A Mystery

Why do the Iraqis hate democracy?

No Mystery

It's no democracy.

The mainstream media's ability to delude itself is reaching new heights, as it tries to perpetuate the illusion of our legitimacy in Iraq.

Take the front page of the Week in Review in The New York Pravda: The Mystery of the Insurgency.

In a disingenuous romp through the playland of the neocon, Bennet writes almost in disbelief

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains - and how the rebels' seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

It is not surprising that reporters, and evidently American intelligence agents, have had great difficulty penetrating this insurgency. What is surprising is that the fighters have made so little effort to advertise unified goals.

Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

"The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he said. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."

Bingo. Give the man a cigar. It's option "B".

You don't understand what they're doing, Professor.

The real irony of it is the author may well understand what they're doing, but he had to hide at the end of the article- only to immediately give it the official dismissal.

Among Iraq's insurgents, the jihadists are one group that has suggested a sweeping goal. They want to establish a new caliphate - a religious regime with expansive boundaries. For them, the destruction and chaos in Iraq may represent creative forces, means of heightening the contrasts among sects, religions and whole civilizations. Searching for parallels, several experts compared the insurgents in Iraq to the violent anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That movement took root among the alienated and uprooted who could find no place in modern society.

Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to...

Only those who choose to forget the lessons of history themselves, Mr. Bennet.

Bernhard decodes it well.

...Bennet's piece is excellent. Yes, he had to code the original a bit to keep his pay check, but then, what do you expect from a mainstream journalists.

Just replace 'black' with 'white', 'insurgency' with 'occupation force' and the 'new caliphate' with the 'promised land' and you will see the real meaning. Apply this to your daily dose of newspaper reading, and you may even start to feel informed.

The comments are pointed, too:

Is that ever occurred to an American that Iraqis may not be unhappy just because of “poor electricity and water service and high unemployment” but because of not wanting to see their country and their oil occupied by American corporations and their bloody Army? I mean really it’s so bloody stupid to mention electricity and water as a cause of anger after you killed 2X 100000 Iraqis (who have relatives you know)
-vbo

The Americans (US/UK) have nothing to propose and care nothing about stabilising, organising, ‘freeing’, Iraq. Or even making decent money by organising the oil industry...

There is no mystery here. Iraqis will either work for low pay for the Americans (the puppet Gvmt., American companies, sub contractors..) or they will not live. They will not be allowed to produce their own food, but will have to import, particularly, grain from Australia. They will not be permitted health care or clean water - that is wasteful expense. (Echoes of the US today...)

It is an experiment. Slow but steady. if it does not work out, well, too bad. There are other places, other times.

Meanwhile, Americans sit on the oil and won’t or can’t pump it. Iraqis queue for 10 liters of petrol. No one else can have it. That is all. Certainly not the Chinese...
-Blackie


Of course, they're experimenting on us, too.

Secretary of State Rice continues to show her talent for a bare faced lie, like "This war came to us, not the other way around."

Jesus the Barbarian loves the child who takes his own.

But sometimes, even the best schemes aren't totally water tight. This leaked out in the recent British re-$election:

...Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Lambert's produced a good summary - mixed with quite a bit of outrage- of how intelligence was manipulated for the election of 2004.

The aftermath? Consider the Dominion. A jihad by any other name serves just as well.