John Robb
This is excellent news, but it needs to be put into context (this is a brief for decision makers/analysts/thinkers and not motivation for the rank and file, so don't expect fluff -- as is often said, only the paranoid survive and every good commander I know understands this). Zarqawi is best categorized as violence capitalist, very similar to bin Laden, that supported and incubated guerrilla entrepreneurs of the new open source warfare model. In this role he was instigator of violence and not the leader of a vast hierarchical insurgency.

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Col. Lang
Zarqawi was a bad and deluded man. He is dead. Good. Is it important? Not very much.

We Americans and our Israeli friends are obsessed with our own conception of what the mentality of people different from us ought to be. We can not deal with the reality of completely different and adversarial world views and mind sets. We account for systematic hostility toward adoption of our ways by attributing this "backwardness" to "bogey men" who from sheer evilness and perversity lead their fellows astray. Having done this, we then build them up in our minds and media as "supermen" whose elimination will end resistance to our "program" of "modernity."

Zarqawi was largely the creation of the collective American mind. In fact, he was the leader of less than 10% of the Iraqi insurgents. His people like to blow themselves up on "their way home." Will his pious madmen stop doing that now? We will see. Present thinking is that AQ in Iraq is now overwhelmingly Iraqi in its personnel.

The other 90% of the people in the Iraq insurgent groups are whatever they have always been.