Who are the Insurgents?
Jeffrey Dubner at Tapped
posts on part of a story in USA Today:
"Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency.
"Since last August, coalition forces have detained 17,700 people in Iraq who were considered to be enemy fighters or security risks, and about 400 were foreign nationals, according to figures supplied last week by the U.S. military command handling detention operations in Iraq. Most of those detainees were freed after a review board found they didn't pose significant threats. About 5,700 remain in custody, 90 of them non-Iraqis."
As Dubner says, there are two possibilities about the forces hostile to the U.S. in Iraq: either they are people the U.S. would have to fight sooner or later--more or less part of international terrorism, more or less connected to 9/11, etc.; or they are caught up in an Iraqi struggle. The Iraqi struggle in turn can be divided between long-standing civil wars that were more or less kept under wraps by Saddam, and then unleashed by the U.S. invasion; and more recent battles that are more or less entirely opposed to the U.S. occupation.
The most recent indications, including musings by the new government on how difficult it is to distinguish people who can be co-opted from those who cannot (here and here), suggest that the U.S. waded into a volatile situation, almost entirely separate from 9/11 or international terrorism, and at least ran a serious risk of making it worse.
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