IRAQ: INTIFADA

LA Times: Fury Ignites Solidarity in Iraq, By Naomi Klein

BAGHDAD - April 9, 2003, was the day this city fell to U.S. forces. One
year later, it is rising up against them.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just
a few "thugs, gangs and terrorists." This is dangerous, wishful thinking.
The war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by
regular people defending their homes - an Iraqi intifada.

"They stole our playground," an 8-year-old boy in Sadr City told me
this week, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field next to a rusty
jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in an area of Baghdad that is
otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected garbage.

Sadr City has seen little of Iraq's multibillion-dollar
"reconstruction," which is partly why Muqtader Sadr and his Al Mahdi army have so much
support here. Before U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer III provoked
Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and
killing his deputies, the Al Mahdi army was not fighting coalition
forces; it was doing their job for them.