What Happened to the Iraqi Resistance?

[B0LSHEVIK]

It was once capable of inflicting impressive damage on the Imperial army. What happened? If we are to believe the 'official' version out of Iraq, the resistance was operated by Al-Qaeda and 'foreigners,' and that, simply, public sentiment favored the US. I could see a peephole of truth to this. Think about it, what the hell were all those suicide bombers (or missiles?) attacking Iraqi markets and common working Iraqi people. What was the point of that? Why not direct those attacks against the occupation? Anyways, what really happened in Iraq?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I am geared towards that there is still resistance.If I recall correctly I remember hearing on the bourgeois news sources that a few months ago was the heaviest coalition death toll in Iraq for years.So there is still resistance,it just isn't as heavily publicized because the media wants to populace to believe that the war is over, and "won," and that Iraqis like their new government.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The US/Coalition realized it would be better if it just gave jobs to the insurgents. Many of the insurgents were fighting because they were angry over economic reasons and it was costing more money to fight them by force. So in that respect the Sunni insurgents won in the end ... many were old Iraqi army men, Baathists or Sunni tribal militias which were discriminated against by the new Shiite government, which in 2007-08 absorbed many of the Sunni insurgent groups into a new militia. The Mahdi army was bought off too with parliamentary representation, although they said they will go to war if America isn't out by the end of this year.

This didn't end all resistance but it reduced it substantially, if only because there were suddenly fewer insurgents.

[The CPSU Chairman]

The resistance is on a low flame now, not like it was before. But it is still going. It's just not being reported on the media anymore. Nobody cares now. I guess because the war is "over", since the U.S is pulling out. Never mind how it affects the Iraqi people, of course. No one ever cared about that and they still don't. Also, Iraq was Bush's baby whereas Afghanistan is Obama's, so now it's Afghanistan the media cares about. It could be too that the media wants people to think the violence is over and therefore the U.S "won" the war.

It seems to me also that the U.S managed to buy off some of the rebel militias and get them to switch sides. But I was never really clear on what happened there.

[Os Cangaceiros]

What happened to the insurgency? Two words: bought off.

It's a simplistic reduction, but essentially what defeated the insurgency was money, not bullets.

[B0LSHEVIK]

Good answers all, but, is saying the resistance was led by Al Qaeda correct? I never understood the suicide bombs directed at Iraqi markets either.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Good answers all, but, is saying the resistance was led by Al Qaeda correct? I never understood the suicide bombs directed at Iraqi markets either.

Al Qaeda never led the resistance there, they were merely the most violent faction and the one most willing to kill large numbers of Iraqis. The other insurgents were mostly ex-Baathists and either Sunni or Shiite tribesmen who hated the government or the US for one reason or another. The US fired several hundred thousand bureaucrats, state employees and soldiers from the Baathist government, and that made up a sizable portion of the insurgents.

Also to some extent the Iraqi insurgents won. The current Iraqi government has minimal American influence, at least compared to what the US would have wanted (judging by the size of the embassy they built in Baghdad). Like the North Vietnamese in 1973, it knew it had won the war even if their soldiers weren't marching through Saigon. The fact that they forced the Iraqi government to recognize their power and bring about an end to the occupation in the next couple of years was victory enough. Now Iraq is increasingly friendly with countries in the area which view the US quite negatively in fact!

[Os Cangaceiros]

Yeah, Al Qaeda In Iraq jumped into the fray simply because it was a chaotic situation. The other insurgent forces generally hated them, especially the Shia insurgents/civilians, whom AII launched attacks on. (or at least that's been my understanding)

[Jose Gracchus]

Yeah AQIM (al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or if one really prefers, The Base of Jihad in the Land of the Two Rivers) was not a central faction of the 'Iraqi resistance' (if some coherent thing could really be said to exist--I think it mistakenly posits the very heterogeneous Iraqi insurgents as being more similar to old-style national liberation fronts than it actually was) and was certainly not among its victorious fractions.

The insurgents were bought off with a better deal with the imperialists, which of course the poor quality of which is the initial cause for the insurgency itself. This ought to be a lesson to those who are still humping the nat-lib rationalizations of the past.