March 5, 2005
WHAT ARE YOU REBELLING AGAINST?:
Iraqis Angry With Insurgents (AP, March 05, 2005)
"I demand that they be put in the zoo along with the other scavengers, because that is where they belong," said Bassam Yassin, who lost his brother to an insurgent attack in Mosul. He spoke Wednesday after relatives of victims protested outside a police station in that northern city.Iraq's majority Shiite Arabs and ethnic Kurds have long criticized the largely Sunni Arab insurgency, portraying the militants as terrorists, loyalists of the Saddam Hussein regime and foreign fighters.
But the insurgents are now also being criticized publicly by prominent Sunnis, including opponents of the U.S. presence.
The quicker the Sunni are incorporated into government the sooner the "insurgency" is completely delegitimized.
MORE:
Angry Iraqis denounce insurgent attacks (Lebanon Daily Star, March 05, 2005)
One turning point came in Hilla, a predominantly Shiite city south of Baghdad where a suicide car bombing killed 125 people on Monday - the deadliest single attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein.Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2005 1:06 PMFor many in Hilla, it was the final straw.
On Tuesday, more than 2,000 people chanting "no to terrorism!" staged a mass demonstration outside the small medical clinic where the suicide bomber rammed into a crowd of Iraqi police and army recruits, also killing civilians from a nearby market.
Outraged, they waved fists in the air and carried banners denouncing the insurgents.
Popular anger against insurgents has been driven, in part, by government propaganda. Last week, U.S.-funded Al-Iraqiyya television aired a series of confessions showing alleged insurgents calmly talking about how they had beheaded dozens of people, kidnapped others for ransom, and raped women and girls before killing them.
"People are realizing that the captured insurgents are not super heroes. They are timid people who kill for money and they have nothing to do with Jihad," said Karim Humadi, head of programming for Al-Iraqiyya.
Don't the Sunnis need to incorporate themselves?
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at March 5, 2005 2:24 PMI would imagine that it was only a segment of the Sunnis who were stooges of the regime, most of the rest were pretty much as oppressed as the rest of Iraqis. If the majority Shia demonstrate their bona fides in running a more or less decent government respectful of the confessional rights of the various communities of Iraq, most Shia should come around fairly quickly.
The stooges and the religious nuts are another matter.
Posted by: Bart at March 5, 2005 2:59 PMmy gut feel is that the fighting will die down very quickly as the foreign terrorists become exterminated (by the local iraqis). the remnants of ba'ath will be selling appliances and used cars within 12 months, as they settle to their proper place in the new society.
Posted by: cjm at March 5, 2005 3:57 PM"But, but, but . . . they're the minutemen, the true Iraqi patriots, and they deserve to win. Michael Moore said so! Its--aaaahh!"
"He's having a seizure."
"No, it's just the cognitive dissonance catching up to him."
Posted by: Mike Morley at March 5, 2005 9:06 PMThe question is whether the Iraqi government will succeed faster in iradicating the violence then before the violence causes the government to lose support. They have a certain amount of time, but how much?
I think we won a major victory with the election, but the war is not yet over. As Han Solo says, "Great, kid. But don't get cocky."
Posted by: Chris Durnell at March 6, 2005 7:23 AMChris,
One thing that works in our favor is that there is a very definite limit of support the terrorists can achieve. They have no cachet in either the Shia or the Kurdish regions of the country. And if the Sunni unite behind one of the two rebel groups, it will be a simple matter for the Shia and the Kurds to stomp them into a mudhole.
For a very long time, the Sunni bourgeoisie has little interest in supporting terror because the cost of supporting the terrorists, i.e. getting stomped by 80% of Iraqis, is far in excess of the value to the average Sunni of re-establishing Saddam-style Ba'athist hegemony or certainly a religious Sunni state.
If the area has a decade or so or Weimar-style weak government, that is another matter.