War & Resistance

There is an amazing article on TomDispatch.com by The Independent's Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn:

The war in Iraq that started in 2003 has now lasted longer than the First World War. Militarily, the conflicts could not be more different. The scale of the fighting in Iraq is far below anything seen in 1914-18, but the political significance of the Iraq war has been enormous. America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness....Much of what has gone wrong has more to do with the U.S. than Iraq. The weaknesses of its government and army have been exposed. Iraq has joined the list of small wars -- as France found in Algeria in the 1950s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- that inflict extraordinary damage on their occupiers.

That is something of Bliar's legacy he can be proud of - helping to give the U$ empire a push downwards. As the various resistance groups in Iraq continue to grow stronger and more dangerous, we can get an insight to how sophisticated they will get by looking at what the 25-odd years of Hizbullah's resistance to Israeli's has evolved;

It's looking at air-power:

One example, apparently under serious consideration by Hizbullah, is how to retaliate against Israel's violations of Lebanese airspace. UNIFIL has recorded more than three dozen violations by Israeli aircraft since the cease-fire came into effect. "We have reported them to the UN Security Council. What more can we do? Shoot them down?" says UNIFIL spokesman Alex Ivanko....But Hizbullah might attempt to do just that. "We were unable to make good use of our anti-aircraft capabilities during the war. This is something we are looking into for the future," says Abu Mehdi. "The resistance is planning a new strategy."

And how to strike at a larger, more powerful army - by out thinking them:

As far as I know, this is the largest and most elaborate bunker discovered so far. Just the effort that went into building it was extraordinary, and yet, it was constructed in complete secrecy....Every piece of equipment, every steel plate, every girder, every door had to be carried by hand up the side of the valley and fitted into place inside the bunker. And there was no clue as to what happened to the hundreds of tons of quarried rock during the excavation work.