Occupied Iraq Will Never Know Peace

[Aidoneus]

Dying and Lying
Occupied Iraq Will Never Know Peace
By TARIQ ALI

The recolonisation of Iraq is not proceeding smoothly. The resistance in the country (and in Palestine) is not, as Israeli and Western propagandists like to argue, a case of Islam gone mad. It is, in both cases, a direct consequence of the occupation.

Before the recent war, some of us argued that the Iraqi people, however much they despised Saddam Hussein, would not take kindly to being occupied by the United States and its British adjutant.

Contrary to the cocooned Iraqis who had been on the US payroll for far too long and who told George Bush that US troops would be garlanded with flowers and given sweets, we warned that the occupation would lead to the harrying and killing of Western soldiers every day and would soon develop into a low- intensity guerilla war.

The fact that events have vindicated this analysis is no reason to celebrate. The entire country is now in a mess and the situation is much worse than it was before the conflict.

The only explanation provided by Western news managers for the resistance is that these are dissatisfied remnants of the old regime.

This week Washington contradicted its propaganda by deciding to recruit the real remnants of the old state apparatus - the secret police - to try to track down the resistance organisations, which number more than 40 different groups. The demonstrations in Basra and the deaths of more British soldiers are a clear indication these former bastions of anti- Saddam sentiment are now prepared to join the struggle.

The bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad shocked the West, but as Jamie Tarabay of the Associated Press reported in a dispatch from the Iraqi capital last week, there is a deep ambivalence towards the UN among ordinary Iraqis. This is an understatement.

--snip--

http://www.counterpunch.org/ali08282003.html

[quilp]

1. If you go into someone elses country with a gun in your hand

you had better be able to explain what you are doing there. In a single sentence. If you cannot. Get out!