I was still awake last night (early this morning) when the news of Zarqawi's death was announced. I was switching around among different news stations and it was interesting to watch the developing coverage. One mentioned that the announcement was greeted with "polite" applause from the media. The odd thing was that I had already seen the Iraq Prime Minister make the announcement on another station and the (Iraqi) reporters seemed pretty enthusiastic to me. (Later reports that I've seen changed this to "loud" applause.)
It didn't take long for the reports to begin adding speculation to the facts - this will cause an increase in violence by non-al-Qaida groups, it isn't that big of a victory because he wasn't as strong a force as he used to be since the Iraqi terrorists resented foreign terrorists coming into their country - just so we don't start thinking that this might actually be good news.
Pundits warn us that this isn't as great a victory as it might appear while the Iraqi police and citizens are dancing in the streets. We know that Zarqawi's death doesn't mean an end to the violence but as far as reactions to this news goes, I'm with the people who were targets of Zarqawi's attacks.
Posted by marybeth at June 8, 2006 01:57 PM Iraq