When do we start calling them IRAQIS instead of "INSURGENTS"

[Proud2BAmurkin]

"Insurgents" sounds ridiculous at this point.

[Ignacio Upton]

1. A lot of the insurgents AREN'T Iraqis

A lot of them are Al Qaida foreign fighters. For example, Al-Zarqawi was Jordanian, not Iraqi.

[Bucky]

2. Very very few of the insurgents are foreign fighters, less than 5% last I heard.

That's less than the number of people who weren't British flying with the RAF in WW2.

The reason we don't call them the Iraqis is the same reason we don't refer the combatants in the American Civil War as Americans. You need to identify which faction is doing what fighting. The Iraqi people are hardly united against their American occupiers--they're mostly killing each other these days (more than a hundred slaughtered daily--close to 20 times the US fatality figures) and they only target American troops as targets of convenience.

What the media should do, but won't, is specify whether insurgents are Sunni extremists, al-Qaeda affiliiates, Mahdi Army Sadrists, anti-Sadr extremists from one of the several Shia breakaway factions, government fighters, ex-Baathist bandits, Baathist insurgents, or members of one of the other gazillion factions that have arisen along the Glorious March to Freedom.

[Ignacio Upton]

4. Even if foreign fighters are small in numbers, they are still influential

Case in point, Al-Zarqawi.

[alfredo]

8. By the time he got liquidated he had worn out his welcome.

al qaeda will meet the same fate as us. they are outsiders.

[Bucky]

9. I have a better example (since you can't offer more than one example)

The US occupation force are foreign fighters. :)

But seriously, if there wasn't a homegrown opposition the foreign fighters wouldn't matter.

[leftchick]

6. about 1500 are foreign fighters

who adopt that catchy "Al-Q in Iraq" name for the cache. The vast majority are sunni and shiia fighting it out because the USA freed them to do so.

[aein]

3. i think he means that there is no single "insurgency"

It's ridiculous the reporting of what's going on in iraq. Insurgents blow up shi'ite neighborhood one day. The next day, insurgents kills 50 sunnis. My god, it's a civil war! They're not an insurgency against anything, true, they both hate the US, but they're just killing each other. The majority sunni and iran versus the minority sunni and al queda.

[JimDandy]

5. Amen to that. n/t

[alfredo]

7. We're not sure there will be Iraqis. Iraq is an artificial state

that was held together by a military strongman. For good or ill, it is returning back to its tribal states.