Please show me once where I used a blog as a cite.
Just one.
Dear lord I’m glad to see somebody posted this. Why is it that the board here seems to need to put everything into the blackest or whitest possible forms? Yeesh.
I think a fair amount of the organizers behind the insurgency are former Iraqi military and Al Qaeda imports. Fluff the ranks with a few religious zealots for those moments when a human face needs a bomb strapped to it. Sprinkle in those who think that the United States is an occupying/invading force. Add a dash of criminal types and stir with those who just like to make things go kablooey.
Recipe for insurgency thanks to Julia Child. Reprinted with permission.
Agreed, this is different then any other war. A military or insurgency almost always has some sort of central command that is able to issue its orders, communicate its beliefs, etc. In that vacumn, and with the fact that any journalist with any sense is scared to go try and interview the insurgents, has left only the US military (and various other questionable sources like Al-Jazeera) to tell us whats going on. Naturally they present a fairly caractatured version of the insurgency as 1,000 bin Ladins whose driving goal is to kill freedom.
I think the military has at least a decent picture of the insurgency. For example, they know what proportion of foreign fighters they’re catching, how many ex-baathists, and in general probably have a good read on the precentage each faction is of the total makeup of the insurgency in various areas. Similarily, fanatics are rarely shy in making known thier beliefs, so the army probably has a good idea of the motivating philosopies at work. Finally, I’m sure a good number have spilled thier guts about organizational factors.
But the job of the US gov’t isn’t really to make sure that citizens get an indepth explanation of their foe, so instead it conveys an image of the insurgency that is most likely to get support from the US populace. Remember when the insurgency was supposed to be made up partialy of rapists and murders Saddam released from prison. I would bet money that story was based on a few isolated incidents, and the people telling it didn’t belive it at all. Similarily they’ve played up the roll of various central figures as the masterminds behind the insurgents, whether it’s Saddam, that red headed general they were after for a while, Sadr, Zarqawi, etc. Why these men certainly controled some aspect of the insurgency, I think there influence is overstated so that there is a central villian for Americans to focus thier anger on. And if I hear that the insurgency is “desperate” and making its “last gasp effort” one more time I’m going to puke. Every surge in attacks for the last year has been described as a “last gasp”.
Erm yeah. that guy is in Iraq though an American soldier with first hand account of what the insurgency is.
And thanks, it was great work 
I agree that the opinion of a solider on the ground can be a valid cite, but I don’t think the post Ryan linked to actually adressed the question of who the insurgents are. It’s also not the best place to go for information like “the number of attacks dropped by 50%” as the soldier isn’t really much more likely to have information on that then the man in the street, presuming he’s a grunt.
Also last week we attacked Fallujah, so presumably that was a week of abnormally high attacks; thus comparing the number of attacks in Iraq to last week is kind of misleading. They presumably dropped because the insurgents are no longer defending Fallujah, but that can’t be interpeted to say that attacks “across the theater” have fallen. In fact, as I understand it, there has been a rash of attacks in Mosul and Baghdad.
Cool pics of Iraq in that blog though. It’s a prettier country then it appears on the news.
As is your ability to completely ignore the approx. 30 lines of text following my initial question outlining the complexities of determining who the insurgents are, X
Ryan posts this, and x targets me for “oversimplifying complex issues”?
x, you need to stop looking at me so critically, and maybe open up your eyes to what the other guys are saying.
As to the “murderous scumbags who relish at the chance yadda yadda…”, as x said about my post, this is an obviously and clearly oversimplified view of a complex issue. May I ask you what you think the reason the Iraqi insurgents want to interfere with the elections?
they come from a society which has never experiencecd the prospects of a transparent elected government ever since Iraq was created, they know what kind of power they will have if they make things as difficult as they can for the prospects of Iraqi democracy fail.
And they are murderous scumbags, you only need to see the decapitated bodies and murdered policemen en masse to have that proved.
You will need to go back a little further than the creation of Iraq to understand that democracy is a completely foreign concept to these people. Bush and people like yourself think that there’s some sort of magical democracy switch that can be turned on overnight. It won’t happen.
I can imagine myself in their shoes. If my country were occupied my Muslim crusaders, I’d be the one dancing around the charred mutilated corpses of my occupiers. I’d be the first sniper on my block. I could become very good at making roadside bombs. If that would make me a murderous scumbag, so be it.
Hmm but if Muslims came to a place to implement a democratic government, human rights, all the good that entails a democracy, I’d be first in line to defend them new concepts.
How do you know? Just because he says so? Why is his credibility any better than any other anonymous blogger?
The U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey said that of the 1000 insurgents captured in Fallujah, only 15 are confirmed foreign fighters. So much for the theory that we are fighting mostly Al Qaeda drawn to Iraq and away from US targets.
This seems a useful site, no idea of its provenance but it may be an antidote to some of the simplistic chest-beating going on.
Based on your post, then, I’d guess that you refer to this war as the “Iraqi civil war” and not “The War on Terror”? Am I right?
When did I say it was mostly foreign fighters?
Since you appear to be so well informed about what is happening in Iraq, surely you can list all the candidates in the running for this “tranparent elected government [sic]” of yours? Surely Allawi couldn’t possibly be the only candidate, right? Because that would be too much like er, a Saddam ‘election’ wouldn’t it?
So then, with only two months to go to this “transparent election” of yours, inquiring minds want to know, where are all the candidates? Taking a crash course in “Campaign financing and advertising”? Or should that be “How to become an American Puppet in ten easy lessons”?
Fact is, so far there are NONE. Zilch. Zero. Zippo. Nada.
Bit bizarre of you ask me.
Nope, but thank you for playing According to that Washington post article:
*The candidate certification period is already underway and will continue through mid-December, the U.N. official said. At a news conference yesterday, Carina Perelli, director of the U.N. Electoral Assistance Division, said that seven lists of candidates had been registered “and more than 180 forms [for] registration of lists have been distributed at the request of the parties.” *
There is a large list of candidates already. You just don’t know their names.
Odd idea of pretty you’ve got!
Interestingly he mentions the numbers of satellite TV dishes he sees on the houses - I heard a report on BBC radio about how the Iraqis are buying up electrical goods at a vast rate (making the power-cuts even more frequent, but otherwise a good sign IMO) - this was in the British zone and there was an interview with a Iraqi who was selling digital cameras and dodgy DVDs to the British troops (good prices!)
In the same report it was saying that locals were being paid ($100 a time IIRC) to attack the British (but didn’t say by whom - or I missed that bit) - so those insurgents were presumably the local unemployed.
Haha. Strange how I got the list right here 
http://english.people.com.cn/200411/24/eng20041124_164996.html
I’ve looked but I can’t find the criteria used to ‘approve’ parties that can run. Without that it’s difficult to judge how ‘democratic’ this election is, as opposed to stacking the deck. 56 parties have been refused so far.
Yes, but 156 have made it through. How many parties in our country?
(Not that loads of parties will necessarily be a good thing, unless ineffectual government is your target. Still, they need time to form into two or three factions.)