The Knight Ridder news service has interviewed some members of the anti-American guerrilla/terrorist forces in Iraq, and it's clear that this is not a popular resistance movement:

quote:
The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters.

The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam's elite fedayeen militia force, they said, as well as foreigners who slipped across the country's long and porous borders to battle American troops.

Those who say that the continuing resistance makes the war a "failure" are deluding themselves. That there are still active pro-Saddam forces is testament to the war's success: Most of these people would have been killed had the major combat part of the war been much longer and bloodier.

Furthermore, the presence of non-Iraqi terrorists is a positive. Much better to have these people in Iraq, where tens of thousands of American troops can kill or capture them, than in other countries where they'd pose a danger to civilians .