This is not a criticism of the judgment of Time magazine in its selection of "you" as the person of the year. Far be it from me to rain on your 15 seconds. And I, for one, welcome the unerring judgment of my newish corporate overlords. But if one person deserves the title of the person who most influenced world events in 2006, my vote goes to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He was killed on June 7, but he had already achieved the goal of his lifetime as a thug-for-God. The most critical event of 2006 was, in my view, the February bombing of the Samarra mosque. It was the spark that transformed Iraq from a fledgling democracy with a Sunni-Qaeda-Baathist insurgency into a vortex for untrammeled sectarian civil war. This was Zarqawi’s goal, and it seems to me in retrospect that he succeeded beyond measure. It may well be that the onset of a regional war between Shia and Sunni will not, in the end, advance the cause so beloved of Zarqawi. But for a monster like Zarqawi, what mattered was his enactment of what he saw as God’s will in his lifetime. Zarqawi’s God was as hostile to Shiites as to infidels, perhaps even more hostile to Shiites. And he died a martyr for such a God. His final success makes it all the more depressing that the Bush administration had a clear shot at killing him in 2003 and balked. The awful combination of Islamist evil and Republican incompetence struck again. Sadly, I see few signs of either part of that equation shifting.
The Dish 