The short, ugly life of a monster

Your Sunday must read is Requiem for a Nightmare, by James G. Poulos.

But the dilemma of the war — that in order to free Iraq, the coalition created a realm of murder and despair — came about courtesy of a man whose very idea of strategy involved exploiting the weakness and good faith of the liberal project of freedom. Stretched between monsters of Islam like Zarqawi and the Muslim angels who have striven for peace, brotherhood, and order in Iraq, a whole range of varyingly aggrieved citizens found their complicity suddenly on the market. Enlistment in al Qaeda in Iraq brought a perverse stability that joblessness could not. The planting of a roadside bomb brought ready cash. Silence itself — won by threats if not by payola — was a commodity of war. And true enough the fabric of Iraqi society itself had no shortage of threads for Zarqawi to pull. The denominations of Sunni and Shi’a became through his blood-colored glasses factions of mutual destruction; the hordes of hardened criminals turned out on the streets in one of Saddam’s last treasons against his own people became a field of opportunity.

This above is a good read no matter who you blame for the messiness that is modern Iraq.

If life is a river, perspective is the current.

Another crisis of legitimacy for which he can be held responsible, and perhaps the worst, was this profane mockery of the laws of armed conflict. Citizens were to be made targets — now, even to the exclusion of actual soldiers. Combatants were to be relieved of the quaint, millennia-old obligation of wearing uniforms. And killing was to be conducted primarily by suicide operations and by the robotic proxy of the IED — a clever new acronym for what was once the bane of people for peace everywhere: land mines.

Zarqawi sowed what he reaped. He worked hard to earn his end.

Similar Posts:

• Standing up for human dignity
• 70,000 gather for violent Pakistan cartoons protest
• Can Muslims and non-Muslims coexist peacefully?
• Another BBC Interview and a few thoughts to accompany the audio
• Juan Cole on Zarqawi