Zarqawi Dead, Fight Goes On

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed today in a precision F-16 strike. The coup was, as it must be, executed on the tip of an informant.

So the man whose strategy was to foment religious war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is dead. Someone else from Lee Harris’s “eternal gang of ruthless men” must step forward to continue the fight against civilization, that is, to destroy the realm of trust and exchange and performance of promises in the city. For that is the power agenda of the gang of ruthless men who harass the city from their redoubts and their hideaways in the hinterland.

It is, of course, deeply symbolic that today the fight between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men should be taking place in the birthplace of the city, the Land Between the Rivers, where the city first emerged out of the surplus of food and wealth afforded by the abundance of agriculture based on domesticated wild grasses.

It tells us that the fight will never be won, for the fight in Iraq is symbolic of the basic divide in the soul of man, between cooperation and competition. For centuries, the threat to civilized, settled life in the great riverine plains came from the fierce nomads of the Asian steppe who would sweep out of the mountains onto the farmers of the two rivers of China, the Gangetic plain, or the two rivers of Mesopotamia.

A century ago a new threat emerged. It came not from the Asian steppe but from communist, anarchist, western nihilists, the bomb-throwers of Europe, whipped into bloodthirsty frenzy by Romantic scribblers. Now it is the educated, disaffected youth of Islam, whipped into a bloodthirsty frenzy by angry old men in the mosques. A century hence it will be another gang of ruthless men.

So the fight goes on.