Who are the insurgents? What motivates them?
They’ll always end up showing their true colors and run from the firefight – cowards, all of them. They key to these guys is peer pressure and simply a lack of anything better to do. They have no job. Their friends fight the coalition and are an influencing factor, similar to the good kid who gets into trouble because he hangs around with the neighborhood bully. They engage in anti-coalition attacks the same way a teenager at home shoots street signs, stealing something on a whim, or breaks a window with a rock. Most don’t even know why they do it. They’ll instinctively spout off a few verses of the Koran as a conditioned reflex, or as an excuse, and participate because other guys their age are doing so. This is the majority of the insurgency. 25%
Read the full text of an excellent analysis.
Hat tip to Gringoman. By the way, Gringoman has been trying to get to Iraq as an independent blogger. He’s having problems because he isn’t part of a mainstream news outfit. I hope the military will continue to revise and reconsider how it views bloggers. We are already a major source of news about what’s happening here in Iraq, and my personal opinion is that indepedent journalists have just as much to offer to the national and world dialogue as anyone else.