| If a foreign military rolled its tanks down your street, imposed a curfew in your neighborhood and shot on sight anyone on the streets after "lights out," and demanded that you and your neighbors immediately turn over all weapons or be subject to house-to-house searches, what would be the reaction of you and your neighbors. Would it matter if the invading military claimed to be there to help you? Would you resist? Would you consider your resistance an "insurgency of terrorists?" |
| [X]enophobia [is] an impulse that's far more ancient and widespread than the yearning for democracy that President Bush talked about this week. Yet it's been curiously underestimated by conservatives who used to pay close attention to just this sort of instinct.
Yet when American troops met resistance after the war, conservatives dismissed the early insurgents as "dead-enders" and expected Iraqis to join Americans in quickly vanquishing the thugs. T. E. Lawrence learned that lesson when trying to unify Arabs early in the last century. Today's liberators in Iraq like to attribute the resistance to Islamic fascists' fear of democracy and hatred of the West. But those fascists know that an abstract critique of Western ideology isn't enough to attract followers. In their appeals they constantly invoke the need to expel foreigners from their soil, a battle cry that is the great common denominator of suicide bombers around the world. During the Civil War, Union soldiers were amazed to see poor Southerners without any stake in the slavery system defending it in suicidal charges. But there was a simple explanation, as a barefoot, emaciated Confederate captive famously put it when a Union soldier asked him why he kept fighting: "Because you're here." Source: "'Get Out, You Damned One'" - By JOHN TIERNEY - NY Times - July 2, 2005 Iraq is starting to look like the West Bank and Gaza. The strategy there is to occupy the territory and beat the residents into submission. The results have been less than successful. (This is a correlation that has not escaped the residents of the middle east.) Is this the model we want to follow? |
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