down bunch and he was only in the loosest sense a leader. In recent months he seems to have become more and more isolated, as the net closed in — and yet, it’s true, the ferocity and frequency of the attacks by his comrades has not abated.
So what is so important about this one man’s removal from the battlefield? For a country and a world inured to the spectacle of failure and shame in Iraq, this simple triumph has a number of positive consequences.
The most obvious immediate benefit is the improved morale and standing of the fledgeling Iraqi Government. The serendipitous timing of this week’s operation — on the very day that Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, affixed the final pieces to his Cabinet puzzle with new Defence and Interior ministers — should bestow some much needed legitimacy.
It should also inject a little elan into the spirit of the Iraqi armed forces, themselves undermined by allegations of corruption and brutality and constantly reminded of their continuing dependence on US forces to attain the most basic level of effectiveness.
This week, though, they played no small part in destroying the al-Zarqawi cancer and they can be rightly proud of their discipline in the operation. The second reason for muted celebration is the effect this should have on the American military. Battered in the past few weeks by allegations of murder and cruelty, US servicemen needed not only to demonstrate to the world concrete progress in their thankless effort, but also to remind sceptics who is the real enemy in this war.
The challenges in Iraq for these young men and women are overwhelming. In the past three years more than half a million American troops have been rotated through the country. They have been fighting a suicidal counter-insurgency in a battle for which they are ill-equipped and ill-trained. While barbarity cannot ever be condoned, it beggars belief to think that in these conditions, with these numbers, outrages will never occur.
You could put half a million Buddhist monks into the mantrap that is Anbar province and I guarantee you’d get an atrocity or two. With most of the painstaking nationbuilding and counter-terrorism efforts of these Americans virtually unnoticed by a critical world, a signal victory such as the al-Zarqawi killing is critical.
However, the biggest benefit, I suspect, will be in the effect of this small but significant victory on the attitude of the American people. Success in this war will in the end be determined not by the insurgency’s ultimate lethality but by the limits of the patience of the public back home. The task that the US has set itself in Iraq, made harder by the ineptitude of much of its execution so far, requires a popular political willingness to see it through. That US troops, even in the hellish conditions of Iraq, can overcome the military constraints on them is not in the end in doubt. But if America’s patience is wearing thin, a vicious circle takes hold.
The enemies in Iraq hear the calls for the troops to come home and assume that the US does not have the stomach for this kind of fight. That emboldens the insurgents, leads to more casualties and increases the likelihood of overreaction and recklessness by US servicemen. That in turn, relayed quickly back stateside, further saps popular support for the war.
Americans need to believe that real progress is being made in Iraq, that, even if it might still take years, Americans and their allies are steadily creating something that will make the loss and the sacrifice worthwhile. The removal of al-Zarqawi is real evidence of that progress.
It probably isn’t the turning point most of us would like it to be — just as those other successes were not turning points. It should not and presumably will not produce another of those brief waves of euphoria, soon to be replaced by renewed despair. It should evince, however, not our weary cynicism but a satisfied, uncomplacent realisation that in this long war on its enemies, civilisation just scored another consequential victory.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
