TURNING POINT! TURNING POINT! Look, it's great that Zarqawi's dead, and it's certainly too bad the Bush administration chose not to kill him when they had the chance years ago, preferring to keep him alive since it was useful to bolstering the set of deceptions they used to launch a war in which tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed, but let's not kid ourselves here. Zarqawi's importance to the tactical situation in Iraq has always been overstated, and I doubt he has any significance at all to the strategic situation.
Many less-trivial turns of events that provoked outbursts of optimism -- Saddam's capture, the Iraqi elections -- have proven to be wildly overblown, and it would be honestly moronic to make a big deal out of this (naturally, they're making a big deal over at the Corner), which even the President seems to at least semi-recognize. We kill people associated with the insurgency in Iraq all the time, and have been doing so for years. The problem hasn't been an inability to accomplish this, it's been that killing insurgents doesn't accomplish anything. Killing a famous insurgent won't accomplish anything either.
--Matthew Yglesias
