Death to Zarqawi

Today hasn't been a good day for all of those claiming quagmire in Iraq.

As The Colossus says, Zed's dead, baby...Zed's dead.

Here's a little haiku from the bottom of my heart:

Here lies Zarqawi
His body stiff, toe-tagged
May he rot in hell

I'd personally like to see his decapitated body hanging from the Fallujah Bridge, however I'll be content with just knowing that he'll never take another breath again.

On a more analytical note, for those of you wondering just how you finally wrap a high value target up, here's a link to my post in December entitled En Prise

The reduction in leadership naturally leads to an organization being run by people who are inexperienced, and thus less effective. However, there is something more that our counter-terrorism efforts can hope to gain out this development: penetration. Al-Qaeda over the years successfully managed to keep their core sealed from the outside, so in combination with CIA's overeliance on technology versus HUMINT (Human Intelligence) over the last 20 years, the CIA has been unable to get much first hand knowledge of the world's deadliest enemy.

This is all changing. As Hutchison points out, Al-Qaeda's operational leaders are being decimated. Bin-Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and even Iraq's Abu Musab Zarqawi, are going to have to replace these leaders with men who haven't had the time to go through the screening process. Expanding on Hutchison's observation, in order to ensure confidence that their new lieutenants (as they are so fond of calling them) are not spies, al-Qaeda's senior leadership needs to come out of hiding, exposing themselves to capture or a Predator drone. If they chose to avoid this, and remain in their caves, then the CIA has a golden opportunity to infiltrate their ranks as new, unknown and inexperienced loyalists are left to do the rooting out.

If this was a chess match, this method of attacking al-Qaeda would put al-Qaeda's leadership en prise. En prise is when you attack a piece from multiple directions, finally putting your opponent in a position where if he moves his piece in any direction, he will be captured. If this piece is a King or a Queen, you bring in another attacking piece to finish off the job. This speculative combination of our military and our intellegence agencies could put the United States in position to bring in the last fatal blow to al-Qaeda's King.

Zarqawi was nailed as he moved closer to Bagdad to orchestrate the terror offensive that he ordered. Unfortunately for him, his network has been thoroughly dismantled, and a great deal of the operational commanders that he could rely on a few years ago, are either dead or captured. He was far away from his previous strongholds, and with the Iraqi Army increasing its capabilities, his options were dwindling with each passing day.

This hit on Zarqawi is a fairly important indicator of Al-Qaeda's status in Iraq, in that he was running the show so close the Bagdad. A man with a solid leadership team doesn't need to stick his neck out so close to the fight. While the quagmire crew kept claiming that we were losing, our forces, along with the Iraqi's, have been inching their way towards this moment for a long time.

Years from now, we'll probably get a full de-classified account of how they actually got him, but I'm going to speculate that we will see someone, or a group of people, who penetrated inside Zarqawi's inner circle and gave him up.

Go check out Security Watchtower for C.S. Scott's excellent round-up and more details.