Who is the Enemy?

Josh Chafetz, Matthew Yglesias, and Sebastian Holsclaw have all recently touched upon the identity of the people in Iraq presently using violence to oppose the CPA, with consequences for what U.S. policy should regarding troop levels and internationalization. I think, however, that the question of our enemies' identity is far from conclusively answered, if there is even a united opposition in the first place.

Juan Cole today says they are "Sunni Arab nationalists and Sunni radicals in Iraq", which he then generalizes into "the Iraqi people." I'm not sure he can really do that, as the two categories he named don't include all the Iraqi people, and in fact seems to support the line about Saddam loyalists which often comes out of the administration. (They may not technically want Saddam back, but they are the same people who formed the base of his regime.) Hiwa Osman of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting suggests that they are a mix of former Ba'athists and Muslim militants who are gaining new recruits from the Iraqi population. This article describes a group called "Muhammad's Army" which claimed responsibility for the blast at the UN heaquarters, and apparently tried to coordinate the dispersed Ba'athist remnants behind its own program.

There is clearly a growing coordination behind these attacks, so I can't buy the notion that a nationalist resistance has simply sprung from nowhere without the coordinating hand of either a noteworthy Islamic militant group or leaders of Saddam's old regime. However, if they are recruiting significantly from the population at large, internationalization would help reduce that pool of recruits by allaying Iraqi fears of a new colonial era and by providing reconstruction aid to give jobs to Iraqis, thus reducing the number who will turn to the resistance out of financial desparation. This in turn would give us a finite number of enemies with central coordination, and presumably make winning the war easier.

UPDATE: I knew I was forgetting something. A couple of posts down, Juan Cole discusses an Iraqi political scientist's observations that Turkmen and Christians are among those killed fighting the U.S. forces, suggesting a nationalist resistance directed mainly at driving out the U.S. If true, that might support the "Iraqi people" line mentioned above. I should also add caution against seeing "Muhammad's Army" as some new umbrella group for the resistance...when I was paying more attention to the Eurasia Geopolitics Yahoo Group over the summer, I saw claims of responsibility and calls to arms from lots of miscellaneously named groups that may or may not have been important.