Maybe Zarqawi just hates Fallujah

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is, or was, a Jordanian who supposedly had links to al Qaeda. He has been rumored to be behind various bombings and other attacks in Iraq, and to have personally beheaded Nick Berg. He has also been rumored to have been dead for quite some time. I tend to believe the dead rumors, or if not dead, that Zarqawi is at most a minor figure who was chosen as our latest bogey man. We always need one of those--Saddam, Noriega, Milosevic, Osama, al Sadr--to justify our bombing the crap out of cities or countries that we feel like bombing the crap out of.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Zarqawi is very much alive, and has a clear agenda. All the evidence would suggest that his agenda is the destruction of Fallujah. If you were a fugitive militant intent on destroying a city, would you rely on your own meager devices--car bombs and the like--to do the job, when the baddest, most deadly military in the history of the galaxy is just waiting at your disposal? Instigate a few attacks, or just claim credit for them, to get yourself on the most-wanted list. Then show your face in one or two places in the city you want destroyed, which in this case is Fallujah. Hire informants to tell Americans or their puppets about some more "safe houses," and sit back and watch the bombs drop.

There were (and probably still are) stories from Afghanistan about various tribes or clans using the U.S. military to settle old scores by accusing their enemies of being "al Qaeda or Taliban." There's no reason to believe that the same thing isn't happening in Iraq.