Requiem for a Nightmare - by James G. Poulos
The world's highest-profile mass killer has finally gotten what he had coming. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi rose (which is to say sunk) to a level of squalid wickedness not even mastered by Osama bin Laden, whose stately visage belied a desire to keep his hands out of the muck of murder. For Zarqawi this was not a problem. He killed among the people. The killing he orchestrated, as much as a devil can orchestrate pandemonium, brought the dilemma of the entire war in Iraq into the flesh. The mere presence of a man like Zarqawi heartened the defeatism of those whose crisis in moral confidence cannot tolerate a situation of misery and injustice touched off by American military action.
WAR IS A TRAUMA in any age. Zarqawi made of that trauma his true religion, and of its harrowing a remorseless science. He did so at a time when a new legitimacy of order -- in Iraq, in Islam, in the Middle East, in foreign relations, and in international law -- is desperately needed and not yet established. He worked actively to destroy all legitimacies of order, by deploying weapons of de-civilization not used so frankly for thousands of years. He exacerbated the standing dilemma of an America deserted by the United Nations, but left to enforce the integrity of an international law which too few truly wanted enforced. And he brought unbearable dilemmas to Iraq's unfortunates, hopeless souls not knowing whether it was worse to spare themselves or survive on complicity in the deaths of Americans and their own unknowing countrymen. For all these reasons, which shall never cease to be true, all of us -- historians, Americans, Iraqis, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists -- can share a moment of solemn resolve, joined in the certitude that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, if he has not received it already, shall face his final judgment.
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