I appreciated Walter’s observation in the comments to my post on the latest atrocity by the Iraqi “patriotic resistance”:
The true believers will be quick to tell you that the monsters you describe represent but one of MANY resistances working to expel the occupier. It’s all exceedingly complicated. The resistance they endorse is completely indigenous, grain-fed organic and pesticide free. That jihadis who are blowing thousands of Iraqis to bits and getting all the press have nothing to do with this clinically pure, platonic ideal of a nationalist anti-colonial movement, they simply have more aggressive advertising.
I’m reminded of an exchange I had in the comments here last August with Victor S, proprieter of the Apostate Windbag blog. Mr. S insisted:
There is a spectrum of politics within the Iraqi resistance, as Susan Watkins very well points out in the latest New Left Review. There are social democrats, liberals, Stalinists, nationalists, Ba’athists and Islamists all there in different factions.
To which I responded:
Social democrats and liberals? Got any names?
I looked at Ms. Watkins’s article, and then at the article she footnoted for this claim. The footnoted article included not a single mention of social democrats or liberals.
Mr. S then claimed to have responded to my question on his blog. Here is his post. If you can find anything other than a repetition of Susan Watkins’s unsubstantiated claim, please let me know. (In light of the atrocity involving the young man with Down’s Syndrome, be sure to read the quote from Tariq Ali in the heading.)
So let me raise the question again for Mr. S or anyone else who wants to field it: Do you have evidence that the armed insurgency in Iraq includes anyone who can be described fairly as a social democrat or a liberal, or even anyone whose democratic credentials extend beyond calling himself a democrat?