Resistance

I doubt that Bush will take the Iraq peace deal currently under negotiation, since nothing in it prevents the Iraqis from re-establishing control over their oil. Besides, the war still makes Dick Cheney a pile of money.

Even so, I would here like to note a point of language: We are now allowed to refer to the insurgents as the Iraqi "resistance."

Conservatives will scream at the new nomenclature. Not so long ago, they snarled at the word "insurgent," preferring to apply the label "terrorist" to anyone who opposed American troops -- even to Iraqis fighting in Iraq. Anyone who used any other term stood damned as a traitor.

That was then. This is now:

“For those that defended their country against foreign troops, we need to open a new page . . . They did not mean to destabilise Iraq. They were defending Iraqi soil,” said Adnan Ali, a senior member of the Dawa party of Nouri alMaliki, the Prime Minister.

So sayeth one of the guys we helped to put in office. You think the folks in (say) Alabama will ever get the news? At this point, even the red-staters must understand that our mis-used soldiers were placed in the impossible position of trying to act well in a bad cause.

Gary Buell at Covert History offers an apt quote from Ehud Barak: "There's no way to win an occupation. It's just a matter of choosing the size of your humiliation."