A Good Terrorist

The other morning the radio awoke me at the usual un-Godly hour with the news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by an American air-strike. This was certainly good news to start the day, any time a terrorist gets sent to someplace considerably hotter than Iraq is cause for celebration. The news hit after the press-time of the free (and worth every penny!) morning paper I get in the morning, so I had to wait until the next morning to read about it.

News is a funny thing. Actual news, meaning the who, what, when and how of an event, has a shelf-life of about twenty-four hours. This means that if news breaks in the morning by the time a morning newspaper runs it it's already getting stale. Newspapers don't stop running news stories just because the news is stale though, oh no. Doing so would lead people to believe that the newspaper exists to inform its readers rather than to expose them to advertizing (I go into much greater detail on this in one of my very early entries entitled The Media).

So what's a newspaper editor to do? Everybody knows that al-Zarqawi found himself fatally near 1,000 pounds of smart-bombs when they detonated, that's not news anymore. What we now get is commentary, and todays throwaway is running with the story that al-Z's death doesn't mean anything, that the insurgency will continue, and that the father of Nick Berg (who was decapitated by al-Zarqawi) is sad that another person had to die and blames George Bush for his son's death.

Of course when all else fails, you can always do man-in-the-street interviews to see if people think the insurgency will end now. One of the randomly-selected experts on insurgency said that if he were a terrorist the death of his leader would inspire him to fight harder. I have some news for him, it doesn't matter how hard a terrorist fights, to be successful he has to fight smart. Any idiot with a room-temperature IQ can wrap himself in exposives and blow himself up, but getting the explosives, recruiting, planning, and deciding where to send him as part of a co-ordinated attack requires a smart and talented leader. By all accounts al-Zarqawi was such a leader.

We'll see. Maybe someone will step in and fill al-Zarqawi's shoes. Maybe the insurgency will crumble without his leadership. I don't know and any prediction I may make would be strictly a guess, just like the predictions I read in the newspaper.

Predictions are funny things, if you happen to be right everyone thinks you're a genius. If you're wrong everybody will forget that you made the prediction. I predicted twenty years ago that music CDs wouldn't take hold, that they'd be replaced any day now by Digital Audio Tape and that anyone who had a CD player would end up with the equivalent of an eight-track player. Had I been right people who heard me say it would be marvelling today at my insight. As it is I'll bet no one remembers.

So will the insurgency continue? I don't know, it might, it might not. I do know that if al-Zaqwari were still alive it most assuredly WOULD continue. I know we have enough bombs to take out his successor if there is one.

Let me head off the comments about Osama Bin Laden right now. Yes, I'll read his obituary with great satisfaction too, but in terms of the War on Terror he's a non-issue. He's in hiding someplace (assuming he's not already dead), he's not running anything. He hasn't even released a video tape in years, just a couple audio tapes. We'll catch up to him someday, but al-Zaqwari was actually leading terrorists in attacks against Americans, getting him was a priority.