Whatever hints of a political program the fragmented Resistance has can be gleaned from, "Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, " Ahmed S. Hashim. Cornell Univ. Press, 2006. http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/5376.html >...Iraqi secularism had disintegrated by the time we went in, in 2003. Iraq was no longer a secular state, as a result of the wars that it had fought, but primarily as a result of the sanctions, which had disintegrated Iraqi society. People, in the time of psychological stress, began to turn more and more towards religion.
Saddam, thinking that he could maintain his power more and more, turned to religion and the tribes. In 1995-96, he began what he called the Hamlah al-Imaniyyah, the "return to faith." What happened was that Iraq, in the 1990s, turned from a totalitarian into a ramshackle authoritarian, paternalist, patrimonial society. In order to maintain power&mdash: and here's the paradox—Saddam devolved more and more power to the peripheries; in other words, to religious groups and to the tribes. In return for providing them with patronage, they would maintain their loyalty to him. So basically he allowed a return to religion, thinking that he could control it.
To give you an example of why this was not true: in Tal Afar and in Fallujah, for example, there was a return to religion and the Baath Party maintained close watch on the imams and so on. But what happened was that there was also a rise of, for want of a better phrase, "Salafist jihadist Islamism" among the Sunnis. The tracts of people like Sayyid Qutb and the thinking of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab began to filter into Iraq in ever-increasing numbers. They gained traction among the youth.
Here's another important aspect which makes Iraq less secular and less likely to be a democratic state: Iraq's youth right now is less educated than their parents and their grandparents. Iraq's educational structure broke down during the sanctions. Parents could no longer afford to have their children go to school, so they sent them out to work.
They also became susceptible to extremist ideologies. We discovered this at length in, say, a town like Tal Afar, where the educational system was never great to begin with, but it had collapsed. The Baathist teachers in Tal Afar had actually started proselytizing Islamist tracts to the youth, rather than Baathist principles.
Why was this not reported back to Baghdad? Because the people who do the reporting back to Baghdad were from the same tribe and kinship structure as those doing the teaching of the youth of the city. You do not report back on your own kinship. With the collapse of the totalitarian enterprise in Iraq, things began to be more tribal. What happened was that there was a growth in Islamism among the youth.
So you see that an important element of the insurgency was Islamic.
Now, this is not the same thing as foreign jihadists coming in. We hear that there were a large number of foreign jihadists. This is part of creating the narrative to say that the insurgency is really foreign-dominated or directed. If you look at the history of countries fighting insurgencies, they have always blamed outsiders, until they realize that there are internal issues at stake and that you have to deal with them. In Vietnam, we blamed Russia and China. In Malaya, the British blamed initially the People's Republic of China. But then there comes a recognition, or a glimmer of understanding, that there are some legitimate problems that need to be dealt with internally.
The foreign element has not been more than 10 percent of the insurgency. Even if there were more, they could not do much without the Iraqis supporting them logistically and materially. This Orientalist view that, "Well, most of the other jihadis are Arabs, so they will fit into Iraq," is nonsense. An Algerian sticks out like a sore thumb in Iraq. So does an Egyptian. So does a Saudi, even if it's a Saudi from the Shammar Arab tribe. The Shammar is a large tribe that extends from Saudi Arabia through Iraq into Syria. They are not the same, through accent, through culture, through a lot of things.