> Different social forces among the colonized don't
> necessarily have to be on the same political side,
> nor do they have to be of the same race, ethnicity,
> faith, or anything else, for colonizers to get a
> clue, as the British obviously did during the Malayan
> Campaign
I was actually just thinking of Malaysia as an analogous example. In his essay on Vietnam in "Revolutionaries," Hobsbawm points out why some guerrilla wars inevitably win, and some are possible to defeat militarily. This essay was written in 1965, shortly after the US had committed its first troops, and Hobsbawm systematically explains exactly why and how the Vietnamese were going to defeat the US and its puppets -- ten years later, it turned out. But the left in Malaysia failed because its support was confined to a minority group, the ethnic Chinese. Per the usual, Hobsbawm was a lot more detailed and elegant in his explanations, but that was pretty much the gyst.
Anyway, it seems to me that Yoshie is here arguing in favor of the idea that generalized chaos, making the country ungovernable, is as likely to bring down the occupiers as anything else -- again, much like George Dangerfield argued that the disparate forces of the right and left, Irish nationalist and Orange chauvinist, women's suffragist and trade unionist, all brought down the placid Edwardian order of Lloyd George's Liberal Party in Britain. Perhaps this is true, but doesn't it beg the question of whether that's the most desirable outcome? Why is it so difficult for some people to concede that some of the political forces in Iraq that are opposed to the US/UK for one reason or another are themselves politically unsavory? Shouldn't we be doing all we can to support the most progressive forces in Iraq so that they at least have a fighting chance?
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!