Believe it or not, we’ve all heard the phrase “show me your numbers” before. Sometimes it’s a smart thing to say, and sometimes it’s a very dumb thing to say.

That’s almost as good as the spin that reporters are failing to report about how peaceful Iraq is now, because they’re too cowardly to take the risk of being killed or kidnapped.

What a remarkable thing to say! I take it then that we can glean no knowledge of what happened in the Peloponessian War from Thucydides account of it, not of the Gallic war from Caesar. How careless of them not to include some stats.

Perhaps Saddam knew he would be defeated, and had a backup-plan in place. The American strategy seemed to assume that Saddam, like Wiley Coyote, would do exactly the same thing during the second war that he did in the first—rely on his helpless conventional forces.

At one point along the way there was a story about a big truck loaded with over a billion dollars in
high-denomination US currency. Hard currency goes a long way in keeping an insurgency going. Very few civil wars are self-financed, spontaneous expressions of the will of the people.

You can’t avoid being moralistic at least a little bit, otherwise we can slice it to the point where we might say, for example: hey, Saddam Hussein was just taking care of his family, supporting his tribe in Tikrit, supporting his fellow Arabs – so what’s wrong with his gassing Kurds? Yeah, sure, everyone’s in pursuit of their own interests, but that doesn’t normally prevent us from casting judgments.

Although I do agree that it’s not exactly black-and-white situation. Here’s an example of a very successful collaborator who is regarded as a hero in his country’s history books: Ivan I of Russia.

I liked the Cockburn article, in part because, I suppose, he reinforced almost everything that I thought or suspected before. I’m not sure he’s right about the relative number of people being killed by Sunni insurgents vs. death squads. Fisk visited the Baghdad mortuary last summer and found there’d been 1000 murders in July—I wonder if there’s any way to tell how many of those political and how many weren’t and who is doing it to whom? But anyway, those murders by gunshot and torture outnumber the number being killed by Sunni bombers.

Cockburn, OTOH, seems to accept that the Americans might be killing very large numbers, or anyway he doesn’t contradict the interviewer when he suggests this.

It’d be nice if you had sensible discussions like this in the mainstream American press—instead we get the fairly crude jingoism of a John Burns in the NYT.

What Cockburn says is very interesting and clever and probably true: Sistani may or may not do this, and the Sunnis may or may not do that, and the Kurds will probably do the other but not too much, blah, blah, blah. And, of course, every individual will make some decision today and may or may not change his/her mind tomorrow.

But there is also a big picture there, forest behind the trees: a typical, garden variety national-liberation anti-colonial struggle. Imperialists are trying to divide the natives in order to acheive their goals, as always; some natives resist, others collaborate. And others maneuver – like Sistani. That’s not exactly being a collaborator, but it’s not too far away from it.

And I don’t see anything silly about pressing this point.

Note that the interviewer has no real response to the clear statements that the real opposition to Saddam has always been very Kurdish. If you buy a simple collaborator/resistor system, then you can’t fit the Kurds in neatly, because they were clearly insurgents against Saddam and are now cooperating with the Iraqi government and fighting the Sunni Arab insurgents.