Fedayeen vs the Minuteman

Jack, from The Horror, thinks that I’m off base some with my Special Ops vs. Fedayeen post (see the comments for what he wrote). All in all his comments were fairly well written even though they made it clear that he has a position that is pretty much opposed to mine. He did make a few comments that I want to respond to – one in particular.

First, the Special Ops guys are not the same as al-Qaida. Yes, they both plant bombs with the goal of creating a feeling of terror. Al-Qaida tries to create terror among civilians; Special Ops tries to create terror among the military and opposition government. The difference is in Special Ops targeting legitimate military targets. There is a distinct difference.

Now he also compared the Fedayeen to the American minuteman of the Revolution. At first glance, the most people’s initial reaction would be to spit back something to the effect of “the Fedayeen are not the same as the minuteman!” On some levels, they are; on other levels they are not.

The basic reason that I will ultimately disagree that they are like the minuteman is that they are not a true grass-roots movement. The Fedayeen is, in my opinion, a warped attempt at disguising military and regime control units. It is the very fact that Baghdad is giving the orders that takes the Fedayeen from the realm of a minuteman type group to a deceitful military unit.

I base my assumption of regime control on the reports coming out of southern Iraq of civilians being “policed” by the Fedayeen. They have forced civilians to take up arms against their will, they have attempted to force civilians to engage in “martyrdom attacks” against their will, and they have executed people who have resisted (or threatened their families). Baghdad has also, before and during the war, spoken of the Fedayeen as agents of the government.

During the American Revolution, we had no central government to give orders to the minutemen. There was no control exercised over the minutemen, except when he showed up to fight. They were not forced to fight; their families were not executed when they refused to join the battle. Plus the minutemen generally, but granted, not always, fought in the same formations as the “official” American military. Most of the time, they were clearly combatants, even if they were out of uniform. That’s not to say that there weren’t deceitful attacks by the minutemen outside the battlefields, there were, but there was an understanding that if you were caught alone fighting the Crown you were as good as a dead man.

If the Fedayeen was a grass-roots movement affiliated with, but not controlled by, Baghdad I would buy the “defender of the nation through necessity” argument. But they are, for all intents and purposes, part of the Iraqi military. That puts them in a different class than the American minuteman who was fighting to defend his home of his own free will, not through the direction of Philadelphia.

The Al Jazeera article I referenced basically was asking why it was ok for Special Ops to operate out of uniform and why it was against the rules for the Fedayeen to do so. Out of uniform, a member of either group, SO or Fedayeen, should lose the protection of the Geneva Conventions. They are operating outside the rules of the Convention; they should not be afforded its protections. If we expect the rules to be enforced as written, we need to be able to suck it up when the rules go against us.

The Fedayeen is a government controlled military organization that uses tactics against the rules of the Geneva Convention. If they were a true grass-roots organization, I would agree that they are worthy, if somewhat suicidal, adversaries. But as a branch of the Iraqi military, I think that they are fighting dirty. They are not spontaneous defenders of Iraq. And that is why they are still different than the American minuteman.