They’ve been fighting them for a year now, so they must have captured and interrogated enough of them, and captured their documents and stuff, to have a pretty good idea of who’s behind this resistance. Who’s organizing it. Who’s financing and supplying it. Where the fighters are coming from and how are theyr recruited. What’s their motivation, their ideology (if any). Etc.
Hasn’t any of this information been released? Are they keeping a lid on it? I’ve heard two different explanations: 1. They’re leftover Ba`thists. 2. They’re volunteers infiltrated from other countries, especially Saudi.
Also: a tangentially related question… Did the former Iraqi government ever formally surrender and hand over authority? Or did they just collapse incoherently? IOW, by what lawful legitimacy is Bremer running the place?
I’ve wondered this myself. Probably the American government knows much less than they would like to know.
Seems pretty simple: get the invaders out.
That is the position of the US government. Of course, there is the obvious one which they will not admit: 3. They are pissed off Iraqis who do not want their country ossupied by strangers.
Bremmer gets his authority from the USA who can enforce it. . . up to a certain point. I do not think the USA claims any legal authority other than that derived from their military conquest.
Squink, OK, I know Sadr City has been in the headlines since, what, yesterday, but I was thinking back over a whole year. Most of the resistance has occurred in the infamous"Sunni Triangle." If the Shi‘ah get involved in the resitance, that is a very uncomfortable new wrinkle and calls into question whether the American forces will be able to stick it out much longer. I think the adjective is “untenable.”
Heh Heh. I’ve now got this image of Bremmer giving a speech about how Iraq is stable and the Iraqis all love us, while a militia is tying him to a post and setting up a firing squad…
Military officials said here that 90% of the attacks are from the pro-Saddam Iraqis. There are, of course, some number of foreign fighters and criminals who are also making trouble.
Collapsed incoherently. Under international law, the US was then placed with the obligation of being an occupying power, meaning that the US became responsible for running the country. Bremer was appointed by the President to do just that. This arrangement of having the Coalition Provisional Authority (Bremer’s occupation government) running Iraq was subsequently affirmed by a UN Security Council resolution – I think it was 1511.
If the Chinese came here to unseat Bush Inc, there would be some people here for it and some against. There would be some amount of dancing in the streets.
Once the stated goal was accomplished and the invaders continued a heavy handed and unilateral occupation, there would be more and more people against the foreigners. After a year, even though we might have been happy to see Bush go, we just want them to leave. It would only be American to try to drive them out. You wouldn’t have to be “pro-Bush” or Republican or religious to attack your occupiers. You would be a patriot.
Outside of the Tikkrit area, none of the many groups involved is remotely Saddam related. And even there, those folks knew early on that Saddam was done for and so they are fighting amongst themselves to be the next Saddam. There are no significant pro-Saddam groups in the country.
What is mainly going on is that a huge number of groups are fighting for position in the post-occupied Iraq. One of the best ways to achieve stature for this purpose is to be the group that forces the US out. 2nd place won’t matter. The typical Iraqi way of getting to the top in recent decades has been to be as brutal as possible. So it’s getting very nasty.
A lot of weapons were stashed all over the country. No imports or external financing are needed for some time. The civilian population provides a lot of secondary support for the miltias.
Note that only our “allies”, some Kurdish groups, are allied with Al Qaida.
If you read the foreign press, which does things like actually goes out and interviews militia members, you get a completely different view of what has been happening in Iraq the past year.
Once they stop interfering, then we’re free to get back to the business of killing each other and trying to take over Iraq (remember, the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis are hardly chums).
American propaganda presented the notion that Iraq would be converted to a peaceful, western style, democracy where all would live in peace. Only the very ignorant could believe such a thing and I do not believe the US government believed it. What I think they believed is that they could hand control of Iraq to Saddam’s enemies and they would rule the country favorably to the USA and, obviously, request the Americans stay. What I think was not foreseen was that even many of Saddam’s enemies would rather have Saddam than the Great Satan runing things and that for now the only way to rule Iraq is Saddam’s way or it is civil war. The USA is just a teeny bit hesitant to do it that way directly and would rather appoint a puppet government to do the dirty work.
So, So who are these Iraqi resistance boys? They are pretty much everybody except some are active and some are waiting. Those who are cooperating with the occupation know their only hope to retain power is with the Americans there. The day the Americans leave the bodies of the cooperators will be paraded down main street.
I am not saying he is necessarily wrong but what a US general says is immediate suspect as propaganda and should be corroborated by independent sources.
Umm, because anyone who has followed the US govt and media in the past year at all has learned that their claims are devoid of facts.
Keep in mind, the rest of the world knows that the Kurds caught Saddam, drugged him, negotiated with Rummy, and then put him in that hole to be captured. Most Americans have never heard the story. There is a huge descrepancy between the world press, even British press like the BBC and The Times, and the US press. Huge.
Bingo. You nailed what’s been bothering me about “what’s wrong with this picture?” The American media and government have both kept a lid on the actual resisters speaking for themselves. Listening to only American sources, you will never get a complete or accurate picture of what the hell is ACTUALLY GOING ON OVER THERE.
ftg, your theory of lots of different groups each trying to prove itself the baddest is… deeply disturbing to contemplate. Especially because it makes sense, I’m sorry to say. jnglmassiv’s perspective fills out the picture and now it starts to add up. However, about the Kurds (our friends) being allied with al-Qa‘idah. What indication that our Kurdish friends are actually “allied” with al-Qa‘idah, instead of just being unable to dislodge them? The impression I had gotten was that bands of al-Qa‘idah survivors filtered into Kurdish-held northern Iraq after the Taliban fell and things got too hot for them in Afghanistan. They crossed through Iran and greased a number of Iranian palms on the way, to persuade Iranian officials to look the other way. Iran and al-Qa‘idah may hate each other’s guts, but Iran must have decided they had enough problems right now without getting mixed up in this business.
So these bands of al-Qa‘idah survivors set up shop in Kurdish-held northern Iraq, whose security was supposedly guaranteed by the United States. All the while Bush accused Saddam of being in league with al-Qa‘idah, the only actual al-Qa‘idah boys were under our own noses, in the one part of Iraq that Saddam couldn’t reach. Ironic much? I don’t know whether our Kurdish friends went so far as to support the Qa‘idah ruffians in their midst, or whether they just decided that they were not in a position to take them on, and pretended not to notice them there. If they were two-timing us, that would really suck.
I presume you’re referring to the al-ansar camps up in the hills?
The answer is no, the kurds didn’t want them there and took an active part of getting rid of them once the war started. They didn’t possess the ability to do anything about them beforehand. They needed US help (with artillery and air strikes and intelligence) so they had to wait for the war to get going.
Al-ansar took over a couple of villages near the Iranian border but I don’t think there is any suggestion (from any quarter) that the kurds ever liked them. The kurds don’t want anyone else in “their terrirtory” and certainly not fundamentalists. They are a pretty secular-oriented bunch the kurds, by all accounts.
This just in from Rolling Stone’s arabic edition, Muhammed’s Stone, the IRB are the hottest new world-beat boy band. They’re outselling 50 Cent and Norah Jones in the dusty street markets. The IRB, worldwide, are number 15 with a bullet; in fact, a lot of bullets. Their cover of Country Joe McDonald’s Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag is a surprise hit in the discos of Afghanistan. In the US, the SoundCount charts are owned by the News Corp., and they refuse to admit the existance of the Iraqi Resistance Boys.
