WASHINGTON: While the achievement of both long-sought objectives may bolster, at least temporarily, his rock-bottom approval ratings, the Bush administration and its allies in Baghdad still face an uphill fight in retaining public confidence in his Iraq policy and ending the sectarian conflict that threatens to plunge Iraq into civil war.

“Zarqawi’s death will help in lessening sectarian tensions,” said Joost Hiltermann, an Amman-based Iraq expert with the International Crisis Group (ICG).

“But the sectarian dynamic has been unleashed, and his legacy exists now very strongly in Iraq,” Hiltermann added in a telephone interview.

In a brief White House Rose Garden appearance early on Thursday, Bush himself eschewed triumphalism, stressing that Zarqawi’s demise, while ‘a severe blow to Al Qaeda’ and a ‘victory in the global war on terror’, would not necessarily affect the underlying dynamic.

“We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him,” he said of the founder of ‘Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’. “We can expect the sectarian violence to continue.

“We have tough days ahead of us in Iraq that will require the continued patience of the American people,” he noted.

Nonetheless, Thursday’s developments out of Baghdad, including the approval by Iraq’s parliament of ministers of security, defence and national security to serve under Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, effectively broke a string of bad news that has further reduced waning patience here for maintaining US troops in Iraq.

The new government’s performance will be crucial, observers say, particularly in reaching out to the Sunni population, including them in the political process, and amending the constitution in ways that deal with their concerns.

The approval of the three new cabinet ministers could be an important start, especially in the wake of Maliki’s moves toward releasing large numbers of Sunni prisoners and cracking down on Shia militias in Basra and elsewhere.

While a Sunni, Lt.-Gen. Abdul Qadir Obeidi, will head the defence ministry, Jawad Bulani and Shirwan Waili, both members of Shia parties, receive the interior and national security portfolios, respectively. Sunnis have expressed particular concern about the interior ministry due to its control of the police whose ranks have been heavily infiltrated by Shia militias and death squads.

However, in the past several weeks, the news out of Iraq has been dominated by reports of brutal sectarian killings that have contributed to a sharp rise in the number of bodies — a growing number of them headless — processed by Baghdad’s central morgue compared to just a year ago and the investigation of an apparent massacre, and its attempted cover-up, by US Marines of two dozen civilians in the Sunni town of Haditha last November.

In addition, Maliki’s failure six months after last December’s parliamentary elections to gain consensus within his ‘government of national unity’ (GNU) on who should head the three crucial security ministries was clearly adding to the growing conviction in Congress, among Republicans and Democrats, that Iraq, on which the US government is spending almost two billion dollars a weak, had become a lost cause.

Against that backdrop, Thursday’s announcements were indeed very good for the administration and its supporters.

Zarqawi’s killing, noted Victor Davis Hanson, a neo-conservative historian at the Hoover Institution and a personal favourite of Vice-President Dick Cheney, “adds to the sense of momentum (created by the three appointments) ...in addition to tranquilising, if only for a few days, the media’s obsession with Haditha”.

Of the two events, Zarqawi’s death, which came with the bombing by US warplanes of a safe house near Baquba on Wednesday evening, drew by far the most attention here on Thursday.

The Jordan-born militant, who has been the subject of horrified fascination by the mass media here since his video-taped beheading two years ago of US hostage Nicholas Berg, appears to have had a complicated relationship with both Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and the more-general Sunni resistance in Iraq.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration asserted that Zarqawi had been sent to Baghdad by Al Qaeda. But most terrorism experts believe he was an independent operator, if not a rival, to Osama for operational leadership of a trans-national movement, even after he ‘submitted’ to the latter’s authority in late 2004 when he renamed his movement ‘Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’.

“It was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US... whose official spokesmen have all along overestimated his importance,” noted Juan Cole, head of the US Middle East Studies Association (MESA), on his widely read blog on Thursday.

By far the most brutal of the ‘foreign fighters’ who flocked to Iraq after the US invasion and a major sponsor of suicide bombings there, Zarqawi clearly had major differences with Al Qaeda, most notably over his hopes of sparking a sectarian war and the cruelty of his methods.

Precisely because of that cruelty, he became a convenient symbol of the resistance to US occupation for the Bush administration which, according to many analysts, appears to have purposefully exaggerated his role in hopes of more easily discrediting the resistance.

In fact, however, as noted on Thursday by Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, ‘the insurgency is far more complex and robust’.

In a privately circulated paper on Thursday, Cordesman called Zarqawi’s death a ‘major political and propaganda victory’, precisely because of his prominence, but that its impact is likely to be ‘limited’ on other elements of the resistance, parts of which have become openly hostile to Zarqawi.

Hiltermann agreed that Zarqawi was never as central to the Iraqi resistance as Washington frequently tried to suggest. “He was always a bit of an outsider,” he told IPS. “He came in with deep pockets and some graphic attacks, but he didn’t represent what the Iraqi insurgency wants.”

At the same time, Cordesman noted that, to the extent Zarqawi’s death weakens Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, it may actually strengthen the resistance by eliminating a source of divisiveness.

“There is at least some risk that his death will allow the surviving insurgency to broaden its base,” he noted.

There may also be a regional downside to Zarqawi’s death, as well, according to Nir Rosen, an expert on extremist movements at the New America Foundation here, who told IPS that, ‘within Iraq, it doesn’t matter, because the civil war will continue no matter what’.—Dawn/IPS News Service