The world’s introduction to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi came on February 5, 2003, in the sixty-first minute of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council making the case for war against Iraq. It began with a declarative sentence that, like many others in the seventy-five-minute presentation, was technically true but widely off the mark.
„Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,“ Powell began, just before Zarqawi’s bearded image appeared on a large screen behind the council’s circular table.
[CIA analyst] Nada Bakos, watching on a TV monitor at work, heard the line and cringed. Yes, Zarqawi lived in the remote mountains of north-eastern Iraq—in an area off limits to Iraq’s military. To suggest that Saddam Hussein was providing sanctuary to him was contrary to everything that Bakos, the Zarqawi expert, knew to be true. It was like claiming that America’s twenty-second president, Grover Cleveland, had „harbored“ Geronimo, the famed Apache chieftain of the frontier West who attacked settlers and Blue Coats from his base along the U.S.-Mexican border.
…
Samih Battikhi, then chief of the [Jordanian] Mukhabarat, erupted in a rage when he saw Zarqawi’s photo behind Powell at the UN Security Council. „This is bullshit!“ Battikhi shouted.
—Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, (New York: Doubleday, 2015), 95, 97.
I was in Mannheim when Powell made this address. I remember a coworker in the months after wearing a t-shirt which humorously added Poland to the Iraq, Iran, North Korea „Axis of Evil“.
Reread „Howl“ this morning. Ruminating over Donald Trump’s joke about a Mexican airplane about to attack New Hampshire. Perhaps poetry is uniquely suited to voice a response to society’s madness.
