I just finished reading this
article by Naomi Klein in Harpers from last month. I did a Google search of Daily Kos and found only these two sparsely commented diaries
here and
here.
What gives? It offers an incredible amount of insight into why the insurgency is fighting the occupations. Did you ever wonder why al Hawza - Sadr's newspaper was shut down? Here's the answer:
As I left the meeting with Mahmud, I got word that there was a major demonstration outside the CPA headquarters. Supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their newspaper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing "false articles" that could "pose the real threat of violence." As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer "is pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their political and individual freedoms." To me it sounded less like hate literature than a concise summary of Milton Friedman's recipe for shock therapy.
This also sounds a lot like what Bush is trying to do in this country as well by keeping us in fear of another terrorist attack and raping the U.S. Treasury while we are distracted. America's outsourcing of jobs and corporate ownership to foreign corporations in Iraq is a major reason for their insurgency. Our government is more concerned about creating the world's first test case of unencumbered free market capitalism than they are of creating a true representative democracy - yes, I know we've been brainwashed into thinking the two are one in the same but they are very very different ideologies.
Kerry needs to latch onto this. The Iraqis are not fighting the American occupation so much as they are fighting the WTO! There fight is not much different than our fight to combat a corporate takeover of our government. They are fighting corporate invasion of their lives! This is the reason the Iraqis have given their support to Islamic radicals like al Sadr - because he's the only one who will help them secure their jobs and keep their factories from being privatized. If Kerry can show the Iraqis that he has no designs on exploiting their country and will give them back their factories and jobs he will go a long way to quelling the insurgency.
Here's another excellent article that was linked to in one of the prior diaries on Allawi.