Neither Junaid Alam (at <http://lefthook.org/Politics/Alam041605.html>) nor I (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050523/010886.html>) make an argument that Iraqi guerrillas kill more US troops than Iraqi civilians. Based upon available evidence, however, we show that US troops kill more Iraqi civilians than Iraqi guerrillas do; and the majority of Iraqi guerrillas' targets are US troops, not Iraqi civilians. Do you have evidence that proves the contrary? If not, it is safe to assume that Iraqis hold Washington, rather than Iraqi guerrillas, most responsible for death and destruction.
Also, a large majority of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by guerrillas are attributed, by both Iraqis and American commanders, to a very small number of non-Iraqi Arab guerrillas:
<blockquote>In numbers, the foreign Arab recruits account for a fraction of the insurgents operating across Iraq, whose total is estimated by the American command to range from 12,000 to 20,000. How small a fraction can be guessed from the fact that, as of last week, only 370 of the 14,000 men held as suspected insurgents in American-run detention centers in Iraq were foreigners, according to figures provided by the American command.
But the significance of the infiltration was starkly evident last week in an incident near Rawa in which the kidnapped governor of Anbar was killed during a shootout between insurgents and an American patrol. The American officer commanding the patrol said the four insurgents who died and three who were captured were all non-Iraqis, from Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
Nor is there much doubt that the foreign Arabs' impact has been out of proportion to their numbers, primarily because of the willingness of the non-Iraqis to die in suicide bombings. According to a tally kept by the American command, more than 60 of these bombings took place across the country in May, responsible for about two-thirds of the civilians who died.
Iraqis commonly insist that suicide bombing is alien to the Iraqi character, and American commanders agree. "In every case we've seen, the driver has been a foreigner," an American officer who has studied the bombings said last week.
(John F. Burns, "Iraq's Ho Chi Minh Trail," <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/weekinreview/05burn.html>, 5 Jun. 2005)</blockquote>
That sheds more light on the casualty statistics. While a large majority of guerrillas are Iraqis who concentrate on attacking US troops, a tiny minority of them are non-Iraqi Arabs who commit most or all of suicide bombings that target those whom they see as collaborators (such as police recruits) and end up killing a number of bystanders. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * 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/>