Iraq Resistance: Bigger, Badder and Uncowed. posted by Richard Seymour

The 'Iraqi government' tries offering a 'truce' that doesn't involve the eviction of occupying troops, and the resistance says:

[A] spokesperson for the 11 largest Sunni insurgent groups said they can't accept the plan because they don't recognize the current Iraqi government.

They want a quick end to foreign troops in Iraq, Iraqi prisoners released from all Iraqi and U.S. jails and the United States and other coalition countries to allocate money to rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure destroyed by war.

They also want all negotiations to be monitored by the United Nations or Arab League.

Despite repeated attempts to smear the resistance as an anti-civilian sectarian movement riddled with psychos and under the thumb of Zarqawi and his putative successors, it is understood by US intelligence that the movement is indeed an anti-occupation resistance. For instance:

New data reveal, surprisingly, that the vast majority of the Iraqi insurgents' attacks are still aimed not at Iraqi security forces or at civilians, but rather at U.S. and coalition troops. In other words, as much as was the case a year or two ago, the Iraqi insurgency is primarily an anti-occupation insurgency.

The statistics—compiled by the multinational military command in Iraq and reproduced in a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office—raise anew a basic question in the debate over the future of U.S. policy toward Iraq: Is the presence of American troops doing more harm or more good?

And here are the stats (click to enlarge):



Of course, this is a huge surprise for those who hoover up impressionistic media reports:

This is a surprising finding because so many news stories from Iraq have been reporting a rise in attacks on Iraqi security forces and in clashes between Sunni and Shiite factions. The graph confirms that those attacks have risen, sharply. But they still constitute a small percentage of the attacks overall.

The graph reveals another discouraging trend. Since August 2004, the number of attacks has stayed about the same—bobbing up and down between 2,000 and 3,000 per month, recently hovering around 2,500.

The resistance is not going to be defeated any time soon. The US has killed tens of thousands of people, whom they claim are resistance fighters - and yet they have consistently estimated the resistance at no more than a few thousand, ten thousand at the most. The truth is, there are tens of thousands of fighters and a large pool of passive and active supporters. The last time they polled Iraqis, they found a growing number of people supporting resistance attacks - a majority outside Kurdish areas. So, the real question is how much pressure we can apply to force our respective governments to stop brutalising Iraq and withdraw. In the process, they will have to publicly negotiate with the resistance just as they had to in Vietnam. Perhaps we can even get Rumsfeld the Nobel prize in the process...