Zarqawi Whacked.

One more of the hydra's heads has been lopped off with the death of this fragrant piece of human offal. It is only a matter of time before another one or two emerge to replace him.

Asymmetric warfare grinds along, however. Despite the fact that al-Qaeda is essentially unable to come up with an equivalent coup, like perhaps hunting down and killing a senior U.S. military officer, Islamists have long allowed for the persistence of an organizational structure despite such setbacks. The doctrine of "Nizam, la tanzim" ("System, not organization") as formulated by Spanish-Syrian terror strategist Abu Musab al'Suri, has surfaced alive and well in Toronto. This would-be Maozedong of Islamist asymmetric warfare postulates a radically decentralized method of waging warfare by spontaneously arising, widespread, isolated, self-motivated and self-contained cells.

The water (or swamp) in which these twisted fish are expected to swim can only be drained with difficulty in liberal democracies such as ours. At the very least, alternatives to Wahhabist education have to be provided by Muslim communities who have failed to present a more moderate and traditional version of Islam to their young people (see Bernard Lewis' comments linked in post below). Also, it would be nice if self-hating and suicidal left-wing fools would stop mouthing statements that sound like they were lifted verbatim from Osama bin Laden's fatwas. And, as another vain wish, can the press avoid being duped into disseminating Islamist propaganda (assuming they're not happily promoting it)?

A statement from Abu Abdel-Rahman al-Iraqi puts a positive spin on events: "The death of our leaders is life for us." La ch'aim.