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

To: KonKilo who wrote (108380)	7/27/2003 4:57:30 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, at least Nadine deserves brownie points for being relatively upfront about the grand scheme. Personally, I find it somewhat predictable that the schemers' grand scheme looks to be falling apart on its first real test in Iraq. I got to return again to a quote from Fallows looking back at the original Great Gamers and how they operated: When British administrators supervised the former Ottoman lands in the 1920s, they liked to insinuate themselves into the local culture, à la Lawrence of Arabia. "Typically, a young man would go there in his twenties, would master the local dialects, would have a local mistress before he settled down to something more respectable," Victor O'Reilly, an Irish novelist who specializes in military topics, told me. "They were to achieve tremendous amounts with minimal resources. They ran huge chunks of the world this way, and it was psychological. They were hugely knowledgeable and got deeply involved with the locals." The original Green Berets tried to use a version of this approach in Vietnam, and to an extent it is still the ideal for the Special Forces. theatlantic.com Well, it may be the ideal of the Special Forces, but with the PNAC people viewing all their middle east cultural context through the lens of Israeli lobby / "Arab mind" "objectivity", the contrast couldn't be more obvious. Who knows, maybe after a year or two Chalabi will actually take hold. It still seems quite improbable to me, though, at least as long as the show is still being run by the Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz crowd.