Yesterday I quoted at length from an interview with a leader of the Iraqi resistance. Today, in the New York Times, is a very important piece on the size and shape of that resistance. The salient fact:
When foreign fighters, and the network of a Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are counted with home-grown insurgents, the hard-core resistance numbers between 8,000 and 12,000 people, a tally that swells to more than 20,000 when active sympathizers or covert accomplices are included, according to American officials.
That exaggerates the importance of the Z Man, however. Zarqawi and the “foreign fighters” are only a tiny slice of that number.
More importantly, the International Republican Institute—that’s the Republican Party—has done a poll in Iraq showing that the Iran-backed Shiite religious extremist parties, SCIRI and Al Dawa, are far ahead in pre-election preferences in Iraq. Now, polls in Iraq may not mean much. But the quote of the day comes from a Bush administration official in the Post:
“The picture it paints is that after all the blood and treasure we’ve spent and despite the U.S.-led occupation’s democracy efforts, we’re in a position now that the moderates would not win if an election were held today.”
But it’s more complicated than that, in fact. More and more, it looks like Iran is going to take over Iraq. That’s been the case for more than a year now. But the Iraqi resistance won’t be going along. Welcome to the second Iran-Iraq war. In the first one, we were semi-officially behind Iraq, although the neocons and the Iran-contra Casey CIA backed Iran. This time, the neocon-dominated Bush regime is backing Iran whole hog.
