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 last 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.
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