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

To: LindyBill who wrote (108115)	7/26/2003 9:44:46 AM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

It's been almost four months since the war has ended. We are paying 200 some thousand of Iraq's former army salaries for doing nothing. The vast majority of the former army have zero loyalty to Saddam. Why are our GIs still doing sitting duck duty guarding public buildings in Iraq?

To: LindyBill who wrote (108115)	7/27/2003 1:52:18 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi LindyBill; Re: "Which is picked up by our media. CNBC featured this story [i.e. TV images of sons shock many Arabs] quoting a couple of Saudis as the voice of all muslims." When you intervene in a war it's always a good idea to see what side you're intervening on. One of our unmentioned problems in Iraq is that we are intervening on the side of the Iraqi liberals against the Iraqi conservatives. The "liberal" and "conservative" terms are relative, of course, and in every society there are people who can be classified into one of the two camps. And throughout history, it has been the conservatives who, on a man for man basis, fight better. Part of this is due to the fact that the military tends to be conservative. But there's more to it than that. Farmers and ranchers, and since they have a lot more practice hunting, tend to be better shots. A great example of this is the American revolution. While the revolutionaries were liberal, relative to the supporters of the king, it is in our national memory that the most effective fighters in the revolution were the farmers and ranchers with their long rifles. And also note that support for the revolution was particularly strong in urban areas like the North, and was somewhat weaker in rural southern regions. This is in keeping with the tendency for conservatives to be more rural, while liberals tend to be more urban, a fact that is still present in the US (and in pretty much every other nation on the planet). So we've gone into Iraq on the side of the liberals. Unfortunately, that means that we have to do the fighting, because even when liberals don't actually "loathe the military", they rarely spend much time studying the fine art of killing. Liberal urban city dwellers buy their food at a market. Conservative rural farmers and ranchers butcher their own meat. So when we talk about "pacifying" Iraq, what we need to recognize is that the liberal parts of Iraqi society need no pacification. It's the Iraqi conservatives that are shooting us up, and those are the people that we need to pacify. The release of the morgue and then the reconstructed embalming photos of Saddam's sons was a complete outrage to the section of Iraqi society that we need to pacify. Not only is the quaint American funeral custom of applying make-up to corpses (even male ones) unknown in Arab countries, but there is also a local religious rule to plant corpses on the same day they die. I would guess that liberal Iraqis would have been convinced that Saddam's kids were dead without the need to exhibit the corpses. (And that reminds me, where were the pictures of the 13-yearold grandson who fought so bravely? Was his face reconstructed too?) And their lack of horror at seeing a body treated that way shouldn't convince us that releasing those pictures was a good idea. I'm reminded of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Predator". In that movie, (rent it if you haven't seen it), an alien equipped with superior technology (like the US military) goes hunting humans (like Bush hunted Saddam and family). When the alien gets one, he keeps a grisly "trophy" (like the bodies recently exhibited). I suppose that the alien doesn't consider the trophy to be disgusting, but Arnold is a bit pissed off. Link: movieactors.com Maybe this movie will give someone an understanding of the motivations of the Arab conservatives. Certainly US films with a revenge oriented plot are widely popular world-wide and are particularly liked in Arab lands. But the problem is that way too many Americans (as with every other group of humans on the planet) are unable to understand another group's point of view. -- Carl P.S. The constant refrain of stuff like "Reuters never quits it's anti-American slant" is getting a little tired. Saddam's sons are killed and the Bush administration can't stop itself from announcing that this is the beginning of the end. How many "we can see the light at the end of the tunnel" quotes can these guys generate between now and the elections? Barely a week later and the death rate for US soldiers in Iraq has doubled. When Bush is running for reelection all this crap is going to come back to haunt him.