Enjoy Your 72 Raisins

This morning, with Lesley away on business, I was able to turn on the television while getting dressed. I flipped to the news to hear cheering. When I looked at the television, I saw a press conference in Iraq. The cheering was from the press corps itself for the news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed yesterday. The American media, retaining its supposed objectivity, sat in silence when President Bush briefed them a few hours later.

Regardless of whether you think going to war in Iraq was the right thing or how you assess the progress, or lack thereof, since it started, Zarqawi's death is a tremendous development. He was the number two man in al Qaeda, whose laundry list of terrorist activities is infamous. Those who oppose the war, whether from principle or simply due to hatred of everything Bush and/or Republican, are already pooh-poohing this Zarqawi's death as inconsequential. After all, they argue, there are still plenty of terrorists looking to kill us. That is true, but it overlooks a few major factors.

First, the members of any entity, whether a terrorist cell, private company or democracy, all suffer a certain amount of discouragement and lack of morale when the leader they admire and follow is killed. Second, it is already well known that his death was the result of good intelligence. In other words, someone with inside information assisted in the killing. You have to imagine that al Qaeda members will be constantly looking over their shoulders with a great deal of distraction. Third, imagine Israel taking the same approach to killing terrorist leaders that the naysayers are professing this morning.

In a somewhat related event, the USS Cole is redeploying to the Middle East today. For those who don't remember, certain wrongdoers attacked the Cole in 2000 while it was sitting in the Yemen port of Aden and killed seventeen American sailors. Every one of the top ten stories on Google News on the Cole label the perpetrators as generic "terrorists." Not one of the stories mentions that the terrorists were members of al Qaeda. People seem to forget that al Qaeda's attacks on American interests , including the Cole, and two American embassies, predated 9/11. This is an institutional failing of a basic tenet of journalism, to report the "five W's" of a story. One such W is Who, as in who the terrorists were. They are al Qaeda, whose membership roster is thankfully shorter by at least one very evil name this morning.