>>>In Palestine, the armed factions don't target other Palestinians.
>>>That's more like Abu Nidal's style, a madman who didn't deserve
>>>support.
>>
>>"Palestinian militias summarily executed hundreds of collaborators
>>during the first intifada" (Suzanne Goldenberg, "Public Death for
>>'Collaborators,'" _The Guardian_, January 15, 2001,
>><http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,422379,00.html>).
>
>The word I used before was "indiscriminately." As in the mass
>bombings of Shiite mosques and marketplaces.
It seems to me that, rather than bundling all attacks together, Shiites themselves are making exactly the sort of distinction that I hypothesized: "After several mosque bombings for which no one claimed responsibility, Shiites tend not to blame Sunni extremists; instead they accuse foreigners" (Neela Banerjee, "Fears of Ethnic Strife Are Growing in Iraq," February 11, 2004, <http://www.iht.com/articles/128999.html>). They blame such indiscriminate attacks on foreigners rather than Iraqi fighters in part out of their correct understanding of necessary diplomacy to avoid sectarian conflicts, and in part because such indiscriminate bombings indeed constitute only a minority of armed attacks and therefore out of line with other attacks. US activists might take a page from Iraqis' own nuanced look at the use of force by all parties concerned: not all uses of force that are chalked up to "the resistance" are morally and politically the same, nor are they likely to be committed by the same faction of fighters.
>>The reticence of resistance fighters makes the job of US anti-war
>>activists difficult, because we have no clear idea of their
>>political composition, but, if we really think about what it takes
>>to resist the occupation by force (at least until resistance
>>fighters get really well organized, politically mature, and very
>>actively and broadly supported by Iraqi masses) solely from the
>>point of view of physical survival and military effectiveness in
>>the short run, their silence makes sense. The fewer clues you give
>>to the intelligence analysts of the army of occupation, the better
>>your chance of staying alive and continuing armed struggles
>>becomes. One of the main military advantages that resistance
>>fighters have over foreign soldiers is that nobody knows who
>>resistance fighters are, whereas foreign soldiers are readily
>>identifiable and their bases and movements easy to chart.
>>Knowledge = Power.
>
>The resistance puts out leaflets to communicate. None of the
>leaflets seem to say: "We are working for an Iraq in which... xyz."
>Resistance forces often have spokesmen, shadowy guerrilla
>intellectuals who communicate the goals using aliases or from hiding
>places. Even al-Qaeda has websites full of ideological material.
>None of that in this case. Maybe some of the footsoldiers don't
>really have a program except getting rid of the occupier. But the
>higher-ups presumably have some kind of vision of who should rule
>and how. I suspect they don't communicate it because they don't
>think it would be very appealing to anybody.
History tells us that, ordinarily, it takes decades before a mature national liberation movement led by a coherent political leadership with a clear political program and a sense of diplomacy to communicate it skillfully to the outside world develops. The invasion of Iraq began less than one year ago. It would be astonishing if Iraqis had already developed what you appear to expect from them.
Moreover, history also tells us that first waves of anti-colonial armed revolts normally get defeated one way or another. Out of accumulated experiences of defeats over decades (and sometimes centuries) did eventually successful national liberation movements develop (when successful ones emerged at all, that is). -- 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/>