[lbo-talk] The Occupation

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>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

I'm not talking about whether Christian Parenti has a high or low 
opinion about Iraqi resistance fighters, though, as you can see from 
my positing.  I'm talking about what types of attacks Iraqis must be 
attributing to American or Israeli agents, and I'm saying that they 
can't be attributing killings of Iraqi collaborators to American or 
Israeli agents.  Or are you saying that Christian says that Iraqis 
attribute the killings of collaborators to foreign agents' work, too?

In any case, why should anyone care what Christian's own opinion 
about Iraqi resistance fighters is?  His job is to report, and we'll 
take what's useful from his reports, regardless of his own political 
judgement.  After all, he is a journalist, not a political leader or 
moral philosopher.
-- 
Yoshie

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