One of the assumptions behind Internationalism is that the majority of people (the working class) around the world share the same interests, the same broad needs. This leads to the conclusion that wars between peoples and nations are wrong, because they force the majority to fight for the interests of their respective ruling classes, rather than fighting together for their own.
Part of making that argument is asserting that foreign peoples and cultures are not so alien from our own. The enemy are not all blood-thirsty murderers who want to kill and enslave you, they are people with families and communities, who want what is best for themselves and the people around them. They want economic security and the freedom to live their lives.
So, part of the empathy that makes people oppose conflict comes from the presumption of shared values. I don't like my government for a variety of reasons, but if another nation changed it by force, imposed their own model of government, deliberately bankrupted the entire economy, forced everyone out of work, wrecked the electricity, health and education systems, allowed big multi-national corporations to corruptly run everything on massive cost-plus contracts that benefited nobody but themselves, sold-off our natural resources and finally had a few hundred thousand soldiers running around the place telling me what to do, dishing out arbitrary violence... I'd be pissed. So I oppose regime change.
On the other hand, I like to live in freedom from religion, and even if I know others don't, I think they personally want to be free to believe in what they want to believe. They don't want to be told how to live by some bearded dude with a kalashnikov who evidently isn't getting enough. I don't want to be told that the cinema is sinful, or holding my girlfriend's hand is abhorrent before God, I don't want to worry that between my house and the corner shop I might offend the wrong person and get a bit of a kicking. So I don't imagine for one moment that I want to live under a religious autocracy.
Let's imagine for a moment that the people of Iraq, at least in some respects, are like me. They overwhelmingly reject the continued occupation because basically the Americans are looting their country (this they have confirmed in poll after poll). Yet the last few months seem to have confirmed something else, they don't find living under sectarian militia very pleasant either.
So, Political Islam seems to be becoming the millstone around the necks of would be resistance movements. Whilst the goal of removing the occupation remains an aspiration of most Iraqis, their specific political project, a hardline Islamic state becomes more unpopular as people come to know what it means in practice (as Iran proves, the worst advert for an Islamic Republic is actually having to live in one).
I'm putting this forward as a hypothesis for something that the 'victory to the resistance' Left has shown little appetite to analyse, namely exactly why their chosen horse is losing ground and the combined forces of the occupation and the Iraqi government have been so successful over the past year. Doing so involves putting aside various viewpoints that I've personally adhered to at one point or another; that insurgencies inevitably continue until their original political basis alters (where other factors, intrinsic to their organisations can play a part, they can squander initial support and die off - see the Greek civil war, The Shining Path, the FARC for details), that the occupation will necessarily continue to spawn violence (it will only do so where the population see a favourable end-game to such violence) and that this is the primary reason to promote it's withdrawal.
I won't claim to have any massive insight into why the civil war continues to dampen. I wish there were some sort of analysis that lacked the crowing of the pro-war lobby and the defensiveness of the antis (more than enough have passed to classify the war as an abject disaster, more than enough issues make opposition to the continued occupation a no-brainer), but I've not seen one. Yet I think from the perspective of critical support for the resistance (or in my case, support for the concept of resisting an invader, but at no point any faith in the groups actually undertaking those actions), this would be the moment for the 'critical' part of that phrase to come into play. If the ousting of the occupation was righteous, necessary and popular, why have the groups that undertook to do so failed so badly? Is it completely unrelated to the political nature of these groups? Their sectarianism, their brutality, their comprised (non-existent?) notion of political and national freedom, their links to other ruling regimes and groupings in the region? Was ultimately their wider political project, rather than resistance per se, the source of their failure?
If some of these are the case, it is not a bad thing that their power is on the wane. Civil wars are horrendously brutal things to live through, and anyone with much compassion can only hope that conflicts are resolved and people can live their lives in peace. If the culmination of the armed rebellion was to be a regime like Iran's, then it scarcely seems worth paying the price of more bloodshed for.
Moreover as the war profiteering and looting on the part of the coalition continues, some sort of project to oust them remains a necessity. Rather than a futile contest of arms with the invader, perhaps as the insurgency dies down it will be superseded by a political project more appropriate to the task of finally forcing them out?
