Zarqawi Could Run, But Couldn’t Hide

Authored by Jay Ambrose

One of the most important things about the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is that the dropping of the bombs that shattered his lungs was made possible by intelligence operations that disclosed what Zarqawi and friends most wanted to be kept secret, his whereabouts.

That fact likely means U.S. and Iraqi military intelligence _ an absolutely crucial weapon in the fight against the terrorists _ is getting better and that the improved capacities will help in the killing or capture of still more terrorist leaders and their followers. The cause of a safe, sane, stable Iraq could thereby be furthered.

The vital role of intelligence in thwarting terrorist attacks was emphatically brought home to me during a 10-day visit to Israel as a fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Lecture sessions and field trips underlined the obvious truth that traditional means of combat are largely useless against the sort of warfare summed up by suicide bombers in civilian dress whose chief targets are innocent men, women and children.

Stealth is the foremost enabler of these terrorists who hate Western civilization and want to eliminate it as a matter of religious and ideological conviction, but are unopposed to using Western technology to accomplish their goal. They are sophisticated enough to make shrapnel-packed bombs that can be hidden under shirts and sufficiently motivated to rip their own bodies to pieces in pushing the button. But if you can discover ahead of time what their plans are, you can defeat their deadly intentions.

The Israelis have gotten as good at this as anyone in the world because they have so often experienced the pain of terrorist success. The horror they have faced was dramatically impressed on the group I was with when some witnessed a memorial conducted the night of June 1 at the Dolphinarium just a block or so down the road from the Tel Aviv hotel in which we were staying. Five years earlier on that date, a suicide bomber killed 21 Israelis and wounded 120 others outside the disco that mostly attracts teens.

Such tragedies, repeated again and again, have led the Israelis to become extraordinarily able in stopping the bombers before they reach their targets. Their technological prowess was on exhibit at a navy facility that keeps a high-tech eye on the Mediterranean to prevent the smuggling of such things as weapons and at the West Bank security fence that sends electrical signals when breached, quickly bringing soldiers to the scene. A lecturer on interrogation methods told us how human cleverness can be a mighty tool, as well.

He said that, in his mind, it was always better to capture a terrorist than to kill one because you can then gather information to capture still more terrorists and avoid still more deaths. The crucial thing, he said, is to have interrogators who thoroughly understand the terrorist's culture and language and can wear him down psychologically, making him feel alone, frightened, betrayed and dependent on the person asking the questions.

Would it have been better to have captured Zarqawi, as inhuman a monster as he was, than to have killed him? Maybe, but it seems clear that any attempt at capturing this major al Qaeda leader would have been far less sure of success than jets dropping precision bombs, an example of our own technological prowess. The killing of this mastermind of murder is itself a significant accomplishment that apparently came about because we were able to track the movements of his spiritual adviser with the aid of Iraqis. A bonus was the finding of scads of data about the terrorists at the scene.

As experts have been saying, Zarqawi's death does not mean no new leaders will emerge or that terrorists in Iraq will be suddenly less adamant in their vileness, but it does demonstrate that the United States and the Iraqi government are improving their mastery of a tactical skill without which hopes for victory are badly diminished. The better we get as we learn this new style of warfare, the more our adversaries will learn that while they can run, they cannot hide.

Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.