I don’t pay super close attention to the American media. However, about a month ago, I started hearing all about this Zarqawi fella. He’s alleged to be a senior al Qaida associate of Osama bin Laden.
What’s interesting to me is that I seem to be hearing way more about Zarqawi than bin Laden. As of today:
- There are 10,400 news hits for Zarqawi (note the fantastic objectivity of the New York Post)
- There are 9,330 news hits for Osama bin Laden.
If I’m handling PR for the American military, and we figure we’re far likelier to catch Zarqawi than bin Laden, I’m going to start talking the former up: “Forget about that dude we can’t find–this is the guy who deserves our immediate attention.” It feels to me like they’re setting up for a win.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Zarqawi is a strange figure, and has been coming through in reports for over a year now. At this point from a media observer’s perspective he seems to be as much myth as man. There are never new photos of him, and he seems to have his hand in every pie in Iraq, and the military repeatedly comes ‘this close’ to catching him, but like the villian of a weekly tv show he always seems to slip away. The reason you see so many hits for him is in no small part due to the painstaking analysis of reports about Zarqawi that pro-war bloggers post relentlessly.