Patriots and invaders Iraqi resistance to foreign occupation enjoys great

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

Support.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1050860,00.html

It was my first and brutally abrupt realisation that Baghdad, the city of my childhood, is now occupied territory. It was also my first encounter with a potent symbol of Iraqi hostility to the occupation forces. Sitting in the front seat of the taxi that brought us from Amman, I suddenly realised that a heavy machine gun was pointing at us from only a few metres away. It was an American soldier aboard an armoured vehicle in front of us, stuck in a traffic jam on the outskirts of Baghdad. He gestured disapprovingly towards our driver for approaching with some speed, then looked to his left and angrily stuck out a middle finger. I followed his gaze and there was a child of no more than eight or nine sitting in a chair in front of the open gates leading to the garden of his house. He was shouting angrily, with a clenched fist of defiance, cutting the air with swift and furious right hooks.
Two weeks later, and after talking to scores of people and touring much of Baghdad, it dawned on me that that child's rebellious, free spirit was a moving and powerful symbol of how most people in Baghdad felt towards the occupation forces. It is precisely this indomitable spirit which survived the decades of Saddam's brutal regime, the numerous wars and the murderous 13 years of sanctions. And it is precisely this spirit that Bush and Blair did not take on board when they decided to invade and occupy Iraq. They chose instead to listen to the echo of their own voices bouncing back at them from some of the Iraqi opposition groups, nurtured, financed and trained by the Pentagon and the CIA. Some of these Iraqi voices are now members of the US-appointed Iraqi governing council.

A recent report in the Washington Post backs up the rumours I heard in Baghdad that the Iraqi resistance to occupation is so strong that the authorities are now actively recruiting some of the brutal officers of the security and armed forces that Saddam himself used to suppress the people. If true, the US administration, in the name of fighting the so-called remnants of Saddam's regime, is now busy trying to rebuild the shattered edifice of Saddam's tyrannical state - a tyranny which they had backed and armed with WMD for many years. One of the popular sayings I repeatedly heard in Baghdad, describing the relations between the US and Saddam's regime, is "Rah el sani', ija el ussta" - "gone is the apprentice, in comes the master."
<snip>

Where are the flowers?

[Barrett808]

1. "Gone is the apprentice, in comes the master."

That just gave me chills.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

2. And I'm afraid they may be right.

[sistersofmercy]

3. Hey Billy Pilgrim, thanks for posting...

The Iraqis are indeed a willful ppl too bad the misadministration hadn't given one thought to the reality of Iraqi nationalism. Looks like the Iraqis have the skinny on Bush Co, though.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

4. I think this admin expected them to behave like the Western "sheeple"

they are so used to controlling.

[hail to the thief]

5. First Time Here

Why is it so hard for this administraion to understand that alot of the Iraqi resistance is coming from the Iraqi people themselves? It is an illegal occupation and they have every right to want us out of their country, they are fighting for their land, their culture, to hell with this notion of so called "Democratization" of Iraq, are these imbeciles for real? We don't even have Democracy here at home and we're supposed to enlighten the Iraqi's? Give me a break, leave the poor people alone, get out of their country and BRING THE TROOPS BACK HOME! As a side note please don't let the thugs on the right silence you, we can't afford to be pansies here. Raise hell! raise it loud and raise it often! We're right.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

6. Welcome to DU!

I think that this administration has a circle jerk mentality. You have a small grpoup of neocons continually telling each other what they think the other wants to hear. You're right. They don't have a fucking clue.

[hail to the thief]

9. Thanks for the welcome

Why and how is it that Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld and all the PNAC boys are still employed? What is this world coming to! This war has as much to do with terrorism and WMD's as Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland (sorry if it's misspelled)had to do with "breathing room" for Germany. Is it just me or is anybody else with even a flimsy grasp of history shocked and appalled at the absolutely stupid comparison with the Marshall Plan, for starters note the word PLAN! and did you hear Nazifeld testifying? what a joke! He needs one of those big ass Hammers from Monty Python (the lunatic church) to fall right on his head and squash him like the rodent he is. Why oh why are the sheeple so freakin' stupid! for the love of god pick up a book and turn off American Idol! The "mainstream" is so fucked it's not even funny.

[Starpass]

7. It is inevitable that we have to install a repressive, dictatorial

new government and that Chabli (sp.?) is just our "kinda guy" for the task. We need to surpress these people so we can be about the business of plundering their oil. There is no way we can have a true democracy and all that jazz over there because the first thing they would do would be to vote us the hell out of there!!!---that will not be permitted. We have not liberated them. We have taken them over and if we have to kill every son of a bitch in the country to show the world how we "liberated" them, then that's exactly what we will do. And the dumb Amurekan will think we brought Deeemockrahsee and Malls to Baghadad.

[sspiderjohn]

8. We are recruiting Saddam's thugs to suppress the Iraqi's now?

Indefensible.