Good Current Analysis of Iraqi Insurrection

Healing Iraq writes this about the current unrest there.

I find it [ the beheadings and whatnot] dubious because the tactics are not those of Zarqawi or foreign terrorists. I have reason to believe that this was the work of former Iraqi security forces. These remain the only organised groups in Iraq today with the required experience and precision to carry out such an operation. This was completely planned beforehand. We know that there have been infiltrations in the current Iraqi police and NG, not only by criminals and former prison inmates, but by informers, Ba'athists, Fedayeen and Mukhabarat members. I do not doubt for a moment, unlike many Iraqis, that Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi indeed exists or that he is behind much of the turmoil in the country. His family and comrades have been interviewed on several documentaries made on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya and his activities and movements have been traced in Jordan, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. However, I am more inclined to assume that the present strategy of the underground Ba'ath party (and there is such an organisation) is not to claim direct responsibility for its actions, and for obvious reasons. It may operate under the guise of Zarqawi's group to give an impression of a holy war in Iraq and to cloak its activities.

There have been rumours and tidbits here and there over the last year and a half that the Ba'ath and its security apparatus is still at large in most of the country and that it remains the most organised political and military entity in Iraq. Its leadership has been purported to be in Syria. Its methods are familiar to Iraqis and they can be easily recognised and singled out. Intimidation, extortion, sabotage, executions, kidnappings, beheadings and coordination with the Arab media have all been employed in the past by the Ba'athist regime, and the same methods largely apply today to the resistance. While Iraqi Salafi groups and foreign terrorists are also active, they remain restricted to certain areas and their operations are limited in scope.

The Arab media persists in labelling these criminal elements as freedom fighters in a legitimate conflict with an occupying force, and that this resistance is nationwide, spontaneous and widely supported by the Iraqi people as an immediate result of US actions in postwar Iraq. The media chooses to ignore the fact that the main victim of this resistance is the Iraqi people itself, and that only a tiny fraction of attacks are now directed at occupation forces. This resistance realises that if free elections supervised by the UN and the international community take place in January 2005 and if a legitimate representative government assumes power in the country then the resistance would have to cease to exist.