Burns is usually good but he's been snowed by the medieval nonsense.
Sure, large numbers of Iraqi's might resent or feel guilty they were relieved of the tyranny by the US but they don't bomb foreigners or other Iraqis because of it.
What's going on is fairly straight forward. A number of Iraqis don't want modernity to be established. They know it means the end of habitual corruption, patronage, dictat and terror they have had all through their history and they don't want to see it end. They are fighting for corruption and tyranny.
I expect the government that comes to power in the Summer will very actively battle these terrorists. They know, and others like Sistanni know, it's necessary to utterly defeat these people.
The lack of proportion in the following is absurd:
After Falluja, fewer Westerners here than ever, outside the American military and civilian establishment, could still believe that the American vision is likely to triumph over an insurgency that has featured recurrent acts of inhumanity, including suicide bombings that have killed more than 1,000 Iraqis.
Hussein was doing a thousand a month! And this merely as collateral damage in his medieval vanity project of making over the country in his image.
Iraqis say in the surveys, and there's no reason to doubt the validity of this datum, the single biggest problem the country faces is security and this is what they are talking about: not the random possibility of being killed by a bomb, but the return of the old ways. |
