Zarqawi post-mortem

At this point in the day, there's not much to add about the death of Jordanian terroist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for a lot of attacks and killings in Iraq following the invasion. Understandably, there is a lot of celebrating today and a lot of pondering about the impact this will have on the war in Iraq.

Andrew Sullivan has a good post on the role Zarqawi played in terms of his role in Iraq and in the minds of people around the world. He quotes an interesting piece from the Atlantic which profiles Zarqawi including the first meeting between Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden (it seems they didn't much care for one another).

Back to the subject of where this takes us. The reason why terrorists like Zarqawi have come into Iraq is because of the post-war instability there. In May, insurgent attacks in Iraq were the highest they've been in the past two years. The country is unstable, because there exists an increasingly violent sectarian schism between the Shiite controlled government, and the Sunni minority which used to hold power under Saddam Hussein.

The Sunnis in Iraq have long aligned themselves with Arab nationalism, and they tend to view the new government as being subservient to American interests. That is at the root of the problem in Iraq, and the death of a foreign thug like Zarqawi is unlikely to have much of an effect on resolving it.