>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>>But for the armed and unarmed Iraqi resistance (and
>> resistance can be
>> very subtle), the US government could have quickly
>> privatized Iraqi
>> industries, installed a puppet neoliberal regime,
>> left several US
>> military bases in Iraq, and, flush with a sense of
>> victory, moved onto exciting new ventures (though
>not necessarily
>> militarily):
>
>Of course, we all support resistance to the US occupation
No one here has given any material support to resistance fighters to the US occupation, nor should anyone be expected to.
What US activists have and should be organizing is opposition to the US occupation, regardless of what they think about resistance fighters.
>but does that mean we should support ANY party engaged in that
>resistance? Certainly if the US continues to occupy Iraq that will
>be miserable for the Iraqi people; if fundamentalist muslims take
>over that country, is that good for the Iraqi people? Of course
>this latter is a question for the Iraqi people to decide, however, I
>am afraid in the current scenario that it will not be decided
>democratically and that the quotation from the "Little Red Book"
>will rule the day: "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun."
<snip>
>What gets forgotten in either of these views is the Iraqi
>people....their desires and hopes are not served by either the US
>occupation or Islamic fanatics. Both want to impose themselves on
>the Iraqi people.
One wishes that the majority of resistance fighters were secular socialists of one kind or another whose politics would endear them to even the fussiest US leftists, but that's not the reality in Iraq (besides, the fussiest US leftists didn't particularly like secular socialists in the Arab world -- or anywhere else for that matter -- when they did have a mass political presence). Nonetheless, not even the US government and media have claimed that resistance fighters are _all_ or even predominantly "fundamentalist muslims" and "Islamic fanatics." Given their apparent battle skills, I suspect that the majority of them -- minus perhaps those who committed suicide bombings -- may be former soldiers in the Iraqi military, which I believe was no hotbed of Islamist radicalism of any variety (the Baath Party made an opportunistic use of Islamic imagery and rhetoric, but I doubt that it tolerated a competing ideology in such crucial institutions as armed forces). -- Yoshie
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