Everyone loves a villain

Most good thriller movies, and all bad ones, have an arch-villain whose unspeakable evil renders sympathy impossible, and whose elimination neatly resolves the plot.

Exactly what becomes of the Jame's Bond villain's numerous submachinegun-toting minions after the movie is never quite clear. We know only that they are incapable of acting without direction. Presumably, they retire and sit around in the nursing home, reminiscing about the good old days when they had an arch-villan to tell them which evil acts to commit, or when their agent actually thought they could get real acting jobs.

We do not inhabit a B-grade thriller. We just like to pretend we do, and this is encouraged by the media and by politicians. So Khadaffi, taking over from the Ayatollah Khomenei, was dubbed by Reagan "the mad dog of the middle east," and Saddam took his place in turn, while Osama bin Laden is the public face of Al Qaeda. The Americans have a peculiar tendency, which washes over into Canada, to personalize conflict, to personify their enemies as a single villain to be removed.

It cuts both ways, too. Some opponents of the Iraq war need to be reminded that George W. Bush is not the master villain. Backing up Bush, at one time or another, you would find folks like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Pearle and Rice. Bush is not the mastermind of anything.

We are speaking, after all, of a man who was nearly killed by a rogue pretzel.

What would happen if Bush were killed, say by a potato chip or by some other terrorist agent? Cheney would take over, until he dropped dead of a heart attack, whereupon the whole chain of succession would be followed until it got down to the White House paperboy. And all this would affect the day-to-day operations of the United States government not one tiny bit. Soldiers would continue soldiering and bureaucrats bureaucratting, because the commander-in-chief has nothing to do with day-to-day operations.

Even the replacement of Bush by more legitimate means, such as voting, would change little. The great machinery of the state continues to grind, all on its own, no matter who gets voted in to change the oil. Kerry would not have pulled the US out of Iraq. Crap comes in many flavours, but it is all crap.

We dogs are intimate with crap, and we know these things.

Pardon me, then, if I fail to become excited one way or the other about the alleged death and resurrection of one Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the latest terrorist mastermind to be set up as the villain du jour.

("Time to break out the good booze!" declares KerPlonka, which explains much; he must normally blog on the cheap stuff.)

Granted, if Zarqawi and seven other top leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq had blown themselves into little bits yesterday, it would have been a blow to the Iraqi insurgency. Money, planning, and coordination would have been disrupted. But the day-to-day job of putting IEDs out to kill and maim people would not have faltered one bit, and then a new leader would have popped up -- just as al-Zarqawi did.

Armies do not collapse when generals are killed. This applies more so to insurgents, who operate far more autonomously than do infantry companies.

So the news that al-Zarqawi is dead, or alive, or dead again, or alive again, matters very little.

Here in the real world, the Fortress of Evil does not blow up when the hero turns Dr. Nasty's own doomsday beam against him.