Who was Musab al-Zarqawi? Evil mastermind or bumbling fool? Intelligent or doltish? Enterprising terrorist or al Queda puppet? As the bloated, bloody face of America’s enemy number one in Iraq dominated the front pages of newspapers today, reporters on the scene could not even agree on the answer to a simple question: Who the hell was this guy?
That he killed many, or at least set off forces that inspired the killing of many, is not in question. But almost everything else is. Here’s the second paragraph of Jeffrey Gettleman’s profile today in the New York Times: “His life story was riddled with contradictions: he was close to Saddam Hussein, he was fighting Mr. Hussein; he had two legs, he had one; he was Palestinian, he was Jordanian; he was right-handed, he was left-handed; he was a cunning leader, he was an illiterate brute.”
Indeed, Gettleman goes so far as to state that “several people who knew Mr. Zarqawi well, including former cellmates, voiced doubts about his ability to be an insurgent leader, or the leader of anything.” (Emphasis ours.)
Yet in the same newspaper, Gettleman’s colleague Dexter Filkins credits Zarqawi with igniting what has become the main event in Iraq, a conflagration of insurgency and bloody sectarian war that “is now unfolding so quickly that it appears to have a life of its own, with hundreds of burned and bullet-riddled bodies turning up each week in the city morgues” — and one that has left the country “at the brink of all-out civil war.”
The importance of this question, of answering the riddle of who was this, anyway, lies not so much in trying to understand the life of one dead thug but rather in helping us figure out what happens next, with Zarqawi now consigned to history. If he was a binding force, a powerful, charismatic and savage leader, plus a master tactician to boot, then his loss might be a great blow to the insurgency. But what if he was a nobody, a dimwitted bully who stumbled into his role as a symbol of the opposition forces that U.S. troops and Iraqi citizens alike find so confounding? What if the administration — with the media in tow — built him up over the months to be much more significant than he actually was? It would mean that his death carries considerably less significance than we are being led to believe.
There are plenty of people who subscribe to this view of his passing. One of the most telling quotes from an excellent recent profile of Zarqawi in The Atlantic by Mary Anne Weaver, obviously written before his death. It comes from a Jordanian Intelligence Officer who says this:
“Zarqawi had the ambition to become what he has, but whatever happens, even if he becomes the most popular figure in Iraq, he can never go against the symbolism that bin Laden represents. If Zarqawi is captured or killed tomorrow, the Iraqi insurgency will go on. There is no such thing as ‘Zarqawism.’ What Zarqawi is will die with him.”
Is he right? So much depends on understanding Zarqawi’s role that its ambiguousness now throws certain crucial questions “completely up in the air,” writes Ellen Knickmeyer, Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post. Questions raised: “[W]hether other foreign fighters will show themselves equally eager to slaughter civilians, whether the Sunni insurgency will split into fragments or broaden its base and, above all, whether the Shiite-Sunni killing that Zarqawi’s attacks helped unleash can be reined in.”
In the end, this confusion about who Zarqawi was and the extent of his powers is just one more casualty of the treacherous conditions under which journalists labor in Iraq. That the man billed by the White House as the initiator of thousands of deaths, hundreds of suicide bombings and dozens of beheadings remains such an enigma — much more than Osama bin Laden, for sure — is indicative of just how difficult it has been to gather information on an insurgency that flames up, sputters down and then flames up anew.
Today, most newspapers stood by, with no real confirmation or rebuttal to the administration’s claims that this was a significant kill. “Maybe,” seemed the predominant response, with the silent “Maybe not” hanging in the air like an unspoken hedge.
There are good reasons for this response. As our own Paul McLeary and many others have documented from the scene, it has been impossible even for journalists who venture out at life’s risk to find out how the insurgency truly functions. And on a day like today, we feel how disadvantaged that we are by not having had eyewitness or earwitness access to the insurgency in action.
It’s one more example of how Iraq eludes our gaze, even when so very much depends upon us understanding what is going on there.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.