by Ed Kinane
The original editorial from the Syracuse Post-Standard follows Ed Kinane’s commentary.

Friends,
Your December 22 editorial, “Who are the Insurgents?” demeans your profession.

As if its author were a U.S. government spokesperson, the editorial takes U.S. military reports or briefings at face value. If a journalist believes that the military is a credible source, he or she is no journalist. In the current Iraq war both sides have been caught in umpteen lies and evasions. Both assert the right to lie.

Your editorial’s subheading claims that the insurgents “are not united, except in their disdain for democracy.” In doing so, you call the kettles (the insurgents) black, while evading the issue of how black the pots (those invading their country) are.

You allow “democracy” to go undefined. Perhaps you equate “democracy” with voting. A moment’s thought will show the fallacy of doing so. Even if elections weren’t readily manipulated by outside forces or bought by the highest spender, democracy can’t be reduced to one day in four years.

This nation’s politicians and their corporate sponsors confuse “democracy” with the reign of the “free market.” But democracy is utterly different: democracy is a political system in which the people rule – in which we shape the decisions that affect our lives.

Crippling a country economically (with 13 years of sanctions)…invading it (unilaterally, on trumped up charges)…occupying it (brutally)…looting its resources (oil, etc.)…defiling its environment (with toxic and radioactive depleted uranium)…destroying its infrastructure (causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths)…bombing, shelling and shooting its civilians (uncountable corpses)…establishing permanent bases on its territory (to better control the region’s oil reserves)…defying international law and the Geneva conventions…imprisoning thousands (without due process)…torturing those prisoners (Abu Ghraib, etc.)…imposing an alien legal system (to promote profiteering by multinational corporations)…appointing ruthless puppets (before becoming a CIA operative, interim prime minister Iyad Allawi ran a Ba’athist death squad against Saddam’s opponents in Europe)

I’m sorry, but does any of this set the stage for leaving a democracy in place when the invaders return home? Does any of this reflect a genuine democracy sharing the wisdom of its own benign system?

Whether or not Iraq’s diverse insurgents are united in disdain for democracy, one thing is clear: they are united in their determination to repel their nation’s despoiler.

Imagine a super-super power invading the U.S…”to bring ‘democracy.’” Imagine further the invader’s editorial writers righteously wagging their fingers at our intense resistance to that invader.

Ed Kinane

Who Are the Insurgents?

Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Syracuse The Post-Standard

The daring, daylight attack in the middle of Baghdad Sunday shocked a world already benumbed by the random violence still gripping Iraq.

With casual cruelty, insurgents ambushed a car on Haifa Street, dragged the driver and passengers to the street, delivered a few stunning blows, then calmly aimed pistols at their heads and fired - all in front of an Associated Press photographer. Their bloody deed done, the men vanished, leaving the corpses of three Iraqis whose only “offense” was working on Iraq’s democratic elections next month.

Who are these attackers? What do they want? Can they be stopped? A recent detailed assessment by U.S. military sources in Iraq offers some answers.

The “Iraqi insurgency” is not a monolithic movement, though all its members oppose the U.S. occupation. One reason for the competing agendas is that Iraq is an uneasy bundle of Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds. With the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, each faction is pursuing its own aims.

The majority Shiites generally support next month’s parliamentary elections - which will likely install a Shia-dominated legislature. Other Shiites, notably the 2,900 or so who include followers of rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, want to scuttle the democratic process in favor of a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship.

Sunni insurgents also want to wreck next month’s elections - but for differing reasons. Some pursue their own version of Islamic extremism - like the ruthless Mohammad Sharkawa, whose Ansar al-Sunna group has hundreds of fighters seeking to destabilize central authority and make room for a Taliban-like theocracy. His group claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s grisly attack on a U.S. mess hall in Mosul.

An estimated 2,200 others are hard-core Baath Party loyalists of Saddam who promise a return to the “stability” of the old regime.

Then there are the foreign fighters bent on Islamic jihad - as many as 500 insurgents loyal to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the dreaded al-Qaida.

The total number of insurgents is estimated at up to 20,000 - including part-timers, fanatical suicide bombers and mercenaries. Money reportedly comes across the long and porous border with neighboring Syria.

The insurgents’ power to destroy, destabilize, intimidate and deter is considerable. It is hard to fight a shadowy band of insurgents for whom victory is simply chaos. Said one U.S. general: “I can’t sit here and tell you that we’ve overcome their best efforts yet.”

But what emerges from this assessment of U.S. adversaries in Iraq is that none of them would fulfill Iraq’s authentic democratic aspirations. They must not prevail.