Friday, September 23, 2005
Quick - we need another reason!
Ah, Iraq. Every time I'm at a loss for a blog topic, I check out the latest news and have loads to say. Picking out imperialist blundering is like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel - in this case, a prize tuna in a very small barrel.
Maybe a tuna metaphor maligns fish - an unbarrelled tuna
Today's Guardian reports what anti-war types have been saying all along, and indeed predicted before the war started: most insurgents aren't foreigners (Report Attacks Myth of Foreign Fighters). An American thinktank has confirmed that
Feel the love - a British soldier set on fire by a grateful crowd in Basra
I've spoken about how racist this notion is before - savage brown folk with death on their mind, ready & willing to cause mayhem for the promise of 99 virgins in heaven. This ignores a) the mayhem the occupation forces cause (always in response to provocation, of course!); and b) that the insurgents have a legitimate grievance: the occupation of their country and region by imperialist forces.
What about those foreign fighters who are there? The report says "the vast majority of Saudi militants who have entered Iraq were not terrorist sympathisers before the war; and were radicalised almost exclusively by the coalition invasion." So, the bombing and carnage that has been caused, wouldn't have happened without the invasion. In other words, there was no shadowy terrorist network. The US has managed to piss enough people off that many want to fight and risk death to defeat it.
I'd rather just be drinking tea - an Iraqi resistance fighter goes about his business
A word about these bombings - the daily carnage that Bush, Blair & co. point to as justification for staying in Iraq. There's increasing evidence that the occupation forces are doing the bombing themselves, as witnessed by the two British SAS captured by Iraqi security (quickly rebranded as 'militants'), who happened to be carrying way more than army rations & rifles. Does this add up to a conspiracy? No, not yet. But this is standard operating procedures for the U.S., which has tried to provoke civil war through atrocities in much of Latin America - usually through proxies, but proxies are getting a little thin on the ground in Iraq.
What this all adds up to is: Iraqis are fighting the occupation. They weren't doing it before the invasion. The USA has created its own terrorists, who are showing remarkable restraint by not attacking the US itself. Permit me a little shadenfreude: told you so. And because I'm feeling generous, I'll even tell you how to stop it: get the fuck out of Iraq. When you leave, the terror leaves, the 'El Salvador option' death squads leave and the pissed-off Iraqis get down to governing themselves.
Maybe a tuna metaphor maligns fish - an unbarrelled tunaToday's Guardian reports what anti-war types have been saying all along, and indeed predicted before the war started: most insurgents aren't foreigners (Report Attacks Myth of Foreign Fighters). An American thinktank has confirmed that
Foreign militants - mainly from Algeria, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia - account for less than 10% of the estimated 30,000 insurgentsThis has been a convenient fiction of the war on terror: vast, shadowy terrorist networks are trying to engage the USA wherever possible. The war on Iraq is the latest battlefront, and the terrorist minions have been streaming across the border to wage jihad.
Feel the love - a British soldier set on fire by a grateful crowd in Basra
I've spoken about how racist this notion is before - savage brown folk with death on their mind, ready & willing to cause mayhem for the promise of 99 virgins in heaven. This ignores a) the mayhem the occupation forces cause (always in response to provocation, of course!); and b) that the insurgents have a legitimate grievance: the occupation of their country and region by imperialist forces.
What about those foreign fighters who are there? The report says "the vast majority of Saudi militants who have entered Iraq were not terrorist sympathisers before the war; and were radicalised almost exclusively by the coalition invasion." So, the bombing and carnage that has been caused, wouldn't have happened without the invasion. In other words, there was no shadowy terrorist network. The US has managed to piss enough people off that many want to fight and risk death to defeat it.
I'd rather just be drinking tea - an Iraqi resistance fighter goes about his business
A word about these bombings - the daily carnage that Bush, Blair & co. point to as justification for staying in Iraq. There's increasing evidence that the occupation forces are doing the bombing themselves, as witnessed by the two British SAS captured by Iraqi security (quickly rebranded as 'militants'), who happened to be carrying way more than army rations & rifles. Does this add up to a conspiracy? No, not yet. But this is standard operating procedures for the U.S., which has tried to provoke civil war through atrocities in much of Latin America - usually through proxies, but proxies are getting a little thin on the ground in Iraq.
What this all adds up to is: Iraqis are fighting the occupation. They weren't doing it before the invasion. The USA has created its own terrorists, who are showing remarkable restraint by not attacking the US itself. Permit me a little shadenfreude: told you so. And because I'm feeling generous, I'll even tell you how to stop it: get the fuck out of Iraq. When you leave, the terror leaves, the 'El Salvador option' death squads leave and the pissed-off Iraqis get down to governing themselves.
