http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GB01Ak02.html~snip~
It's the resistance, stupid
If the Sunni resistance is really 200,000-strong, as Iraq's chief spook has announced, it is the resistance that will have the last word. In a perverse twist of "reaping what you sow", American abuses in Iraq have reaped so such anger that nobody wants them to leave - even moderate Sunnis, because everyone fears total chaos. The Americans created the conditions for the emergence of a hardcore resistance. They created the conditions for the emergence of suicide bombers. And they created the conditions for staying: after all, now they need to engage in counterinsurgency. As the Iraqi Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni party puts it, even the resistance does not want the Americans to leave. What moderate Sunnis want to see is a detailed plan on the table, with fixed dates.
Americans - but not the rest of the world - are still unable to understand why the resistance has become so powerful. Every faction has its own reasons. Ba'athists are longing to recapture their lost power. Salafists want Iraq to be part of the new caliphate. Moderate Sunnis want the restoration of Sunni rule - which has always been the rule in Iraq. Iraqi nationalists want to kick the foreigners out - like they did with the Mongols, the Ottomans and the British. That's why the resistance is a relentless, ever-expandable proposition, but always under a unifying umbrella: to defeat the occupiers.
The Shi'ites may be on the brink of power after 14 centuries. Their premier electoral promise - later reneged - was to negotiate a total American withdrawal. If now their strategy is a "wait and see" - let's train Iraqi forces to fight the Sunni resistance and then we negotiate the American withdrawal - they may be in for a rude shock and awe.
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