Have you ever seen any other columnist try to understand who we're fighting and how they think?
http://www.exile.ru/2004-September-13/war_nerd.html SHI'ITE! HOLY SHI'ITE! By Gary Brecher We've been fighting the Shi'ites for months now, and nobody seems to want to ask the obvious question: who are these loonies, anyway? Well, for starters, there's that embarrassing name, "Shi'ite." I can't help it if it reminds me every time I see it of a certain four-letter word. But that's not their fault either. I don't claim to speak Arabic -- my Spanish isn't even that good -- but from what I've read, in Arabic, "shiat" means something like "party," as in political party, and "Shi'ite" is short for "Shiat Ali," which means "the Party of Ali." Ali was Muhammad's adopted son. He saved the Prophet's life and became his favorite. Muhammad even gave Ali his favorite daughter, Fatima. But the most important thing to remember about Ali is -- he lost. And Ali's son Husain, another loser, was killed in battle charging the Caliph's whole army with a few friends -- a couple dozen riders against a horde. To us, that's just stupid. To the Shi'ites, it's glorious. That's what's hardest for Americans to understand about the Shia: they don't think winning is everything. It'd be closer to the truth to say that they think losing is everything, that losing is a sign of being in the right. The point is, they don't think like us. A whole lot of what's gone wrong in Iraq comes from thinking that everybody in the world wants to be like us. That's just plain wrong. Hell, I'm not sure I even want to be like us. And I know for certain the Shi'ites don't. We believe in winning. Remember the beginning of Patton, when George C. Scott stands up in dress uniform and says, "No son-of-a-bitch ever won a war by dying for his country -- he won it by making some other poor son-of-a-bitch die for HIS country"? That sounds pretty obvious to us, but it's not the only way you can think about war. In fact I'd say Patton (Patton in the movie, not the real Patton) is wrong. You can kill twenty of the enemy for every guy you lose -- and still lose the war. That's what happened to us in Nam. We made a million or so of them die for their country, vs. 60,000 of us, and still lost. The British killed dozens of Kikuyu for every settler or soldier they lost fighting the Mau-Mau, and they still got run out of Kenya. Body count is the WORST way to figure out who's winning a guerrilla war. If the Shi'ites wrote the script for Patton, George C. Scott would get up and say something like, "Go ahead and kill us -- you'll be sorry!" We're talking about a martyr culture here, where dying makes you stronger. You know, that shouldn't be so hard for us to get, because we've got Christ, who won by losing, by dying. But that was a long time ago, and it's so prettified by now that Mel Gibson had to make a whole movie to remind people that martyrdom actually hurts. [picture] The Shi'ites' martyrs are a lot more recent. Their favorite disaster happened in 680 AD, at the battle of Karbala. Yup, THAT Karbala -- the same city where we've been fighting Shi'ites for the last few months. Karbala means "anguish." That should tell you something about the way Shi'ites see the world, that they named one of their holiest cities after something we'd call "clinical depression." They're not smiley-face optimists. If a Shi'ite coached your kid's soccer team, he'd start every practice with a video of the team's biggest defeat: "Yet again we see Jason missing the goal! Truly we AM/PM Minimart Big Gulps are out of the playoffs forever and a day!" For the Shi'ites, the battle of Karbala is like Christ's crucifixion and the Alamo, all rolled into one: a doomed last stand with God on the losers' side. Karbala was a fight over leadership, the kind you get when an empire based on one man has to deal with that man's death. Muhammad's armies blasted out of the desert in the early seventh century and ended up in control of most of the Middle East. When he died, he left a power vacuum like a black hole centered on Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic world. The winner would become "Caliph" -- a pretty cushy job, sort of like Pope and Emperor rolled into one, with total control over everything, religion and government both. With that kind of power at stake, the feuding got pretty intense. Ali got himself assassinated, which was a tradition for Caliphs -- life insurance salesmen ran from Caliphs like they were motocross riders. His killers, a rich, mean clan called the Umayyads grabbed the Caliphate. This is the key moment for the Shi'ites. The Umayyads won, Ali's family lost. It's time to face facts, right? You can't argue with success, right? Wrong. The whole Shia psychology is that you CAN argue with success, and you DON'T have to face facts. Ali's son, Husain, stayed calm when the Umayyad killed his dad; he even accepted the first Umayyad Caliph. But when that Caliph died and the Caliphate went to another Umayyad, Husain realized he had to take back the Caliphate or die trying. Husain was riding to a rendezvous with some rebels with only about 30 men guarding him when he found himself facing the Caliph's whole army near Karbala. Victory was impossible. Escape was impossible. So Husain did what any red-blooded boy would do: he charged. And naturally, the Caliph's soldiers did a Benihana on Husain and his men. That's the key moment for Shi'ites. The way they see, everything that happened after Husain's martyrdom is sleazy, dirty, worthless. The real world is trash; the only good people are the martyrs. In Shia culture, you ain't nobody till you're dead. The world won't be worth living in until the return of the "Mahdi," the messiah. (You may remember that Sadr's posse is called the "Mahdi Army.") The Shia are the Travis Bickles of Islam: "someday a real rain will come, to wash the scum off the streets," and if they can help it along with a car bomb or two, so much the better. They have a huge death wish, so naturally their holiest places are tombs. That's why Shi'ites make that pilgrimage to Karbala, to visit the tomb of Husain. Shi'ites commemorate Husain getting himself sliced and diced for ten days every year, slashing themselves with knives and bashing themselves with chains to celebrate that glorious defeat. Ayatollah Khomeini, the biggest Shi'ite hero of the 20th century, used to preach "Every day is the anniversary of the battle, and every place is Karbala." The inspirational message was: wherever you are, go get yourself massacred. What are you doing sitting around breathing? Why ain't you out there getting slaughtered, you lazy godless bum? And these are the people we're picking off one by one, then bragging about body counts. Still wonder why the war's going so badly? At the moment, Sadr and the Mahdi-ettes are withdrawing, and Bush's PR guys are claiming Sadr's going into politics to play nice. You have to wonder if they really believe that. I hope not; I hope they're not really that dumb. Any guerrilla war has lulls, slowdowns, little coffee breaks that last a week, a month, sometimes years. It doesn't mean the war's over. The VC used to go home when it was time to harvest the rice crop; every time they did, the Saigon PR office would declare that the insurgency was beaten. Sadr and his boys are going to work us the way you work a can lid: back and forth, over and over, sheer metal fatigue. They've got a whole new crop of martyrs to worship, and all they have to do is wait for another policy mistake to outrage all their followers. One thing you can be sure of, if you're an Iraqi Shiite: outrages are like buses, there'll always be another one coming along. When it arrives, they'll get on board, fight us again, lose again, win the propaganda battle again, and come back a little stronger, with more of the Shi'ite poor on their side. After a half dozen lost battles, they'll be so strong we'll be glad to catch the last chopper out of Najaf and let'em martyr each other, instead of paying hundreds of billions of my tax money to be their Santa-Claus bogeyman. -- Jay P Hailey ~Meow!~ MSNIM - jayphailey ; AIM -jayphailey03; ICQ - 37959005 HTTP://jayphailey.8m.com "That's awful! That's terrible! I'm impressed!"--Tom _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list Libnw@immosys.com List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
