A tiny handful of evildoers. posted by Richard Seymour

"Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander of the multinational coalition in Iraq, told reporters on [June 27] that the worst-case estimate of the size of the Iraqi insurgency is less than one-10th of 1 percent of the country's population -- that is, a top end of 26,000 people supporting the insurgency." -- The Guardian

If you've been following guerrilla wars as long as I have, you have to laugh when you hear Army PR guys say that the Iraqi insurgents are just a teeny-tiny bad apple in a big barrel of shiny Red Delicious Iraqis. One bad apple -- that little beady-eyed Al Qaeda operative Zarqawi -- is supposedly responsible for the whole mess. Sorry, folks, but insurgencies just don't work that way.

Of course, you can't blame US Army guys for doing their job -- lying to the press. But you sure can blame the press for buying it.

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Guerrilla war depends on two "obvious" facts -- so "obvious" nobody in the press even mentions them:

1. The people who live in a place care more about it than the foreign occupiers, and so they'll outlast them in a long guerrilla war.

2. So the only way to defeat the guerrillas is to wipe out or displace the population.


It's been done. The Brits did it in the Boer War a century ago. They were stuck in a losing war against an insurgency by the Boers, so they dragged the Boers' women and kids into the concentration camps to die of every horrible disease in Africa. It worked. A quarter of the civilian population was wiped out, and the Boers lost heart and surrendered, giving the Brits access to the gold and diamond mines. Even now the Boers still burn with hatred over what the Brits did to them, and you can't blame the poor bastards.

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Nobody in Iraq was going to risk their lives just for Saddam. Guerrilla warfare is terrifying for the guerrilla as well as the occupier. The occupying army has all the tanks, heavy weapons, aircraft, communications, media control and funding. Air power is what would scare me the most. It's almost impossible to hide from a helicopter equipped with infrared sensors. If you've watched those reality cop-chase shows, where they track suspects fleeing in total darkness, you have an idea of what the urban guerrilla is up against.

The Iraqis are fighting for one simple reason: because we invaded and occupy their cities.

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The poster boy for the "foreign agitator" theory these days is Zarqawi. I admit, he's a better candidate than Saddam was. He's a real guerrilla operator, with a solid mujahedeen resume: Born in Jordan, probably to Palestinian refugee parents, grew up in the town of Zarqa (his alias means "The Guy from Zarqa"), went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and got radicalized.

But there's no sign he's anything more than a small-time recruiter for suicide-bomber volunteers. Zarqawi's face has been all over the Net for years now, and there's a $25 million bounty on him. Like they say in spy movies, his cover is blown. No way he can be really useful as a guerrilla leader. That job puts you out on the street all day, moving through checkpoints, changing your identity non-stop.

The reason that both sides in the war -- the Pentagon PR corps and these Jihadi websites -- keep making such a big fuss about Zarqawi's every move is that he's good PR for both of them. The Al Qaeda fundraisers need a Mr. Big for their propaganda as much as we do. Except their version is a hero, Zarqawi as Robin Hood in a greasy skullcap, always outsmarting the big, dumb American crusaders. He's a great gimmick, a cross-eyed poster boy, for Al Q.

The Pentagon wants to put an outside agitator's face on the insurgency. America will do anything to avoid having to face the most obvious fact about Iraq: They hate our guts, all of them.

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And behind is the real insurgency: the Iraqis. All of them, in the Sunni zones, and a damn big slice of the Shi'ite population as well. Yeah, the Shi'ites are cooperating with us now because their 62 percent slice of the Iraqi population guarantees they'll win any election, but if we cross them again we'll face the same insurgency profile we face now in the Sunni Triangle. Which is, to put it bluntly, everybody. Every-damn-body in the place.