THE RALL PIECE: I've been e-mailing with a few different people on this, so I figured I'd clarify a thing or two (and if I'm repeating things I already wrote in e-mails, I apologize):
Some have written that in Rall's piece (original one here, my original comments here), was more a "devil's advocate" sort of thing [yes, if Saddam is the devil, Rall is his advocate- ed.] than a serious argument in favor of the Iraqi resistance. To that I say this- if Thomas Friedman had written the exact same column, word for word, I would have had a different reaction- because Friedman often plays devil's advocate, assuming the positions of foreign factions with whom he obviously disagrees, in order to prove a larger point. We know Friedman doesn't come at things with an agenda, and he's certainly not rooting for America to lose, even when quoting someone else who does.
Ted Rall, however, doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt, simply because he's made it clear in his past columns and cartoons and television appearances that, yes, he does hate America, and does openly root for us to lose the War on Terror. He might not actually mean it, he might just want to rile up his political opponents (as soon as the piece appeared, it was denounced by every major conservative blog, which was likely the reason he wrote it in the first place). But the fact is, based on positions Rall has taken in the past, it's not hard to imagine him rooting for the neo-Baathists to defeat American soldiers in Iraq.
And besides, he claims to be speaking as an Iraqi resistance leader. If he were one, there would likely be 1) references to Allah, and 2) references to "the Jews" and/or "the Zionist cabal," and 3) positive references to Saddam. Rall uses none of the three, perhaps because he knows his argument collapses the moment he mentions Saddam's name.
He does, however, refer to "Dick Cheney's cynical oil war." Guerrilla warriors in the third world don't use phrases like "Dick Cheney's cynical guerrilla war"; cartoonists who live in Manhattan and read The Nation do.
Last year Rall finished #2 in the not-exactly-right-wing New York Press' survey of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers, behind only Maxim editor Keith Blanchard and just ahead of Michael Moore, and they called him "just another self-righteous shitheel who coasts on self-created controversy and tells himself that any publicity is good publicity." Hopefully this latest nonsense will be enough to push him to #1 in next year's edition.
Instapundit has quite a bit more on this.