[lbo-talk] The Occupation

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Dec 21 15:11:23 PST 2004



>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Christian Parenti understands one crucial point -- Iraqis' self
>>respect -- much better than Doug makes him sound like
>
>There are at least two points here that you're conflating. Iraqis
>want the Americans out (and a lot more than they did a year ago,
>when there was some willingness to cut the U.S. some slack), but the
>resistance includes some really bad people (theocrats and
>semi-fascist Ba'athists). The situation sounds extremely messy and
>complicated, and not at all appropriate to simple tales about
>self-respect.
>
>Doug

The idea of self respect is hardly contradictory to the fact that the resistance includes Islamists and Ba'athists, unless you think that only those whom you classify as "good people" have self respect (and then, there are "good people" who do not have any self respect at all, but that's another topic). There are Islamists and Ba'athists -- the sort of Islamists and Ba'athists completely lacking in self respect -- working for the occupation.

Think of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson -- they were slave owners (worse people than the worst Islamists and Ba'athists in Iraq) who had more self respect than Tory slave owners. In the same way, there are Ba'athists and Islamists, and there are Ba'athists and Islamists. Some work for the foreign occupation; others resist it.

Resisting the occupation imposes a tremendous sacrifice on you. First of all, you are likely to get killed or tortured. You wouldn't do it if all you wanted were money or power _at any cost_, even at the cost of becoming a lackey of the foreign occupier. You would do it only if you have at least enough self respect to make submission to the foreign occupier intolerable for you.

Most likely, though, the majority of resistance fighters are neither Islamists nor Ba'athists -- they are probably working-class men who have yet to develop any coherent political philosophy of their own. I've read a good deal of Christian Parenti's and others' reports on Iraqi resistance fighters, but none appears to say that the majority are "theocrats and semi-fascist Ba'athists." The majority seem to be ordinary Iraqis. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>



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