>>(1) Do you believe that people who live under foreign occupation
>>have the legal and moral right to resist the occupation, including
>>the right to wage armed struggle against it?
>
>No one's arguing that the resistance doesn't have a right to shoot
>at American soldiers. It's a question of whether we should support
>the existing resistance.
If US leftists believe that resistance fighters have the legal and moral right to wage armed struggle against foreign occupiers, they ought to say so clearly (whether or not they are personally in favor of armed struggle, whether or not they condemn particular attacks that violate the standards of national liberation movements, whether or not they support any individual or group of individuals who actually take up arms against the occupation) -- otherwise, they end up sending a message that all armed struggles in Iraq are illegitimate.
Also, it won't do to label all resistance fighters Ba'athists and Islamists -- such blanket labeling cannot be supported by evidence and does nothing but reinforce Washington's propaganda efforts. Let's take a look at one of the recent reports on the occupation and resistance -- Christian Parenti's "Two Sides: Scenes from a Nasty, Brutish & Long War" (_The Nation_, February 23, 2004):
***** . . . [A resistance fighter in his late 40s who "believes in the ideology of the Baath Party and of Islam," a former professional soldier who leads a team of "'less than twenty' local men," fighting "to repel the invaders and restore sovereignty" that Parenti interviews in Adhamiya] claims that his team, along with one from al Quds and one from Ramadi, were responsible for recent attacks in Karbala, and that contrary to press reports, no car bombs were used. "Some of our RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and small Katyusha rockets hit cars with gas in them and they exploded."
He also claims that the Iraqi resistance had nothing to do with the Nabil restaurant bombing. "We do not kill Iraqis, unless they are military interpreters or spies." And for these "traitors," his team maintains a "blacklist" of names, several of which have already been "crossed off" -- that is, assassinated. To bolster his claim about not hurting Iraqis, he points out sites around Adhamiya where there have clearly been IED explosions. "See, there are no shops here, the roads are wide."
It would be very difficult to prove or disprove this masked man's assertions, short of watching him in action. But the man's apparent skittishness, the ubiquitous but discreetly stashed pistols and the grave risk to any Iraqi who would pretend to be a resistance leader together make his story credible. . . . .
. . . Someone is seen dashing across rooftops. He's trapped. The paratroopers storm in and arrest the shooter [of RPGs, one of which has hit a tanklike Bradley and destroyed its engine], a kid of about 18. For good measure they also round up three men in the house from which the kid fired. Bound and hooded, these guys will end up in the vast and terrifying Abu Ghraib prison camp, home to almost 13,000 detainees. . .
To find out what the rural resistance thinks of these [counter-insurgency] tactics [used by the US military] I visited a farm on the muddy flood plains near Balad. My translator and I are here to meet a group of former -- or momentarily retired -- resistance fighters. They are farmers, all brothers and devout, ritualistic Sufis.
Sitting on the floor of a cold farmhouse waiting for a lunch of fried chicken, rice and soup, one young man explains: "My brothers and I did many operations against the Americans, but it is dangerous to talk about this. We spent a lot of money on remote controls."
In these tightly knit villages, the resistance seems to be even more informally structured than the networked cells described in Adhamiya. "Sometimes a group of brothers or cousins will do an action," explains the man. "Or maybe someone from Abu Hishma might ask you to help with an action. You'll go to a field and you will find, maybe, some of your friends and maybe other people you don't know." He says that fear and disparate beliefs have kept this network of overlapping "cells" from uniting.
According to this young farmer and his brothers, the guerrillas all have different reasons for fighting. Some fight for Islam, some for Saddam, some just to get the Americans out and some for revenge. These young men seem to have fought for all of the above: They lost their father to an American bomb, they feel humiliated by the occupation, they are intensely religious and a few of them really like Saddam but are not in the Baath Party. . . .
(12-14) *****
Former soldiers. Kids. Farmers. For the ideology of the Ba'ath Party. For Islam. For revenge for the death of a loved one. For national liberation. Disparate individuals, disparate beliefs. If I were a communist in Iraq, I would not write off all of them -- some of them would be my bitter enemies for ever, others might become my future comrades. I'd ask, what could we do to win over as many of resistance fighters as possible to communism? What could we do to bring discipline to armed struggles, so no fighter would violate the code of conduct that should govern any national liberation movement? What could we do to coordinate underground armed struggles with aboveground political struggles?
>>(2) Which party is the most legally and morally culpable: (A) a
>>man who, telling boldfaced lies, votes for a war of aggression to
>>invade a foreign country, compelling soldiers to blow up armed
>>combatants, civilians, and properties; (B) soldiers of the invading
>>army who follow the order that violates law and morality, blowing
>>up armed combatants, civilians, and properties; or (C) men of the
>>occupied country who resist the foreign army of occupation and
>>indigenous collaborators, blowing up armed combatants, civilians,
>>and properties?
>>
>>It seems to me that the order of legal and moral culpability would
>>be (A) > (B) > (C), from the most culpable to the least. You don't
>>seem to be ashamed of voting for and urging others to vote for (A)
>>while sounding shocked, shocked that there are people who support
>>(C). Why?
>
>No one disputes your hierarchy of culpability.
Really? A number of LBO-talk subscribers have posted messages that suggest that all resistance fighters -- including the Iraqi kid who destroyed a Bradley's engine -- are very committed Ba'athists or Islamists or both and definitely more morally repugnant than John Kerry who voted for the invasion of Iraq.
>But you forgot to add a fourth example. What is the culpability of
>someone, (D), who has the opportunity, through the ballot box, to
>help ensure that the next president is one who is less likely to
>order soldiers into an illegal war -- but declines to exercise this
>opportunity?
Do you think that poorer Americans are more culpable than richer Americans who vote more regularly than poorer ones do?
Cf. "The typical voter today is relatively well off financially and over fifty years of age. Better educated, higher earning Americans vote at 70-80 percent levels, while less than two-fifths of the working class bother to vote--a forty percent gap" (<http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/con_voting.cfm>). Democratic caucus and primary goers are likewise financially better off and better educated than the rest of working-class America: "Caucus Class Demographics," <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040119/001530.html>. -- 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/>