The terrorists are Iraqis?

By Paul Tate

"They are shooting at us ... they are terrorists - they dress like the local population."
The above quote is from an American Marine interviewed on CNN during the US assault on Fallujah. Obviously, before CNN set up the camera scene the Marine's superiors had drilled the script into him. In parrot fashion, the young Marine dutifully repeated the mantra.
Amazing isn't it? The "terrorists" described by the Marine actually dress like the local population - they speak with Iraqi accents - they are, in Fallujah at least, Sunni Muslims, so what exactly differentiates them from the local populace?
Ever since the disastrous attack on Iraq began, the US occupation authorities have been trying to convince the rest of the world that the insurgency taking place in the country is either the result of foreign terrorists or of die-hard Saddam supporters who just don''t know when the game is up.
Initially, Iran and Syria came under fire from the hawks in Washington for allowing and allegedly abetting terrorists to infiltrate Iraq. No evidence was produced. Indeed, not one single suicide bomber has been identified as a foreign terrorist, not a single Al Qaeda operative has been arrested in Iraq, and of the 8,500 "security detainees" arrested by the US, only two per cent are said to be from outside Iraq.
Then we began to hear tales of civil war, of a supposedly ancient Sunni-Shiites split which was only kept under control by Saddam''s brutal oppression.
Convenient as this theory may be, it bears no relationship to the historical record and ignores the fact that the real fault line in Iraq is located up north, among the Kurds and their previous Sunni masters. One wonders what the occupation authorities will say then. Perhaps "terrorist Kurdish elements" from Turkey, Syria or Iran will be blamed.
During the past few weeks, thousands of Shiite militiamen loyal to what the mass media describe as the "extremist" Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr have joined the battle. They have been described by the occupation authorities as a "small group of criminals and thugs". Now we are hearing tales of how Saddam loyalists and terrorists have infiltrated the Iraqi police force. During the past two weeks of spiralling violence, the Iraqi police force has seen a fifty per cent defection rate, with the occupation forces claiming that 40 per cent have simply "ran away" while ten per cent have actually joined the resistance forces.
All these lies are, of course, aimed at deflecting attention from a notion the US is unprepared to entertain. Maybe, just maybe, the Iraqis don't want the Americans to protect them. Maybe the Iraqis are not too keen on the US concept of sovereignty. For, surely, sovereignty and democracy do not entail being ruled by a group of people who were hand-picked by a foreign power and who lack legitimacy with the local populace.
The truth is that the Iraqi people want the Americans to leave their country. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperate to stay and in order to do so they need to allocate blame for the violence. Just because the people of Iraq were glad to be rid of Saddam doesn't mean that they want him replaced with Paul Bremer and Co. Judging by the events of the past week and the pictures broadcast on Al Jazeera (not the sanitised gloss of the Western news media), the occupation of Iraq is looking less like liberation and more like repression. Funny how quickly liberators can turn into oppressors.
After World War I, the British managed to keep the lid on Iraq for three years before an uprising occurred. The Americans have managed to provoke an uprising in just one year. But we must not mention the word "uprising".
This word is a taboo in the media for it means that what is now taking place in Iraq has the support of a significant percentage of the population. The simple truth is that the terrorists referred to by the Marine on CNN are, in fact, Iraqis