It's time to give devil — Zarqawi — his due

WASHINGTON -- The dust having settled -- 500-pound bombs canraise, and even manufacture, a lot of dust -- it is time to give thedevil his due. To understand the diabolical genius of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that pornographer of violence, begin with this:

He was a primitive who understood the wired world and used anemblem of modernity, the Internet, to luxuriate in gore. But althoughhe may have had an almost erotic enjoyment of the gore, it was alsoin the service of an audacious plan. And he executed it with suchbrutal efficiency that he became, arguably, the most effectiveterrorist in history.

That appellation still suits Osama bin Laden because, as theanimating mind behind 9/11, he pulled the world's superpower into awar that provided the occasion for Zarqawi's rise to worldprominence. Still, Zarqawi set out to prove that a central premise ofthe U.S. intervention in Iraq was -- is -- false. Or perhaps it ismore precise to say that he decided to make it false. But if he couldfalsify it, it never was quite true.

The premise was that Iraqis are primarily nationalists and onlysecondarily sectarians. Zarqawi's wager was that explosives, usedwith sufficient cruelty, could blow that premise to smithereens. Hemay have succeeded. If so, the February bombing of the Askariyashrine, although the blast itself killed nobody, may have been themost deadly explosion since the planes hit the Twin Towers, becauseit provoked sectarian violence that may now constitute a socialfirestorm.

A firestorm occurs when a fire becomes so hot that rising heatpulls in cold air, an influx of oxygen that feeds the fire. Afirestorm is self-perpetuating because, in effect, the fire becomesits own fuel. If Iraq's sectarian violence has reached that point,Zarqawi had made himself somewhat superfluous.

It is sometimes charged that journalism, which considers thephrase "good news" an oxymoron ("We do not report the planes thatland safely"), is missing the good news from Iraq. But so pervasiveis the violence, and hence so dangerous has Iraq become forjournalists, that The Wall Street Journal, hardly a hostile observerof the U.S. undertaking in Iraq, thinks the bad news might beunderreported.

Even the good news often has a dark cast to it. At last -- 25weeks after the voting -- the Iraqi parliament has produced a fullgovernment. But its first task is to conquer itself: It must end thesectarian violence by people wearing government uniforms, in themilitary and police.

It is frequently said that protracted terrorism has an atomizingeffect on a polity, reducing civil society to so much human dust. InIraq it may be having the opposite effect: Rather than disaggregatingIraqis, the force of the explosions -- especially the one on Feb. 22that demolished the dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra -- seemsto have blown them together, ruinously, into furious Sunni and Shiiteblocs.

Just in May, just in Baghdad, sectarian violence killed 1,400 --and that figure does not include victims of car bombs. It speaksdepressing volumes about the U.S. predicament that the new idea is to. . . conquer Baghdad. On April 20, the Iraq war became as long asthe Korean War. This Friday the war will be as long -- 1,185 days --as U.S. involvement in World War II when U.S. troops captured theLudendorff railway bridge at Remagen and became the first foreigntroops to cross the Rhine since Napoleon's in 1805. And Baghdadbeyond the Green Zone is a war zone, which accounts for the flightfrom the country of many educated and mobile Iraqis.

But it did not take three years of Zarqawi and terrorism andsectarian violence to turn Iraqis into difficult raw material forself-government. For that, give another devil his due: SaddamHussein's truly atomizing tyranny and terror did that. On June 20,2003, just 72 days after the fall of Baghdad, The Washington Postreported this vignette from Fallujah:

"Military engineers recently cleared garbage from a field inFallujah, resurfaced it with dirt and put up goal posts to create aninstant soccer field. A day later, the goal posts were stolen and allthe dirt had been scraped from the field. Garbage began to pile upagain."

An Army captain asked, "What kind of people loot dirt?" There aremany answers to that question. Here is one: A kind of people who arehard to help.

George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.