One need not have any sympathy for the leader of "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to think that there is something unseemly about the triumphalism in which the killing of this man has been universally greeted. In war (if one believes that war is ever justified, which the majority of Americans and Britons do), our side's job is to kill the enemy. It has been traditional (if tasteless) for our governments to brag about how many enemy soldiers have been killed each day or each month. One assumes that by talking of aggregate numbers of enemy soldiers, governments usually try to avoid engaging the public's imagination, try to distance themselves from the fact that they are in the business of killing people.
Here instead they seem to be deliberately appealing to our collective bloodthirstiness. We are told "we dropped two 500-pound bombs on his safe house." We hear glee in the voice of a marine seargant explaining that the photographs of "the result of the operation" were too gory to show on TV before being cleaned up, with just enough allusions to oozing body fluids and bone fragments to tittilate us. We are told that Zarqawi's corpse was identified by his face, his fingerprints, and his "known scars." We are treated to descriptions of "detail teams" whose job it is to empty the dead man's pockets (to collect intelligence and pocket lint, one presumes) and to confiscate his cell-phone.
That Zarqawi ordered brutal killings or at least propagandized in favor of such acts is not an argument for killing him (necessarily); much less is it an argument for rejoicing in his death. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are not the only people to be very pleased by Zarqawi's death: Apparently, the mood today on the websites which promoted Zarqawi's activities is also one of joy. According to the believers in violent Jihad, Zarqawi has now accomplished the highest act a Muslim can aspire to, and he is enjoying hie due rewards in Paradise. Meanwhile, his martyrdom may well inspire many others to acts of terrorism. From a policy point of view, we should at least wonder if by killing Zarqawi and then publicly flaunting our act of revenge, we have not done more harm than good. From a moral point of view, we have gone from the (already questionable) position that to defend democracy and freedom we must unfortunately kill people to a new low in which nations engage in revenge killings for sheer joy even when such acts may engender exactly the terrorism they cliam to be fighting.