Zarqawi and the serendipity of fame

Hitler, famously, was a seemingly unremarkable man. It is easy to believe that in another world, he would have worked in a pawn shop. His peculiar talents had a bit of an "autistic-savant" nature -- extraordinary abilties embedded in an average mind.

Zarqawi sounds like that. There's no doubt he had an odd set of talents. Mary Ann Weaver (a western woman wandering in the bad spots of the world) was preparing a bio of Zarqawi, which The Atlantic has rushed to press with his death:

The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

... I learned that the first of al-Zarqawi's two wives had lived in the house until recently. She was his cousin, whom he had married when he was twenty-two. They had four children, two boys and two girls. But not long before my visit, al-Zarqawi had sent an unknown man to drive them across the border to be with him in Iraq. His second wife, a Jordanian-Palestinian whom he had married in Afghanistan, and with whom he has a son, was reported to be with him in Iraq as well. Al-Zarqawi's mother, Omm Sayel, whom he adored, and who had traveled to Peshawar with him when he joined the jihad, died of leukemia in 2004; although he was the most wanted man in Jordan at the time of her death, al-Zarqawi returned to Zarqa in disguise to attend her funeral....

...Everyone I spoke with readily acknowledged that as a teenager al-Zarqawi had been a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp in Zarqa’s underworld. He was disruptive, constantly involved in brawls. When he was fifteen (according to his police record, about which I had been briefed in Amman), he participated in a robbery of a relative’s home, during which the relative was killed. Two years later, a year shy of graduation, he had dropped out of school. Then, in 1989, at the age of twenty-three, he traveled to Afghanistan..

...Al-Zarqawi came across to bin Laden as aggressively ambitious, abrasive, and overbearing. His hatred of Shiites also seemed to bin Laden to be potentially divisive—which, of course, it was. (Bin Laden’s mother, to whom he remains close, is a Shiite, from the Alawites of Syria.)...

When pursuing fanatical killers, be sure to stake out the funerals of their mothers. They seem to be uniquely devoted to their mothers, who love them despite some glaring defects. Unconditional love has its disadvantages.

Zarqawi was not a particularly interesting person, but I am quite interested in what creates successful thugs like him. War is a part of the equation, as it was for Hitler. In this sense War is a bit like some awful fungus, that makes spores of veterans that spawn more War. A troubled youth, a capacity for fanatacism, a blindly supportive mother ...

And, yes, the mothers. bin Laden's mother is Shiite. Zarqawi wanted to kill all the Shiites. And we learn this only now? Sometimes I think the greatest conspiracies are not about what is said, but rather about what is not said.

As my wife would say, the mother is always to blame ...