A host of names has been tagged to those who are fighting US troops in Iraq. In his speech last night, President Bush referred to them as “foreign fighters,” “Saddam loyalists,” and simply “terrorists”. The journalist Patrick Graham says that separating these fighters from the Iraqi people themselves might be a mistake.
Graham spent the past year in and around Fallujah, meeting with the people he calls simply, the resistance. He says they are not the assassins, thieves, and foreign fighters as they are so often described. Instead, he says, many of them are simply men who oppose the occupation. “We are like a man with a razor in his throat,” one of them told Graham, “We can’t spit out the Americans, but we can’t swallow them either.”
Guests:
Patrick Graham, freelance journalist who covered the Iraq war for the London Observer. His most recent article in the forthcoming Harper’s magazine is “Beyond Fallujah: A year with the Iraqi resistance.”