"The massive U.S. assault on Fallujah created a situation in which political forces not on very good terms with one another put aside their differences to unite against the U.S. Palestinians and Iraqis tend to differ about whether the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein from power was a good thing. Almost all Iraqis agree that it was. But both concur that Israeli occupation and punitive measures toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are wrong."
In other words, the US has managed to squander a great deal of good will.
Folks here know that I rarely agree with Chomsky. He's more right than wrong here:
"Typically, military occupations are quite successful, even by the most horrendous conquerors. Take, say, Hitler's occupation of Western Europe and Russia's postwar occupation of Eastern Europe. In both cases, the countries were run by collaborators, security forces and civilian, with the troops of the conqueror in the background. There was courageous partisan resistance under Hitler, but without extensive foreign support, it would have been wiped out. In Eastern Europe, the US tried to support resistance (inside Russia as well) until the early 1950s, and of course Russia was in confrontation with the world dominant superpower. There are many other examples.
Consider, in contrast, the invasion of Iraq. It eliminated two monstrous regimes, one of which we are allowed to talk about, the other not. The first was the rule of the tyrant. The second was the US-UK imposed sanctions regime, which killed 100s of thousands of people, devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely on him survival -- probably saving him from the fate of other gangsters supported by the current incumbents in Washington, all overthrown from within; that was a plausible surmise before the war, and is even more so in the light of postwar discoveries about the fragility of Saddam's rule. The ending of both regimes was certainly welcome to the population. The US had enormous resources to reconstruct the ruins. Resistance had virtually no outside support, and in fact developed within largely in response to violence and brutality of the invaders. It took real talent to fail."
-- Luke
----- Original Message ----- From: "mike larkin" <mike_larkin2001 at yahoo.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 12:34 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Juan Cole: Most Fallujah Dead Were Combatants,Not Civilians
> "It is controversial how many of those are women and
> children as opposed to combatants (some say as many as
> 200). It seems likely that most of the dead were
> combatants, since they were the ones the Marines were
> firing at.....
>
> "The siege of Fallujah was represented on the Arab
> satellite television channels, such as al Jazeera, as
> a massacre of innocent civilians, a charge that was
> apparently widely believed but which caricatures the
> Marines, who took heavy fire from experienced fighters
> and lost many killed and wounded. This toll was hardly
> inflicted by innocent women and children."
>
> http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/16/israel/print.html
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk