Zarqawi killed - WANTED: new mascot for War on Terror

How will the US ever find a replacement on such short notice?

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida-linked militant who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and hostage beheadings in Iraq, has been killed north of Baghdad, Iraq's prime minister said Thursday.

Just in time to distract from the ongoing carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Haditha scandal, and the Council of Europe's report on CIA renditions. Even traders managed to captalize on his demise as an excuse to drive down prices in crude oil.

Thankful for respite from the daily barrage of attacks against his administration and eager to gloat over the death of an arch enemy, Bush delivered a prepared statement at 7:30am to revel in Zarqawi's timely demise.

But, now that he's officially dead, who will the US find to replace the all-purpose Zarqawi?

[E]vidence suggests that Zarqawi was part of a Pentagon disinformation campaign launched in 2003. which was initially intended to justify the US led invasion of Iraq. This central role of Zarqawi as an instrument of war propaganda was recently confirmed by leaked military documents revealed by the Washington Post.

The Pentagon had set up a "Zarqawi program." Military documents confirm that the role of Zarqawi had been deliberately "magnified" with a view to galvanizing public support for the US-UK led "war on terrorism":

"The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work..." (WP. 10 April 2006)

An internal document produced by U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, states that "the Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date." (WP, op cit). (For further details see Pentagon PSYOP: "Terror Mastermind" Abu Musab Al Zarqawi is "Incompetent" - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2006-05-15)

To be continued . . .