Dig inside your memories to four or five years ago.
A man called al-Zarqawi was labelled the most dangerous insurgent in Iraq.
But the most famous footage of him was one where he and his comrades could barely shoot right. It’s one of the most bizzare contradictions ever seen - mainstream media showed a man clumsily fumbling with his rifle while anchors said that he was the most dangerous anti-Shi’ite terrorist in the region.
It’s virtually comic relief material.
So was most of his life - an aspiring jihadist who always came too late to the party to be martyred and only succeeded in getting himself arrested for what amounted to an absurdist non-plan. Yet, look at the international celebration when he was killed in an air strike, like they finally captured bin Laden or something.
Was he just an overblown story meant for mass media infotainment?
Or was he a scapegoat in a newly Shi’ite regime in Iraq with a Sunni-hating prime minister who felt the fellow was an annoyance who knew too much?
He had maybe 800 fighters in his organisation at most. That was a tiny part of insurgency but the occupation found it expedient to pretend he was its central personality since they were fanatics and mainly foreigners.
That’s the most amazing thing about mainstream media. There wasn’t just one single insurgency In Iraq. There were dozens of them. They tried to show that there was one single organized insurgency run by one man himself, and that killing him would kill the insurgency. That’s how badly oversimplified the whole situation in Iraq was. Had people ever shown the real state of the Iraqi insurgency back then, everybody back home would have been calling for withdrawal much in advance.
He didn’t even look like a serious militant. More like a pencil-pushing middle class desk-jobber who suddenly decided that he wanted to become a terrorist.
I bet Bush would perform with a weapon similarly, and he attacked Iraq and Afghanistan. Just because he can’t use a weapon well, does not mean he is not dangerous.