Have you noticed this lately? Suni insurgents=al qaeda, Shia insurgents=Iran

News reports about Shia violence in Iraq have for a while now been being told almost always with "context" which imply that all Shia insurgents are acting as proxies for Iran. Some of the news reports have connected Iraqi Shia violence to Iran are more subtle than others, but there is almost always that inference of a connection made.

Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but the connecting of every act of Suni insurgency violence to al qaeda seems to be a rather new meme.

The living hell that we have created in Iraq is complicated, and there may not be any simple formula for understanding the matrix of the acts of violence that occur daily in Iraq. But the last I heard the number of foreign fighters in Iraq (those who we would associate with al qaeda) are still a reletively low percentage. Iraqi violence against US forces in Iraq are driven by Iraqi nationalism--not radical religious idiology.


I believe that these distinctions of who is behind the violence in Iraq are important. Can you imagine if the average Joe-Blow American voter knew that their son or daughter was killed or injured in Iraq not because they are "protecting Iraqis from outside evil influences", but rather because the Iraqi people themselves want us to leave? IMO, the result of the American public knowing the truth would be the end of the war.

mentions the insurgents who come across the borders from Jordan and Syria to fight in Iraq - we are led to believe that this is bad.

From our stand point it is bad.

But whose fault is it that they come across the borders?

If we had a Commander in Chief who was correctly running the war, those borders would have been sealed from day one. The need to seal off the borders was a major reason that experts like Brent Scowcroft told Bush to have 300,000 people onthe ground to hold the positions needing to be held.