[lbo-talk] The Occupation

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Dec 21 10:50:09 PST 2004


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>It can't be that Iraqis can't believe Iraqi resistance fighters
>would kill other Iraqis -- they know that resistance fighters have
>and will kill collaborators who work for the occupier as
>politicians, soldiers, policemen, translators, and so forth.
>Christian Parenti must have meant that many Iraqis attribute the
>sort of attacks that will make it difficult to unify Iraq to the
>work of US or Israeli intelligence agents. That is promising. They
>may turn out to be correct, and if they don't, they still have a
>usable myth.

No that's not what Christian meant. (How is it that you & Carrol know so well what people really mean?) He doesn't have a high opinion of the Iraqi resistance in general - he describes them as nihilistic, willing to destroy Iraq completely to deny victory to the U.S. They don't care about killing innocent bystanders in a car bomb attack on a police station. They don't have any developed vision of what kind of Iraq they'd like to see if they drive the Americans out; he interviewed fighters who said they believe in "Islam and Ba'athism," but when he asked what that meant, they couldn't say much more. They're absolutely right to resist, and the U.S. has to be punished for invading Iraq, but that doesn't make the resistance good guys in any sense.

I'll be posting the interview later today or tomorrow.

Doug



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