TWO months ago, The Washington Post, citing “internal military documents and officers familiar with the programme”, reported: “The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq .... The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organisation responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

The Post quoted Colonel Derek Harvey, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq, as saying that Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents are “a very small part of the actual numbers ... Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will — made him more important than he really is, in some ways.”

The psychological operation served two purposes: apart from helping to reinforce in the United States the entirely spurious impression that the war against Iraq was in fact a logical and legitimate response to 9/11, it was also intended to spur distrust and conflict between the home-grown Iraqi resistance and volunteers from neighbouring Arab states. According to an internal briefing document cited by the Post, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt described “the Zarqawi psy-op programme” as “the most successful information campaign to date”.

“Disinformation campaign” would probably have been a more accurate description, but the point is that such assessments did not figure too heavily in western media coverage of Zarqawi’s demise a week ago, which generally elicited euphoria and was followed yet again by talk of a “turning point” in Iraq. Remember how the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were supposed to undermine the resistance? Or how the “Ba’athist insurgency” was expected to steadily diminish following the capture of Saddam Hussein? The so-called handover of sovereignty and each successive electoral exercises has also been touted as a turning point.

This time around, the predictions have relatively subdued, with all manner of spokespeople and pro-war commentators warning against expectations that the dreaded insurgency will begin to recede following its decapitation - in many cases because they are well aware that Zarqawi’s profile was out of all proportion to his influence. He wasn’t exactly insignificant by any means, but he was in all probability a lot less significant than other leading participants in the insurgency, whose names don’t make headlines because they are predominantly Iraqis, and it is not in America’s interest to publicly acknowledge the extent to which its occupation inspires disgust among those it ostensibly “liberated”.

Zarqawi was an all but unknown operator before Colin Powell mentioned him during his notorious show-and-tell presentation before the UN Security Council in the run-up to the assault against Iraq. Powell’s purpose was to insinuate links between Al Qaeda and the Saddam regime, so he conveniently neglected to mention the not unimportant fact that Zarqawi was at the time operating from a Kurdish Islamist camp based in territory that was off-limits to the government in Baghdad. He also did not bother to inform the august gathering that in the preceding year the Pentagon had thrice proposed wiping out the Al Ansar camp, but had failed to elicit a response from the Bush administration.

Zarqawi’s elimination at that point may have helped to save some lives, but it would not have served US interests. After all, he had been picked to serve an important purpose: to show the world that Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league. It wasn’t true, but veracity has never been much of an issue for Washington. In fact, it wasn’t true on two counts: not only did Zarqawi have nothing to do with Saddam, even his links with Osama bin Laden’s organisation were tenuous.

Before he came under the influence of the Tablighi Jamaat and, later, the Salafists, Zarqawi was a petty criminal in his Jordanian home town, Zarqa. In a profile in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mary Anne Weaver, who visited Zarqa a few months ago, writes: “Everyone I spoke with readily acknowledged that as a teenager Zarqawi had been a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp in Zarqa’s underworld.” By 1989, in his early twenties, the scourge of Zarqa was prepared to transfer his talents to a different realm. He headed via Peshawar to the US-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan, but by then the Soviets were already leaving.

He returned to Jordan four years later and began to dream of overthrowing the monarchy, but was arrested when a small cache of grenades was found in his possession. The six years he spent in jail were, by most accounts, a transformative experience. Amnestied in 1999 after King Abdullah succeeded his father, Zarqawi headed back to Afghanistan, which was by then under the Taliban, and had his first meeting with bin Laden. Evidently it was mutual contempt at first sight, although Al Qaeda did give him funds to set up a training camp near the Iranian border.

Throughout this period Zarqawi refused to pledge allegiance to bin Laden and apparently wasn’t particularly supportive of the Taliban. He was, thus, pretty much an independent operator when he slipped into Iran following the US attack on Afghanistan. According to some accounts he continued to receive crucial assistance from the Iranians even after it became clear that he was at least as interested in targeting Shias as he was in attacking the occupation armies. That’s an intriguing twist, but it’s by no means the only one, and sifting facts from propaganda is a fraught exercise in the existing circumstances.

What is beyond doubt is that the high profile he acquired as a consequence of the American promotional blitz facilitated his recruitment drives and improved his cachet among the local Sunni insurgents. The Jordanian government had been following Zarqawi’s activities with interest even before he reputedly sent bombers last November to three hotels in Amman, and a senior former Jordanian intelligence told The Atlantic Monthly’s Weaver, “The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now. Your government is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

There can equally be little doubt that Zarqawi was a particularly nasty piece of work even by extremist jihadi standards, and that he had no more interest in liberating Iraq than the Americans do. He is believed to have been behind some of the deadliest suicide bombings, including the attack on the UN offices in Baghdad in 2003. The extent to which he might be responsible for sectarian warfare is controversial — he may have had nothing to do with the dastardly attack on the Samarra shrine earlier this year — but his antipathy towards Shias was pathological. That and his penchant for beheading hostages (and displaying the results on the Internet) are alleged to have earned him a reprimand from Ayman Al Zawahiri — someone who doesn’t exactly believe in pussyfooting when it comes to “infidels”.

So, good riddance? Unquestionably, although one can only wonder whether a pair of 500lb bombs, delivered by F-16s, were really required for the purpose. Notwithstanding the obvious overkill, there has been some conjecture about exactly how Zarqawi met his end. Perhaps it doesn’t matter very much. It might be more worthwhile to speculate about how many kills Zarqawi would have notched up had it not been for American assistance, chiefly through the gratuitous invasion of Iraq, but also by exaggerating Zarqawi’s importance.

A decrease in violence is not a likely consequence of his elimination. His removal from the scene may, however, prove to be a boon for those elements of the resistance whose primary aim is to end the occupation rather than establish a base for Islamist expansion.

The latter aim seems like a mirror image of stated American intentions: establishing Iraq as a beachhead for promoting “democracy” and market capitalism in the Middle East. Likewise, George W. Bush and Zarqawi have been following parallel paths in seeking the Iraqisation of the conflict in that country. Parallel, but unequal. When Donald Rumsfeld described Zarqawi as the single largest threat to innocent lives in Iraq, the US army was clearly off his radar — just as when US and British leaders, without any evidence of irony, blame Iraq’s continuing troubles on “foreign fighters”. And when Bush announced in the White House Rose Garden last week that Zarqawi “will never murder again”, he forgot to add: But who’s going to stop me?

Zarqawi’s end came at a fortuitous moment for America: with the Haditha and Al Ishaqiya massacres receiving too much attention, it was desperate for a bit of balance. The targeted killing of a supposed terrorist linchpin provided the ideal diversion. But the sensation of success — which anyhow may not have made a lasting difference to Bush’s abysmal popularity ratings — proved fleeting. At the weekend, three of the 460 inmates at Guantanamo Bay apparently committed suicide.

Bush declared himself to be disturbed by the development, but not all American officials felt the same way. The commander of the illegal prison camp on occupied Cuban territory described the deaths as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us”, while to the State Department’s Colleen Graffy the suicides were “a good PR move”.

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com