Thanks to Lenin's Tomb for the article on the Iraqi Resistance: Does the resistance target civilians? Multiple sources show that civilian targets are about 4% of attacks. Those are in the news because civilians don't have body armour - and because it's in the U.S.'s interest to show Iraq as a senseless bloodbath.


from Left Hook. The bottom line represents attacks on occupation forces.

This fits nicely with the impression I get reading between the lines. Last week the U.S. military found a secret Resistance bunker, containing "machine guns, mortars, rockets, black uniforms, masks, compasses, night-vision goggles and satellite telephones." None of these would be of any use carbombing civilians - yet the latter is all we hear about. Behind the (very real, but not central) barbarism of civilian attacks, an entirely different war is going on.

Which is why it's time for yet another restatement of the pro/anti-Resistance argument. The media plays up the most bloodthirsty elements of the Resistance. Then we 'radicals' fall dutifully in line, arguing about whether what we're told - the "incompetent, crazed, brown barbarians" blowing stuff up - is a good or a bad thing. When the image isn't true to begin with.



I support the goals & methods of the genuine, popular Iraqi resistance. The latter aren't racist caricatures, and they don't want to kill their fellow citizens (and, in fact, they're dealing with those who do.) They're a mass, popular movement against the occupation, a fact the media ignores - and some of the anti-war left forgets.