uber creep Reuel Marc Gerecht

uber creep Reuel Marc Gerecht in WeeklyStandard:

Zarqawi was Islamist trailer trash, a crude man whose love of violence was unvarnished, organic, perhaps perversely sexual.
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No single man did more to bring on the sectarian strife that is crippling Iraq. If the Shiites give up on the idea of Iraqi brotherhood--which grows ever more likely as half-hearted, undermanned American counterinsurgency strategies continue to fail--and grind the Sunni Arab community into dust, possibly provoking a vicious duel among Sunnis and Shiites across the region, Zarqawi can posthumously and proudly take credit.
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Zarqawi lasted as long as he did in Iraq because he had many sympathizers, probably even among those who were revolted by his gruesome tactics, often aimed at Shiite women and children. Zarqawi and his men were regularly, so it is said, obliged to move their headquarters and areas of operation because of Iraqi Sunni resistance to his methods and his overbearing ways. This may well be true. But Iraq's Sunni insurgents could have easily killed him and his foreign and Iraqi jihadist allies. Their numbers and means dwarfed his. They could have betrayed him long ago, to either his American or his Iraqi enemies. Sunni Arab Iraq is a region of villages, towns, and cities surrounded by great swaths of desert where city kids, like Zarqawi and his foreign holy warriors, cannot sustain themselves.
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Again, Zarqawi knew what he was doing: Reconciliation would be brutally difficult once the Shiites started doing to Sunnis what the Baathists and the Sunni insurgents and holy warriors had been doing to the Shiites for years.

The dimensions of Zarqawi's possible success are thus enormous--greater than what bin Laden accomplished on September 11. Zarqawi was the right man, with the right tactics, at the right moment.

fancy that. the guy who is widely presumed to have either died years ago, or at least was an acknowledged propaganda 'success' for the US military actually fulfilled Wurmser's wet dreams. odd.