CAN'T BEAT SOMETHIN' WITH NUTHIN':

In Fallujah, sentiment may be turning against resistance (Hannah Allam, 1/09/04, Knight Ridder Newspapers)

The explosion Friday rocked the dusty blue bus, sending tattooed tribeswomen to the floor in a swirl of fringed scarves and screams.

They were leaving town for a shopping trip to Baghdad, about 35 miles east, when insurgents apparently bombed a nearby American military checkpoint. None of the women was injured, but the blast destroyed the last vestige of their support for the guerrillas who make Fallujah the most consistently troublesome city for the U.S.-led coalition.

"Now you see how it feels, how we have to jump and duck when we hear explosions," Samia Abdullah, a 45-year-old Fallujah resident, told a Knight Ridder reporter on the bus. "Day and night, we are afraid, and we are tired of it. I can no longer feel proud of the resistance. They have made these bombings our everyday life."

Such disdain for anti-American attacks is a new phenomenon in Fallujah, where violence in recent weeks included two deadly attacks on U.S. helicopters, frequent grenade assaults on convoys, roadside bombs that blocked traffic for hours and the brazen drive-by shooting of two French contractors whose car broke down on a road leading to the town.

The celebrations that followed such attacks in the early days of the occupation are becoming more rare, several residents said, and martyrdom no longer seems noble when it means upturning the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

"I'm against the resistance now, and I'm not afraid to say it," said Mahmoud Ali, 25, who was tending a roadside soda stand. "I can bring you a dozen friends who say the same thing. I wish the attacks would stop. It's affecting our whole stability, our whole life."

As several of the better stories on the task of defeating the resistance have mentioned, its fatal weakness is that it offers no alternative vision of an Iraq--particularly since Saddam's capture--that prospective supporters might choose instead of the one that America is offering. Killing Americans is probably fun, but it won't feed the family.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2004 10:09 PM