YOU CAN KILL THE ARSONIST BUT THE FIRE BURNS ON
"Zarqawi may be gone, but the conflagration he set alight continues to burn," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorist expert at the RAND Corporation in Washington. "That is the reality. He has already set in motion powerful forces that won't necessarily stop just because he's dead."
--"Hatred He Bred Is Sure to Survive Terrorist's Death," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, June 9, 2006
About, about in reel and rout
The death fires danced at night.
--"The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When I first heard of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the number-one Most Wanted and bloodiest terrorist in Iraq, I was going to sit down and dash off my thoughts, but I decided to wait until this morning so that I could read the papers, watch the news, and gather some more definitive information on what this means for the United States--particularly our fighting men and women--and for Iraq.
But when I was finished printing up the articles pertaining to this charismatic thug and the reverberations his life and death have caused throughout the globe, there were almost 30 of them, and that was just from a limited amount of papers. The New York Times, alone, had something like a dozen, divided into categories: The Target, The Raid, Sectarianism, The Victims, and op-ed commentaries. Each one was dense and heavily researched, supplemented, as were those of the Washington Post, with reporting from special correspondents in Iraq.
What emerged from a full day's reading was a complicated picture so complex that I knew that, in order to cover the subject fully, I would have to divide it into parts:
Part I. The Arsonist: Zarqawi
Part II. Knockdown: the Fire Fighters
Part III. Scorched Earth: the Victims
Part IV. Smoldering Embers: Aftermath
What I want to do is try and separate myth--both theirs and ours--from fact. The bottom line is that it's not as good as the politicians and military spokespersons would have you think, but it's not as bad as their detractors say, either.
And nobody will really know, for sure, for many more months.
--"Hatred He Bred Is Sure to Survive Terrorist's Death," Dexter Filkins, New York Times, June 9, 2006
About, about in reel and rout
The death fires danced at night.
--"The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner", Samuel Taylor Coleridge
When I first heard of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the number-one Most Wanted and bloodiest terrorist in Iraq, I was going to sit down and dash off my thoughts, but I decided to wait until this morning so that I could read the papers, watch the news, and gather some more definitive information on what this means for the United States--particularly our fighting men and women--and for Iraq.
But when I was finished printing up the articles pertaining to this charismatic thug and the reverberations his life and death have caused throughout the globe, there were almost 30 of them, and that was just from a limited amount of papers. The New York Times, alone, had something like a dozen, divided into categories: The Target, The Raid, Sectarianism, The Victims, and op-ed commentaries. Each one was dense and heavily researched, supplemented, as were those of the Washington Post, with reporting from special correspondents in Iraq.
What emerged from a full day's reading was a complicated picture so complex that I knew that, in order to cover the subject fully, I would have to divide it into parts:
Part I. The Arsonist: Zarqawi
Part II. Knockdown: the Fire Fighters
Part III. Scorched Earth: the Victims
Part IV. Smoldering Embers: Aftermath
What I want to do is try and separate myth--both theirs and ours--from fact. The bottom line is that it's not as good as the politicians and military spokespersons would have you think, but it's not as bad as their detractors say, either.
And nobody will really know, for sure, for many more months.
posted by Deanie Mills at 7:36 AM
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