Zarqawi was a tool

This is from the Independent. It echoes other reporting about the US's use of Zarqawi as a propaganda piece against the US population, but it was the example at hand this morning.

This is not to say Zarqawi wasn't a bad guy, he was, but his promotion as a terror supervillian served everyone's interests, the US, Al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, the Iraqi government, and Zarqawi himself, whether it reflected reality or not.

No sooner was Saddam captured than the US spokesmen began to mention Zarqawi's name in every sentence. "If the weather is bad they will blame it on Zarqawi," an Iraqi journalist once said to me. It emerged earlier this year that the US emphasis on Zarqawi as the prime leader of the Iraqi resistance was part of a carefully calculated propaganda programme. A dubious letter from Zarqawi was conveniently discovered. One internal briefing document quoted by The Washington Post records Brigadier General Kimmitt, the chief US military spokesman at the time, as saying: "The Zarqawi psy-op programme is the most successful information campaign to date." The US campaign was largely geared towards the American public and above all the American voter. It was geared to proving that the invasion of Iraq was a reasonable response to the 9/11 attacks. This meant it was necessary to show al-Qa'ida was strong in Iraq and play down the fact that this had only happened after the invasion.