Dead-Alive-Dead-Alive-Dea... Oops Wounded... Nope, Dead er... Maybe Not

I see Stranger at Blah3 is as mystified at the 400 lives and deaths of al Zarqawi as I am:

This guy has died more times than the Knicks' playoff hopes.

The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq - died on Friday and his body is in Fallujah's cemetary, an Iraqi Sunni sheikh, Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir, has told the Saudi on-line newspaper Al-Medina. He claims that gunfights which broke out in Fallujah in the last few days involved militants trying to protect the insurgency leader's tomb from a group of American soldiers patrolling the area.

During a telephone conversation from the city of Fallujah with the Saudi newspaper, Nasir said al-Zarqawi was taken there after being injured in the city of Ramadi around three weeks ago, and may have been treated by two doctors who had worked with his aides in Baghdad. He said the two doctors had stopped a serious haemorrhage in al-Zarqawi's intestines, but that after his condition worsened last week, the militant died on Friday.

No exaggeration. I've literally counted 11 reports of Zarqawi's death in a year. He's the new bin Laden - whom we don't mention anymore because darned people noticed we hadn't caught The Tall One yet - and always gets miraculously resurrected when there's something new we want to blame on him.

Bin Laden was the bogeyman from 2000-2003 when Zarqawi took over. Too bad nothing the president tells us turns out to be accurate because I'd like to believe Zarqawi is the sole perpetrator of everything wrong in Iraq (a single bad guy is easier to get than several hundred or thousands). But ... well, that's open to question.