Riverbend, the girl blogger on the Tigris, has a bitter (how would you not be bitter in Baghdad?) take on Zarqawi:
“To hell with Zarqawi (or Zayrkawi as Bush calls him). He was an American creation — he came along with them — they don’t need him anymore, apparently. His influence was greatly exaggerated but he was the justification for every single family they killed through military strikes and troops. It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now?”
Indeed, whom, or what, will we blame now? Killing Zarqawi was probably the only thing the administration could have done in Iraq that was guaranteed to generate positive spin–and the spin won’t last. Someone, somewhere, must be thinking about how to follow this act between now and November.