>>Perhaps, Pilger has a different understanding of what "winning"
>>means than mine. In my view, resistance fighters themselves cannot
>>win as long as they have no political wing that can command
>>allegiance of sizable sectors of all critical constituencies in
>>Iraq.
>
>Not true. Armed groups win power all the time without the allegience
>of the population, often with ugly results.
All the time? Entirely on their own? With little mass support at home and no significant assistance from any foreign power? I doubt it.
I've seen estimates of numbers of resistance fighters, many of which put them in the range of thousands -- the numbers high enough to sabotage the occupation but too low to make them a force capable of governing a nation of 25 million, even aside from the fact that they have no political wing at present.
>>If the occupation continues for long and the ranks of resistance
>>fighters grow, however, they may eventually develop a political
>>wing, whose program it is impossible to foresee at this moment.
>
>In other words, if an armed resistance that we can support emerges,
>we should support it. Agreed. In the meantime, it's worth pointing
>out how destructive, apolitical and nihilistic the existing armed
>resistance in Iraq is. Which means that leftists like Pilger are
>wrong.
A number of attacks in Iraq have been certainly destructive, but it seems to me that the proportion of attacks that solely or primarily target civilians who occupy no political office out of the total number of attacks is higher in historic Palestine than in Iraq. The choice of targets in Iraq certainly appears to be far more politically and militarily strategic than in historic Palestine -- in large part because the US occupation of Iraq is not settler-colonialist.
More importantly, it is a mistake, on your part as well as Pilger's, to speak of "the existing armed resistance" as if it were a monolithic force who have practically identical ends and means. For instance, I just read in the _New York Times_ today:
***** Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian suspected of ties to Al Qaeda, is now thought likely to have played a role in at least three major car bombing attacks in Iraq that have killed well over 100 people in the last six months, according to senior U.S. officials.
Intelligence information including some gathered in recent weeks has provided "mounting evidence" to suggest that Zarqawi was involved in the bombings, including the attacks in August on a Shiite mosque in Najaf and the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and the attack in November on an Italian police headquarters. . . .
(Douglas Jehl, Jordanian Suspected in Bombings," February 10, 2004, <http://www.iht.com/articles/128926.html>). *****
I don't know if Washington's intelligence is accurate, but if it is, a sizable part of attacks that directly targeted civilians who held no political office may have been organized by foreign Islamists.
On the other hand, there have been numerous attacks on coalition soldiers that resulted in no civilian casualty, Iraqi or otherwise -- and the right to organize such attacks on colonial occupiers has been codified in international law, as US activists ought to remember.
Is it possible that there are some political tendencies among the forces of resistance that are trying to conduct their guerrilla warfare more or less in line with the standards of other national liberation movements, attacking colonialists, punishing collaborators, but eschewing indiscriminate attacks on civilians who have little or nothing to do with the occupying power? At least, we can't rule out such a possibility. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>