Huff Post: A Small Rabbit Out of a Big Hat

[Raster]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/a-small-rabbit-out-of-a-b_b_22551.html

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is apparently dead. The United States armed forces in Iraq have been bombing al-Zarqawi hideouts almost weekly since May 2004 when American businessman Nicholas Berg was shockingly beheaded on film, and someone claiming to be Zarqawi is said to have taken credit for it. With a $25 million reward on his head, there were surely a series of tragic mistakes based on opportunistic calls.

It's hard to say who was more interested in transforming the Jordanian Bedouin fighter, formerly Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh, into a legend -- Zarqawi himself or the American military. Now the Bush administration will reap the short-term reward for this dramatis persona... and the long-term grief. This is the latest symbolic rabbit that the administration has pulled out of the hat labeled "turning the corner." The press will tune in and turn on to this docudrama with monotonous predictability. The Bush administration will get a little bump in the polls as people divert their attention from its other political chicaneries and snatch at the last threads of hope that: the war is about terrorism, after all, and we are the good guys; the lives lost will not be in vain, and we will really "turn the corner" this time... the Iraqis and the world will see that we are a benign and beneficial nation.

But the attention-deficit disorder of the media and a society inebriated on the instant gratification of the consumer bacchanalia will watch this triumphalism fade, in days, not weeks, and the grating realities of our culture's meaningless drudgery and vacuous need to be entertained, the steadily mounting casualties, rising gas prices, the Haditha massacres... all of it, will return. When it does, the draught will be that much more bitter. The war will continue. The blood will spill. Even fewer people will retain the capacity to fall, yet again, for the old Turning-the-Corner parlor trick.

Moreover, the Pentagon and the White House will have lost the personification of evil that Zarqawi represented to justify the war. As Scott McClellan -- before his ticket was punched -- said hundreds of times, like one of those dolls with a string on its back, "Iraq is the front line in the global war on terror." Zarqawi was the ultimate "foreign fighter," one who willingly adopted the name "al Qaeda in Iraq," feeding the mistaken notion that there is actually an organization called al Qaeda, an official enemy that is global and eternal, and now manifest on this particular part of the oil patch.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/a-small-rabbit-out-of-a-b_b_22551.html

[CAG]

1. To goff: Please let us celebrate the death of a madman

who delighted in killing innocent men, women and children for a couple of days before trying to bend over backwards to try to convince americans that zarqawi was becoming less and less of a serious player. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't, the point is good riddance to a murderous bastard.

The rush (within hours) of some of the left bloggers to try to discredit ANY amount of significance of killing the jerk is interpreted readily by a lot of people as politically defensive posturing to minimize any temporary bump * may get in the polls. I'm sick that these attempts will simply backfire in our face as we get prepared for midterm elections.

"But the attention-deficit disorder of the media and a society inebriated on the instant gratification of the consumer bacchanalia will watch this triumphalism fade, in days, not weeks, and the grating realities of our culture's meaningless drudgery and vacuous need to be entertained, the steadily mounting casualties, rising gas prices, the Haditha massacres... all of it, will return. When it does, the draught will be that much more bitter. The war will continue. The blood will spill. Even fewer people will retain the capacity to fall, yet again, for the old Turning-the-Corner parlor trick."

You know what, I didn't hear anyone in the MSM, Faux, or other RW idiots even claim that this means clear sailing from here. In fact, from the MSM I heard exactly what he says here; ie, beware of any turning-the-corner message, because we've all heard it before...

[ixion]

2. there is nothing to celebrate in killing

of anyone. The fact that tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died using ammunition paid for by your tax dollars is no cause for celebration, and neither is this. It's another senseless death in a senseless and violent occupation that resulted from and illegal invasion. Every death of one of the US soldiers, every death of a journalist, every death of an innocent civilian, or even the deaths of thugs like this 'madman' are all the result of an illegal invasion orchestrated by our own government in our own name.

There is nothing to celebrate about that, IMO.