Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald reacts to the killing of Zarqawi:
The death of Zarqawi is cheering, and worrying.
Cheering, for all the obvious reasons. And there would be still more cheering, for all the obvious reasons, if Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri were killed. Puts a bounce in one’s step, makes the morning better.
Worrying, for all the obvious reasons and some unobvious ones. Gives Infidels a false sense that there is an end to this matter; allows some to conclude that “we’re getting the bad guys” and we are “winning.” (Listen to radio shows).
Worrying, because Al-Zarqawi, like Bin Laden, like all of them, is part of a store that is endlessly replenishable, as long as Islamic jihad remains Islamic jihad, and Believers take it seriously.
Worrying, because the idea that this is a “war on terror” and we “are killing the terrorists” will be reinforced, as it naturally would be when this or that terrorist, or eight of them, are killed.
Worrying, because it will be given enormous, exaggerated attention, and the other war, the main war, the war that involves the most effective instruments of Jihad — money, Da’wa, demographic conquest — will still not be addressed. The “war on terror” will be seen as being won, and that will take away from what was dawning on some, to wit: The phrase “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is a false remark, and seen to be even more false as those 17 natives of Canada are rounded up, with their Qur’ans, and their burka-ed relatives smack in the middle of Toronto, and their storefront mosques, and their three tons of nitrogen fertilizer, and their plans for dealing with the Canadian Parliament and the Canadian Prime Minister.
Worrying, because even if the killing of Zarqawi and others diminishes the outside Sunnis, this will delay the day of American recognition that the main part of the revolt is not from the “terrorists” outside Iraq (though it is pleasant to think so) but from Sunnis who do not wish to see power transferred from themselves to the Shi’a. Yet that transfer became inevitable when Saddam Hussein was overthrown, along with his entire ruling class and the Sunni-officered military disbanded. Far from being cause for American alarm, American aims, the aims of all Infidels, are best achieved by letting those sectarian and ethnic (Kurd and Arab) hostilities simmer, not be somehow papered over. Ideally — if we stop watching that pot — they may boil over, distracting the principals entirely from the Jihad against the Infidel. As co-religionists of both sides join in, and effects are felt from Yemen and Al-Hasa province of Saudi Arabia all the way to Lebanon, and perhaps even to Muslims in the Western world, their previous anti-Infidel unity will now be suddenly sundered.
Wonderful news. Hurray! Misleading news. Watch out! Be careful not to be carried away.
Of course, some have long since been carried away, away from all reason. I heard Michael Berg on NPR. He said something about people like “Zarqawi, Bush” and repeated that phrase “Zarqawi, Bush” at least once or twice more. Clearly a special hatred was reserved for Bush. Berg, a “peace activist” who told his interviewer that he, Berg, had asked the FBI (when they came to find out more about what his son might have been wearing) “not to kill Zarqawi,” explained that what he had really wished to do was to sit down with Zarqawi, and talk to him, man to man, and reason with him, and see his point of view, and have him see his, Michael Berg’s, point of view. That is how conflicts are resolved, you see, in Michael Berg’s world, which is not that far, I’m afraid, from Jimmy Carter’s world, or the world of clownish Roger Fisher of “Getting to Yes” fame. No, they are all types. And these types, whether they are holier-than-thou in the Carter and Berg manner, or in it because they are simply dizzy promoter and self-promoters of “process” — Getting to Yes, you see, is never about the possibility of one side wishing to destroy the other, always about compromisable matters, where everyone wins and no one loses (in other words, Fantasyland) — they are, as Michael Berg is, clear dangers to the rest of us.
Imagine a world in which someone like Michael Berg ran things. Imagine what peril he would put us in. Berg is crazy. Not crazed with grief as he ought to be — in fact, when he began his interview he discussed the physical pain he had been in. Not moral pain, nothing to do with anguish over his son, not at all — just some pain he had been having.
Let’s tell the unpleasant truth that before we were all too diplomatic to tell: Michael Berg’s attitude toward the world is crazy. He is terminally and permanently naive. And even though his son did not agree with him about policy toward Iraq, the sheer craziness of that son, Nicholas Berg, flying off by himself as a civilian to Iraq, to find ways to help the Iraqis, with no connection to the government, was the result of hopeless naivete about the world — and that hopeless naivete came directly from his nearly insane father. That responsibility is something Michael Berg will never understand. But we who do understand must prevent these insane people (and there are others, perhaps not quite so obvious, all over the place) from taking chances with our lives, and our children, by not seeing the world and evil as it is.
They should not be given that chance. And those who are hailing the death of Zarqawi today should not be given the chance to, in their overconfidence, weaken us still further against the Jihad threat.