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

To: LindyBill who wrote (95716)	4/23/2003 2:17:20 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

We have got to help the local Mullahs run the Iranians off. Use their tribalism to do it. Easier said than done. The Iraqi Shiites backed away from the Iranians during the Iraq/Iran war, but that's long gone. We have a problem here: the Iraqi Shiites just don't trust us. No matter what we say about democracy, they'll think we're going to try to convert them all to Christianity, take their oil, and put their women in short skirts. To reassure them, we will send them Franklin Graham. Oh joy. I don't think we can ascribe the Shiite activities exclusively to Iranian intervention, appealing though that idea may be. I think we're going to discover that much of Iraq is a good deal less secular than we thought, and that Islamic identity is stronger than we thought. I hope we see evidence of political organization among secular pro-democracy types, and soon.

To: LindyBill who wrote (95716)	4/29/2003 10:04:12 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I just got back from a few days in the lowlands... in the process, I had breakfast at a place frequented by US military retirees. They had Fox News on the tube, and about 5 minutes after I sat down, they started an interview with our friend Mr. Ledeen. I don't watch TV voluntarily, but I paid attention to that, just because we'd been discussing his opinions lately. The first thing that struck me was that, even accounting for the inevitable dumbing down for TV, this was one of the dumbest conversations I'd ever seen. Not so much Ledeen's fault as the interviewers... he was maintaining a sort of bizarre hyperventilated excitement, spitting out unbelievably inane comments. The only one that stayed with me was along the lines of "we've seen some really crazy Shiites in the streets of Iraq lately, is this all the fault of the Iranians"? The whole thing displayed nothing but contempt for any idea that was not completely in line with the opinions of the interviewer. It was a bit jarring: I'd heard that Fox leaned that way, but I'd have expected a slightly more sophisticated bias. Is that really their style? The conclusion, of course, was that all the excvitement is solely the fault of Iranian agitators. No mention, of course, of the generally recognized reality that no amount of agitation will move a population unless that population is already inclined to favor the message of the agitator. I couldn't tell if the Iran emphasis was intended to cover up for failure to predict the level of organization and religious focus we've seen among Shiite communities, or if it was the beginning of a process of laying ideological groundwork for action against Iran. Both, maybe. The whole thing left me glad that I don't watch TV, but a little horrified at the notion that sombody, somewhere, is lapping this crap up.