Yesterday, Bush gave a speech at the Naval Academy and outlined his plan for victory in Iraq. ( Why is it that he always gives his speeches before members of the Armed Forces? Wouldn’t it be great if he spoke before a large crowd of anyone that wanted to listen? He could just announce a place on the grounds of the National Mall and a time that he will speak, and then any American-supporters and dissenters-could show up and hear him speak. Now that would be a speech. Dream on… ) In his speech, he offered up the same old tired platitudes and declared that our plan is to fight really hard and win.

I noticed that he never referred to the resistance fighters as “enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government” like Rummy suggested. Instead he mostly referred to them as terrorists-42 times. He slipped just once and referred to them as insurgents.

So who are the insurgents? Are they all terrorists? Why are they so intent on killing Americans and Iraqis?

This morning on the drive in to work, I heard an NPR interview with Zaki Chehab that answered those questions. Chehab is the political editor of the Arabic TV station al-Hayat-LBC, and he is currently on tour promoting his new book, Inside the Resistance.

Here are some excerpts from an article with the same title that he wrote two years ago for The Guardian.

The US-led coalition forces, frustrated by their inability to control the situation, blame foreign infiltrators for these attacks, emphasising the similarity between these new tactics and those of al-Qaida and other militant groups in the Middle East. Few seem to grasp the fact that Iraqis, who are well-trained militarily, have simply learned from others’ experiences, and carried out the attacks themselves.

I first met Iraqi resistance fighters at a farm in the suburbs of Ramadi, north of Baghdad…

What struck me most, though, was their intense commitment to their cause: the liberation of Iraq from its current occupiers. These were no “Ba’athist remnants”. On the contrary, they blamed Saddam Hussein for bringing the Americans into Iraq. They went so far as to say the capture of Saddam by allied forces would sever the links between Saddam and the resistance movement once and for all. They defined themselves as nationalists. One said: “We do not want to see our country occupied by forces clearly pursuing their own interests, rather than being poised to return Iraq to the Iraqis.”

Later, I met members of a different strand of the resistance: Saddam Hussein loyalists in Tikrit.

…

In Mosul and Falluja, the resistance groups are different again. Here, most identify themselves with Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

…

Iraq is a country which has faced more than 20 years of war, and more than a decade of sanctions. The motivations of each strand of Iraqi resistance vary: the loyalists are driven by the loss of power; the nationalists by the desire to establish independence and security; the Islamists by their dream of returning political Islam to the Iraqi nation. These aspirations may be incompatible, but the focus of each group now is to fight together against the common enemy of Iraq – the occupying forces.

In some areas at least, this common interest has a structural expression. In the back streets of Mosul, soon after the fall of the city, I came face to face with a group of armed men, shouting and firing shots in different directions. I asked who they were: some introduced themselves as former Ba’athists, others said they belonged to Islamist organisations. Though ideologically worlds apart, they explained that they all took their orders from the same committee in the city, which was headed by a group of religious leaders. I later found there were similar relationships in Falluja and Samarra.

Chehab wrote that in October 2003. Too bad Dick Cheney and the gang didn’t read it.