Abu Wabu

First they were silent as lambs, then they copped to the usual paranoid babblings or just called it insignificant because, duhh, so where's bin Laden, already? The left is sad because Abu Musab al Zarqawi got a "five-hundred-pound curb-stomping", as one wag put it. Now that he's dead he's a martyr who will inspire others to join the cause, so goes the apologists' argument.

Well.

For one thing, it's intellectually dishonest to attempt, as many do on the left, to separate that thought from its implied but obvious conclusion, being that Zarqawi therefore should not have been killed, which I suppose is consistent with the antiwar idiots' central canard that the U.S. should not have gone into Iraq in the first place and, in fact, should not even be opposing Islamofascism because innocent children might get hurt or killed.

They don't talk about the innocent children of Beslan, raped and executed in front of their classmates and teachers or just blown up, or the innocent children of Ain Laila whom Zarqawi's men pulled off schoolbuses and executed.

That would be indecorous.

Christopher Hitchens writes in response to this soulless drivel:

It hasn't taken long for the rain to start falling on this parade. Nick Berg's father, a MoveOn type now running for Congress on the Green Party ticket, has already said that he blames President George Bush for the video-beheading of his own son (but of course) and mourned the passing of Zarqawi as he would the death of any man (but of course, again). The latest Atlantic has a brilliantly timed cover story by Mary Anne Weaver, which tends to the view that Zarqawi was essentially an American creation, but seems to undermine its own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that, Zarqawi wasn't all that important.

Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document of which Weaver (on no evidence) doubts the authenticity, has been the key innovation of the insurgency: applying lethal pressure to the most vulnerable aspect of Iraqi society. And it has had the intended effect, by undermining Grand Ayatollah Sistani and helping empower Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.

So. Memo to idiots: Zarqawi dead good. Zarqawi alive bad. Repeat until seared, seared into your memories.

Zarqawi's death without the option of surrender is the ultimate statement to his followers:

Zarqawi is dead; we have killed your god, and now we're coming to kill you. Right now.

Screw that. I'm outta here.

That's the plan.