Robert Fisk - Saddam's Capture Will Not Stop The Relentless Killings

[realFedUp]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5376.htm

Saddam's Capture Will Not Stop The Relentless Killings From Insurgents

Robert Fisk in Baghdad

snip-

In Fallujah, in Ramadi, in other centres of Sunni power in Iraq, the anti-occupation rising will continue. The system of attacks and the frighteningly fast-growing sophistication of the insurgents is bound up with the Committee of the Faith, a group of Wahabi-based Sunni Muslims who now plan their attacks on American occupation troops between Mosul and the city of Hilla, 50 miles south of Baghdad. Even before the overthrow of the Baathist regime, these groups, permitted by Saddam in the hope that they could drain off Sunni Islamic militancy, were planning the mukawama - the resistance against foreign occupation.

The slaughter of 17 more Iraqis yesterday in a bomb attack on a police station - hours after the capture of Saddam, though the bombers could not have known that - is going to remain Iraq's bloody agenda. The Anglo-American narrative will then be more difficult to sustain. Saddam "remnants" or Saddam "loyalists" are far more difficult to sustain as enemies when they can no longer be loyal to Saddam. Their Iraqi identity will become more obvious and the need to blame "foreign" al-Qa'ida members all the greater.

Yet the repeated assertions of US infantry commanders, especially those based around Mosul and Tikrit, that most of their attackers are Iraqi rather than foreign, show that the American military command in Iraq - at least at the divisional level - knows the truth. The 82nd Airborne captain in Fallujah who told me that his men were attacked by "Syrian-backed terrorists and Iraqi freedom-fighters" was probably closer to the truth than Major Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, would like to believe. The war is not about Saddam but about foreign occupation.

Indeed, professional soldiers have been pointing this out for a long time. Yesterday, for example, a sergeant in the 1st Armoured Division on checkpoint duty in Baghdad explained the situation to The Independent in remarkably blunt words. "We're not going to go home any sooner because of Saddam's getting caught," he said. "We all came to search for weapons of mass destruction and attention has now been diverted from that. The arrest of Saddam is meaningless. We still don't know why we came here."

[wabeewoman]

1. "We still don't know why we came here."

This is so sad! I just read in the local paper how some local soldiers and their families figured they would be coming home soon because Saddam was captured.

[Manix]

2. ...Fisk is right on the mark.

nt

[The Zanti Regent]

3. Why can't we read Fisk in the New York Times?

OOPS--I forgot, Fisk is a reporter and the asses who run the New York Times haven't a clue as to what a reporter is!

[realFedUp]

4. Fisk was on Democracy Now this morning talking from Saddams rathole

Fascinating to hear someone describe the little
house and yard, books, foods (including Happy Tuna)
and claustophobic rathole Saddam was found in.