Missing the Point

Zarqawi's Hideout: Bombed, Bulldozed
Structure Hit by F-16 Is Demolished In Search for Clues About Insurgency

By Nelson Hernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 11, 2006; Page A21

HIBHIB, Iraq, June 10 -- The two bombs that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, left a strange tomb nestled in the quiet farmland about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

A handful of U.S. soldiers escorted a small group of journalists on the media's first visit to the site on Saturday, walking east across a bridge of palm trunks over a canal of still, green water into the grove of tall Mesopotamian palms where Zarqawi's three-year game of cat-and-mouse with U.S. forces came to an end.

The sight that greeted the visitors was a 600-square-yard wasteland of broken concrete, twisted steel and splintered tree trunks, bound by a wall of cinder blocks that remained largely intact as well as crude irrigation ditches. Scattered in the wreckage were the mundane artifacts of lives that came to an end at 6:15 p.m. Wednesday with the explosion of two 500-pound, laser-guided bombs dropped from an F-16 fighter jet.

The bombs left what one American command sergeant major described as "a big hole." What the bombs did not destroy Wednesday night, U.S. bulldozers did the morning after. In their search for weapons, booby traps and information that would lead them to other insurgents, U.S. troops demolished anything left of the structure, pushing a substantial amount of rubble into what soldiers said had been a 40-foot-deep crater. The blood and the bodies were gone.

The Sabbath Gasbags are having their wargasm over the death of Zarqawi, which tells you how little they understand about war in general and insurgencies in specific. War isn't an episode of Survivor or American Idol and insurgencies are not dependent at all on personalities or individuals. That is what a guerrilla war is, independent. This changes absolutely nothing, although the cable channels would like it to be the big, end of the season wrap. It's hurricane season and they'd like to move on to their next big product because they can only concentrate on one thing at a time.