IT'S ABOUT HONOR?

So says this piece...and note the role the media play.

Given the world’s shortage of enlightened despots these days, this fantasy is unlikely to be realized either. No leaders, no goals, no future—what do Sunnis hope to gain from the violence?

Honor. Forget political or social objectives—or even attempts to “drive out” the Coalition. By killing GIs and Iraqi civilians, Sunni terrorists feel they are reclaiming the pride they lost when the U.S. military juggernaut crushed their miserable fiefdom. This explains the sense of desperation one detects in their complaints about the U.S., as well as their lack of interest in ideology, propaganda, leadership or anything that normally characterizes a true “resistance movement.” The goal of these criminals is simply to kill: a non-negotiable position that allow an enemy no chance for accommodation or truce—only withdrawal or death.

Unable to grasp such irrationality, the press insists on bestowing a more acceptable motive to the death squads stalking the Sunni Triangle. They are “guerrillas,” we read, waging a war of “resistance” against Coalition “occupiers”—as if they were an Arab version of the French maquis or the Viet Cong. The gunmen are happy to have an obliging media grant them legitimacy and offer justification for their atrocities. As the Israelis discovered with the PLO—another humiliated bandit-gang transformed into a national liberation movement by the media—even a democracy can lose the moral high ground to corrupt insurgents posing as the representatives of an oppressed people..