[lbo-talk] Why the French Resistance Is Not the Model for Iraq

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Both those, like Tariq Ali, who have hailed resistance to the
occupation of Iraq and those, like Doug, who have had nothing but
negative comments on it have often invoked the French Resistance by
way of comparison, positive or negative.  That is interesting, for if
there is any occupation that is the least comparable to the US
occupation of Iraq, that's the German occupation of France, for in
France the Germans enjoyed the full state collaboration of the native
regime of Vichy.

If Washington had decided not to disband the Iraqi Army after the fall
of Saddam Hussein's government and not to de-Ba'athify the
administration, it could have conceivably enjoyed as solid a
pro-American government as the Vichy regime and might have been able
to render resistance in Iraq as generally ineffective as the French
Resistance.

As it happened, Washington, unlike the Third Reich, chose to assume
the full burden of occupation at first (for it was more ambitous than
the Nazis and wanted to totally restructure the occupied country's
political economy from the bottom up, building a neoliberal pro-Tel
Aviv regime) and then only gradually outsource the occupation to the
Iraqis when direct occupation did not work.  By then, though,
resistance was in full swing, and Washington could never build a
strong Iraqi government, though it has succeeded in Iraqifying death,
by siding with Shi'is here, siding with Sunnis there, assisted in this
endeavor to divide and conquer by sectarian international jihadists of
the Al Qaeda tendency.

If resistance in Iraq were like the French Resistance, Washington
might have already had a big victory party, a majority of the American
public celebrating it, and moved onto Iran and Syria.
-- 
Yoshie
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