Once again, the Iraqi resistance, or mysterious individuals claiming to be part of the resistance, strike out with futility. “Iraqi militants holding a German woman and her son hostage demanded Saturday that Germany withdraw its troops from Afghanistan to ensure their safety,” reports CNN. “The little-known Arrows of Righteousness group posted video on the Internet on Saturday threatening to kill the two in 10 days if Berlin won’t comply.”

Let us rewind back to November of last year. “Germany on [November 13, 2006] ruled out sending combat troops to Iraq and fended off pressure to shift peacekeepers to unstable parts of southern Afghanistan,” Reuters reported. “The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the resulting occupation have been extremely unpopular in Germany. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s opposition to the Iraq invasion helped him win re-election in 2002.”

“Despite her strong support for the Iraq war, a hugely unpopular position in Germany, Angela Merkel has pledged not to send German troops to Iraq,” lamented the Heritage Foundation last June. “The deployment of German troops to the Middle East would be a political earthquake that would instantly split the coalition, causing the fledgling government to collapse. It would also be strongly opposed by many in her own party…. Instead, Merkel will continue the Schroeder gov­ernment’s policy of supporting Iraqi stabilization and reconstruction efforts without a direct military footprint inside Iraq.”

“Everyone knows there are not going to be German troops in Iraq, that this is going to be a sensitive issue in the relationship,” Merkel declared during a visit to Russia early last year. “It has been a difficult issue in our relationship and I fully understand that,” admitted Bush the Lesser.

In fact, according to CBS News, “Germany has never sent troops to Iraq,” thus we may conclude the “little-known Arrows of Righteousness” are smoking something other than herbal fruits and tobacco in their hookahs.

But the “militants” appearing in the video, “in civilian clothes, not the usual uniform worn by militants,” dispute this, claiming Germany is involved in attacking “secured villages,” and thus its innocent and easily snatched civilians must suffer.

Meanwhile, “Islamic militants threatened to attack Germany and Austria unless the two European nations break ranks with the U.S. and withdraw their personnel,” according to yet another internet video, this one posted on “an Islamic Web site used by Al Qaeda -linked militants.” Naturally, the “authenticity of the video could not be verified, but it was released by the Voice of the Caliphate, which is said to be run by Usama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group,” that is to say it was issued by a documented CIA asset named after a database, as the late British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons. As we know, the Voice of the Caliphate is a cartoonish “al-Qaeda” weekly television show, featuring an “anchor man … wearing a military uniform and a black mask,” complete with a “Koran and a machine gun,” according to Spiegel Online, a presentation certainly designed to win the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world, that is so long as said Muslims conform to the neocon version of a Muslim, that is to say a blood-thirsty and psychopathic killer.

“Germany has no troops in Iraq but has troops serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, most of them focused in the north of the country,” reports Fox News. “Austria also has no troops in Iraq and has just five officers in Afghanistan.”

Of course, this minimal profile is unacceptable to the United States, a country that starts wars and expects others to participate. “The US administration is increasing pressure on Germany to lift restrictions on its Afghanistan directive and help reinforce combat troops in the south to stop Taliban insurgents,” Deutsche Welle reported last November. “The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper quoted a high-ranking US defense official as saying that German troops based in the relatively peaceful north must be able to move to the south at short notice. The unnamed official said allied commanders should be able to call the Germans in the morning, asking for a battalion, and it should be there by the evening.”

As the PakTribune notes this morning, the situation has not changed over the last few months. “Britain’s Nato allies who refuse to fight in Afghanistan were accused of causing ‘huge resentment’ and a sense of betrayal among UK forces,” the online newspaper explains. “The 60-year-old coalition has come under pressure as countries such as Britain, America and Canada continue to shoulder the burden of the fighting, while others such as Germany and France have held their troops back.

Last week, according to United Press International, a “staff member of the German relief organization Deutsche Welthungerhilfe, or German Agro Action, was shot by unidentified assailants while on a road trip with several locals in the northern Afghan province of Sar-e-Pul. It is the first death of a German member of the group in more than four decades.” Since the CIA and Pakistan ISI created Taliban was run off in late 2001, as they were no longer useful and stood in the way of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, a pet Unocal project, the German Agro Action “has spent more than $50 million on water projects, infrastructure and rural development in Afghanistan. It has rebuilt bridges, schools and hospitals. The group is also involved in a program aimed at reintegrating former combatants and the generation of alternative sources of income for opium farmers,” the latter hardly acceptable to the CIA, in essence the motivating force behind Afghanistan’s opium bumper crop, quite an accomplishment considering in 1980 Afghanistan produced zero percent of the world’s opium, a situation that reversed after the CIA began organizing and funding the Mujahideen, later to become a household word, i.e., “al-Qaeda,” named after a database.

It is interesting to note, even though it appears Germany will send Tornado reconnaissance aircraft to Afghanistan, never mind the opinion of the German people, the government-owned Gesellschaft fuer Technische Zusammenarbeit was able to build a “4.5-kilometre road, Germany’s largest reconstruction project in southern Afghanistan… without incident in the restive province of Kandahar,” according to DPA.

Finally, as a clue to what is going on in regard to apparently clueless “insurgents” counterproductively abducting and threatening to kill foreign nationals, thus outraging those opposed to the presence of German troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need look no further than the criminal organization the Project for the New American Century. Tom Donnelly, described as a resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute (the repository where Bush gets his “minds”) and a senior fellow at the Project for the New American Century, and Vance Serchuk, a research assistant at AEI, wrote “U.S. Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Lessons from the Philippine War” back in 2003, a few months after Bush’s invasion. In order to “prevail, the U.S. military must develop an effective counterinsurgency strategy,” the authors propose, and then cite the example of the Philippine War.

This example brings to mind the “special” forces “integrated into the Philippine counterinsurgency effort,” as Michael McClintock writes, irregular forces employing “organizational innovations and tactics centered on measures of deception similar to those employed in the British and French colonial campaigns in Kenya and Indochina. In a variation on the countergangs of the Kenyan insurgency, a pilot countergang was set up in 1948 by the Sixteenth Philippine Constabulary Company, designated ‘Force X’: ‘The basic idea was to make this specially trained force into a realistic pseudo-Huk unit that could, in enemy guise, infiltrate deep into enemy territory.’”

“Pseudo operations, in which government forces and guerrilla defectors portray themselves as insurgent units, have been a very successful technique used in several counterinsurgency campaigns,” writes Lawrence E. Cline for the U.S. Army War College External Research Associates Program. “The use of pseudo teams has been a hallmark of a number of foreign counterinsurgency campaigns. In most cases, these operations have been very successful.”

One such operation was a bit less successful when two Brits were captured in Basra in 2005 wearing traditional Arab headdresses, driving a car loaded with explosives, an event almost completely ignored here in Bushzarro world, where it is assumed, thanks to a large and incessant dose of corporate media propaganda, read directly from Pentagon scripts, that Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis are killing each other because that’s what Arabs do, given the chance.

As well, we are expected to believe the Iraqi resistance, consisting of “little-known” terror groups that emerge for a moment and then slip back into the shadows, are so clueless they believe the neocons, including no shortage of complicit Democrats in Congress, will abandon the occupation after the Germans and Austrians pull up stakes, due to an abduction and murder here and there.

In other words, we are expected to believe the Iraqi resistance, now completely taken over by “al-Qaeda,” reads about as much history as the neocons, that is to say precious little.