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December 25, 2004
Xmas in Iraq
The offical line from Washington is that Iraq is a part of the war on terror, the war was going well, and that anyone who reckons otherwise is a defeatist liberal uninterested in bringing democracy to the Middle East. There is an Iraqi insurgency, but it is made up exclusively of foreign fighters led by the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
So have a read of Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches
Too strong?
Then read Riverbend.
It is catch 22 for the US. The insurgency required forceful action to put down but that any such action could further alienate the Iraqi population, thus fueling the insurgency.
What is not being said is that a majority of Iraqis angry at Americans. Americans have invaded their country, have killed anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 civilians, plus an unknown number of combatants in the regular Iraqi army or the resistance, and have vowed to transform their country politically—beginning with the banishment from public life of scores of thousands of Baath Party members who ran things for thirty years before the Americans came.
As Thomas Powers says it's a classic scenario: "an invasion followed by military occupation backing a client government has encountered resistance. What else would we expect?"
Yet the Americans persist in saying that opponents of the occupation are a mixture of die-hard Baathists, dead-enders, and Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreigners generally described as loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is said to be an ally of Osama bin Laden or an associate of al-Qaeda.
You can only infer that the White House refuses to concede that what is happening on the ground: that the actual resistance the US meets in Iraq is angry and nationalist in an uncomplicated way.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 25, 2004 08:10 AM
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