That really does strike me as a very confused piece in the Guardian Wolfgang linked to there. It swings back and forth between drawing rather strained analogies between Northern Ireland and Iraq, and pointing a finger at very selectively reported stuff about the actual attitudes expressed towards what is happening in Iraq at present.

Myself, I think that talking in terms of an overall "Resistance" in Iraq is misleading, not just because using that term is a value-loaded way of talking, but also because, pretty clearly, there are a lot of different sets of people engaged in these kinds of activities, with a range of agendas.

True enough, that's been the case in other "resistance" wars of course, such as in France during the war, but not to the same extent as here. It's more akin to lumping together the IRA and the UDA in the Irish context, and speaking of them as "the Resistance", which would clearly have been absurd.

It seems to me that there are some people in Iraq who are engaged in trying to get the Americans and their allies to pull out. The term "Resistance" is at least in principle applicable to them -which doesn't in any way mean they are a nice bunch (but then, nor were the French Resistance in many ways. That's how things work in that kind of war.)

But for the people who are trying to attack Shi'ite targets, with the aim of stirring up a Civil War, it seems likely to me that their objective is to suck the Americans ever deeper into a military quagmire in Iraq, with the object of weakening them elsewhere, and pushing them into the kind of over reaction which will strengthen the forces opposing them. Iraq is just another chess piece to be sacrificed for the overall objective.