Juan Cole was right about Sunni fighters
I argue in my new book, Engaging the Muslim World, that the Sunni Arab guerrilla war against the US was wrongly interpreted as religious in character when mostly it was a manifestation of Sunni Arab nationalism, and that most Sunni Arabs in Iraq are secular-minded. That is, the Bush administration propaganda about fighting"al-Qaeda" in Iraq was just that.
The US military is supporting what I said. According to a poll it carried out among the Iraqis in its custody, some 36% percent of the 26,000 prisoners held by the US at the peak of the arrests said that they had never been inside a mosque, and 70 percent said that they were not regular mosque attenders. The Sunni and Shiite Iraqis in US detention centers got along fine and played soccer quite amicably with one another (why wouldn't they-- they were in agreement on the need to push the US military out of Iraq and were all paying the price together for their determination to do so). But all through this decade we were bombarded by the corporate media and the White House and Pentagon with with the message that the US was fighting religious forces in Iraq, specifically"Islamofascism," and that in fact it was the 'central front' in the war on 'Islamic terrorism.' In fact, the prisoners were mostly not religious. The US was fighting secular Iraqi nationalists and couldn't admit it for fear of looking like an occupier. Hence, its spokesmen lied about the guerrillas and made them out to be religious fanatics.
Read entire article at Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
The US military is supporting what I said. According to a poll it carried out among the Iraqis in its custody, some 36% percent of the 26,000 prisoners held by the US at the peak of the arrests said that they had never been inside a mosque, and 70 percent said that they were not regular mosque attenders. The Sunni and Shiite Iraqis in US detention centers got along fine and played soccer quite amicably with one another (why wouldn't they-- they were in agreement on the need to push the US military out of Iraq and were all paying the price together for their determination to do so). But all through this decade we were bombarded by the corporate media and the White House and Pentagon with with the message that the US was fighting religious forces in Iraq, specifically"Islamofascism," and that in fact it was the 'central front' in the war on 'Islamic terrorism.' In fact, the prisoners were mostly not religious. The US was fighting secular Iraqi nationalists and couldn't admit it for fear of looking like an occupier. Hence, its spokesmen lied about the guerrillas and made them out to be religious fanatics.