At every stage during the occupation of Iraq, the United States and the ruling Iraqi faction have portrayed each large-scale bombing, murder of civilians, and politically deleterious act of violence as the work of Zarqawi. The U.S. military put together a propaganda campaign to inflate Zarqawi's importance within the Iraqi insurgency. (This was complemented by a campaign of ridicule after the military discovered an outtakes reel of Zarqawi's most recent videotape.) Similarly, after most sectarian massacres, Shia or Kurdish officials frequently mention how "Zarqawi's strategy" of instigating a civil war is bound to fail. In general, such campaigns have a clear logic: to portray the widespread phenomenon of sectarian violence in Iraq as attributable to one person. And Zarqawi fit the caricature perfectly: His missives called for the extermination of the Shia, the Kurds, and those Sunnis who collaborated with the United States--defined, in effect, as any Sunni insufficiently loyal to Zarqawi.
But the propaganda effort also had a specific logic for Iraq: It provided an opportunity for Sunnis to distance themselves politically from a psychotic that many of them loathed anyway. That's particularly important in the context of Iraqi sectarianism. Broadly speaking, most Iraqi Sunnis have shown time and again that they resent Al Qaeda's presence in Iraq, allying with the foreign jihadis out of either successful coercion or a sense of besiegement from the United States and the other Iraqi factions. (Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki said today on Al Arabiya that the $25 million bounty on Zarqawi will be awarded, suggesting that Sunnis in Baqubah, where he was killed, turned him in.) Obviously, that strategy ends with Zarqawi's death. Since no one expects either sectarian violence nor the influx of foreign jihadis to come to a halt--both phenomena run much deeper than one particularly uncharismatic and self-proclaimed "leader"--neither the United States nor the Iraqi government can use Zarqawi as a cover for worsening sectarian conditions or as a face-saving way to bring Sunnis into the new political order.
