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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (49477)	10/4/2002 11:06:43 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

As soon as we attack Iraq, the Iraqis will rally around Saddam just like the Palestinians rally around Arafat, the Americans rallied around Bush, etc. This is a fact of human nature and (home brew as opposed to foreign installed) authoritarian regimes. By this law, the Ukranians should have rallied round Stalin when Hitler attacked. Didn't happen. This may be news to you Carl, but there are few immutable laws of human nature, and this 'rally round the dictator' law you're citing isn't one of them. It particularly does not hold if the people in question don't feel themselves to be among the dictator's own people, as is the case with a large majority of Iraq's population. It's not like the Islamic Fundamentalists don't have operations in Iraq already. It's fairly obvious that the Iraqi people would flock to those groups to organize guerilla operations against us. Body bags. Hey, Carl, haven't you spent half your time arguing that there is no connection between secular Iraq and Al Qaeda or the other Islamists? Where did all these fundamentalists come from? Do you now agree that Saddam has been inviting them in and training them? At least for this article he's writing from Iraq, where he's probably got a better view of things than you do. I question the sagacity of any columnist who quotes straight what Iraqis have said to him in front of a government minder.