The US invasion is being unmasked as colonialism and will end in a war of liberation.
First it was Saddam and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, who were leading a rump of diehard loyalists to regain power; then it was Saddam's deputy, Izzat al-Douri, leading the same rump; then it was a leaderless rump of diehards who had no place in the new, free and democratic Iraq; then it was foreign terrorists "flooding" into the country; then it was a fiendish foreign al-Qaeda terrorist named Zarqawi who killed Shiite mourners to start a Sunni-Shiite civil war; then it got a bit confusing, with a creeping number of insurgent operations in the Shiite quadrangle; then it got even more confusing with the Shiites changing tactics and staging increasingly militant protest marches; and today we have Muqtada al-Sadr - an "unrepresentative" Shiite radical cleric leading a tiny army of extremists who happen to be active in most of Iraq's 18 governorates and who want to destroy the new free and democratic Iraq.
The 160,000 occupation forces, backed by mass destruction technology, are now deemed insufficient in the fight against the Sunni diehards and the Shiite unrepresentative extremists. Furthermore, many thousands of foreign fighters have indeed come "flooding" into Iraq - not terrorists sent by bin Laden but mercenaries hired by the occupation authorities. Their role is to carry out dangerous tasks, to help reduce US Army casualties.
This is in addition to the Pentagon's Israeli-trained special assassination squads. Iraqis now believe that some of the recent assassinations of scientists and academics were perpetrated by these hit squads. A similar campaign of assassinations in Vietnam claimed the lives of 41,000 people between 1968 and 1971.
The unleashing of F-16 fighter bombers, Apache helicopter gunships and "precisely" targeted bombs and tank fire on heavily populated areas is making the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah and the southern cities resemble those of occupied Palestine. Sharon-style tactics and brutality are now the favoured methods of the US-led occupation forces - including the torture of prisoners, who now number more than 10,000.
