I was up late Wednesday night and rolled out of bed late this morning.  When I walked into the main room some of Knight Ridders’ staff were watching CNN’s coverage of Zarqawi’s death in a U.S. airstrike.  At first I assumed they were reporting a rumor, but very quickly it starting sounding real.

The KR guys glanced at me and seemed to expect some kind of comment.

I said, “Alhamdulillah,” which roughly means, “Thank God.”  I try to bust out my pathetic Arabic when the occasion calls for it.

One of the KR staff skeptically asked, “Do you think this will end it?”

“No,” I said, “I just don’t like that guy.”

“Why,” someone else asked.  “Do you owe him money?”

Zarqawi was already a high-profile terrorist when I got to Iraq in January of 2004.  He’d killed the United Nations envoy and 21 other people in a bombing of the organization’s Baghdad headquarters, sending the UN and much of the international community running from the country.

He’d blown up a massive bomb in front of the Shi’ite shrine in Najaf, killing Ayatollah Mohammad Bakir al Hakim and about 100 worshippers.  When I visited Najaf in the summer of 2004 bomb damage still scarred the shrine’s façade.  The image of the martyred Hakim’s is plastered all over Shi’ite Iraq.

I wasn’t sure whether to try and cover the story or not; as a freelancer I generally assume that any story that every single reporter in Iraq is covering is a story that no one will want to pay me to write.  But I couldn’t resist hitching a ride to the Green Zone for the follow-up press conference by the Army’s public affairs chief.

It seemed like a normal afternoon (to the extent that I can tell anymore, since I spend so much time embedded).  There wasn’t much traffic, but as we approached the Green Zone there seemed to be a lot more Iraqi government security guys out on the street.  We got waved through a few checkpoints (not real checkpoints, just guys with Kalashnikovs standing in the street eye-balling the cars as they rolled slowly by).

At CPIC the assembled press corps was loitering in the hallway and the break room while the military got itself set up.  The air conditioning was iffy, the crowd was big, and for the first time in a while I felt serious humidity coming on.

The briefing was by the numbers.  The general said they’d been able to track Zarqawi down in part because someone in his own network had betrayed him.  It’s impossible to say if that’s true, because it’s probably better to say it publicly if it’s a lie.  Getting the remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership second-guessing each other as they try to regroup is a good idea.

They showed a grainy black and white video taken by one of the planes involved in the airstrike.  The house the F-16’s hit was a small two-story home on a narrow road flanked by palm groves.  The home silently exploded, sending dust and debris flying outward, as the first bomb hit.  The general said they decided to hit the house again; moments later a second silent explosion rocked the area.

Iraqis are conspiracy-minded, and the military dispelled any doubt (or, I guess, any reasonable doubt) by hanging a couple pictures of Zarqawi’s lifeless face on an easel.  I remember wondering, back when all you saw of Zarqawi were three wildly different mug shots or his hooded figure sawing off people’s heads, what the guy really looked like.  On the easel he looked pretty much as he did in his recent video—bearded and just a little bit heavy.  There were a couple minor scrapes on his cheek and forehead.

In a few subtle ways he looked like some of the men I saw at one of Baghdad’s police stations, as a cop flipped through a computer slide show of the bodies he and his men have discovered in the past few months.  There are ways in which the faces of the dead resemble each other.

Zarqawi bears as much responsibility as any one man for those bodies, for the suffering that has engulfed Iraq.  His strategy was to incite sectarian strife; his tactic was the slaughter of Shiite civilians.  He brought obscene violence wherever he went.

It makes sense that he spent his final weeks in Baquba, which had recently seen drivers murdered at makeshift checkpoints and severed heads turning up in fruit boxes.  The wisdom or morality of many, many, people involved in this conflict can be called into question.  But Zarqawi was the face of mass-murder in Iraq, the advocate of civil war.  My time here has made me very wary of making easy moral judgments, but I’m still very comfortable calling Zarqawi an evil man.  I’m happy to see him dead.

Right after I got back from my first trip to Iraq, in early May 2004, the Nicholas Berg video was released.  With the possible exception of what happened to the contractors in Fallujah, I don’t think anything has had a greater psychological impact on westerners in Iraq than those images.  I remember sitting in a room at the Hamra and scoffing when a photographer friend of mine said that American intelligence officers said insurgents were looking for westerners to kidnap and decapitate.

Then it happened to Berg, and soon happened to others.  It had been dangerous for western civilians for a while, but ending up a helpless victim, murdered on television, was a new horror to contemplate.  It played a big role in cutting Americans and other westerners off from ordinary Iraqis.  Meanwhile ordinary Iraqis faced even greater dangers. 

Zarqawi’s credentials as a killer and thug aren’t in dispute.  But it’s definitely possible that his importance to the insurgency as a whole was over-stated.  It was in everybody’s interest to put him front-and-center.  The U.S. prefers that the face of the insurgency be non-Iraqi, home-grown insurgents need a monster to serve as the unthinkable alternative to caving in to Sunni nationalist demands, and there was obviously no downside for Zarqawi (with his demented dreams of leading a revived caliphate) as he became the only name-brand insurgent in the country.  Maybe his demise will put a serious dent in the insurgency; maybe whoever replaces him will be even worse.

But I’m sticking with my initial reaction from this morning, which is that the overall strategic importance of Zarqawi’s death is, today, beside the point.  I’m just happy he got what he deserved.