Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out
Sadr’s answer was clear, from that announcement he made in mid-June: He’s going to divide the movement into two parts, just like the IRA did. There’ll be a big-tent political party for the ordinary civilian supporter, backed by a small, well-trained urban guerrilla movement. And there’ll be a firewall between the two groups, so Sadr can deny any armed operation that gets messy, just like Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein used to do when an IRA attack went wrong. The IRA provides Sadr with a perfect blueprint on how to do it. (It even had a slogan to describe its new tactics, saying it would win “with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot in the other.”)
After its reorganization, the IRA fought much smarter, pushing its political party, Sinn Fein, and working to set up top-secret guerrilla cells in London to hurt the Brits where they lived and take the war away from the Northern Ireland slums. Over the long term, it worked: After it blasted London a couple of times, it cut a deal just in time to be out of the terrorism business before 9/11. As of now, not a single IRA fighter is in prison and Sinn Fein is the fastest-growing party in Ireland.
Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out
By Gary Brecher, AlterNet.
One thing the United States doesn’t get about guerrilla warfare: It’s not over until the guerrillas win
It’s very easy to see what’s up in Iraq right now — if you’re willing to face it. The trouble is, most “experts” aren’t willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn’t want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that “the surge worked,” as if that translates to “we win, it’s over, let’s go home.”
Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They’re not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla’s viewpoint 80 years ago: “The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him.” The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they’ll go home — because they can. It’s that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it’s over is just plain ignorant. That’s one thing you can rule out instantly.
But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that “Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence.” Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: “From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. … The weapons will be held exclusively by this group.” In other words, he’s switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.
Also, there’ll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to “liberate the minds from domination and globalization.”
The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr’s announcement to mean that he’s getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the “special groups,” which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol’ middle of the road. See, that’s classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It’s like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn’t think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it’s easy to find one, but you can’t look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr’s Mahdi Army did — as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there’s a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.







