Obviously the demise at the hands of U.S. forces of arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is good news - but it is not a clear turning point. Zarqawi's viciousness, as evidenced by the videos of him beheading captives, was never in question, but his importance within the Iraqi insurgency is less obvious. Much of his notoriety came from our need to put a face on the Iraqi insurgency and his own skill at playing to the international Islamist gallery.

The impressive part of this operation was the intelligence work to find Zarqawi and his spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, apparently the Jordanians provided some crucial support. These developing intelligence capabilities and the close cooperation with Jordan's capable intelligence forces are good news for future counterinsurgency efforts.

Zarqawi's end is also a much-needed morale boost for U.S. forces, for the American people, and the Iraqis.

But the Iraqi insurgency is a complex super-network with numerous components that interact in complex and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Within that world Zarqawi was merely leader of one faction of foreign jihadis, which were by no means the most important factor of the insurgency. Even his pronounced antipathy towards the Shia was hardly new to Iraq where many Sunnis needed little push to turn against their Shia countrymen.

Zarqawi came to our attention because he was in contact with bin Laden and on the scene early in Iraq. He then parlayed this attention into international notoriety by issuing videos and statements, publishing online magazines and websites, and carrying out public ideological brawls with al-Qaeda number two Ayman Zawahiri. (Zarqawi vs. Zawahiri: The Battle to the Bottom of the Alphabet.)

Whether all of this cyberactivity was actually central to the emerging Iraqi insurgency is less clear. By focusing on Zarqawi, the United States may have missed the emerging broad-based insurgency throughout Iraq.

Zarqawi, a native of Jordan, may have been a greater threat to that embattled pro-Western kingdom (which also faces threats from Hamas and Syria next door). Zarqawi had been targeting Jordan since the 1990s and had been linked to the Jordanian part of the 2000 Millenium plot. His primary link to al-Qaeda had been through Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-born, London cleric known as bin Laden's European spiritual leader. Zarqawi has been linked to numerous attacks in Jordan, the assassination of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley, the November 2005 triple suicide bombing in Amman, and plots for massive attacks against Jordanian security agencies.

Zarqawi's death is good news, but the cautious restrained reaction hopefully indicates that not only our leaders, but the American people overall, are getting a handle on fighting networks in which the elimination of the top leadership - no matter how prominent - is not always a guarantee of victory.

Thirty-six years ago today, Robert Kennedy was assassinated by a young Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan. He reportedly shouted, "I did if for my country." At his trial, Sirhan Sirhan claimed he was driven by RFK's strong support for Israel.

It cannot be an accident that a year earlier, that day, the Six Day War began with a pre-emptive Israeli strike on Egypt. In many ways the 1967 war pushed the Palestinian cause to the forefront. With the Arab states sidelined and badly beaten, and Israel now ruling over Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat's Fatah and the PFLP took the lead against Israel.

Sirhan was not, reportedly, a member of any of these organizations. He was an outlier inspired by the cause. Still it was early sign of the ability of the madness of the Middle East (and really anywhere) to reach across the globe and cause bloodshed.