This war is so distressing. It's not surprising to me that there's such resistance there. I can't imagine it's all because of loyalty to Saddam. People are protecting their homeland. The US military planners don't seem to have considered that natural impulse.
People never forget when their land has been invaded, even when they agree with the other side's position. I don't know if it's still true in the US South because many people have moved into Southern states and so the region is not as insular as when I was growing up in Virginia/North Carolina, but back then, decades ago, there were still feelings about the Civil War that had ended over 100 years earlier, and hostility passed through generations toward the North and Yankees and General Sherman, who marched his army through Atlanta, burning everything along the way. It could be as silly as me as a toddler giggling and raising my shirt to show my belly button when my grandmother or other relatives asked me to show them where the Yankee shot me (and then I got some tickling), or as intense as the Atlanta tour guide who was so indignant about General Sherman you'd think the fires in Atlanta were still burning. And that was even though not a single person believed that the South's position during the Civil War was the right one, in a moral sense. The feelings are emotional reactions to having armies march in, like having one's home forcefully broken into and rearranged. Even if the rearrangement ends up being better, there's always resistance to that initial invasion. And I can't pass the battlefields in Virginia without thinking of how many men suffered and died there. Those huge green fields are so bloody. Looking at all the war maneuvers being explained on tv, it feels so primitive. Let's capture the capital... depose the king... raise the flag. It's a deadly version of games like "king of the hill" or "capture the flag." Fun games when I was a kid. Maybe humans are practicing for war all the time, like it's something innate and unavoidable. That alone is a distressing thought. Debra Shea
