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Originally Posted by zen_tom
I just wanted to flag this up for a moment. I don't think this is what the insurgency is necessarily all about. The insurgents want; an end to occupation, and end to being raided in their homes in the middle of the night, an end to checkpoints, and end to civillian deaths, an end to seeing foreign troops on their soil, an end to their humiliation at the hands of the west, an end to their human rights being violently snatched away from them by western troops, and a form of government that isn't subject to manipulation and the cheapening of values that is evident in the decadent west.
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All due respect, but I don't think this is whats really going on in Iraq, I don't believe this is the mindset of the insurgency.
You have a society that, before the war, was held together by violence, fear and intimidation by one man and his (ethnic minority) tribe. The issues you bring up above, such as 'night' raids, civilians dying, personal humiliation and lack of civil rights; I would venture a guess that all these issues and worse flourished abundantly under Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. As far as the insurgency struggling against the spread of 'corrupted Western values', come on, who in the world is pure as the driven snow? The 'insurgency' itself has committed some pretty repellant and atrocious acts - I don't think they have a moral leg up on anyone. This Islamic purity that they espouse is, to my mind, a way to avoid the realities and responsibilities of the modern world, and at the same time a way these people forcibly corral their citizens together by appealing to age-old stereotypes and fears of the 'outsider'.
These 'insurgents', these leftover remnants of a violent dictatorship, fight for only one ideal that I can see: Power, and the right to control 25 million people and its resources in the same dysfunctional, violent, outdated and isolated way that many other suffering countries in that region operate.
edit: one more thing - can you imagine the type of Anti-Western government that these 'insurgents' would assemble if they came to power? If they hate the West so much now, can one picture how rabidly anti-Western they would become if they were let to come into power after all that has transpired?