begin Ken Moffat's quote: | Do you feel a bit mislead, judging by the amount of resistance, and | the lack of open-armed welcome by the Iraqis? Our intentions may be | good, but something smells.
actually, not really. there are, besides substantial cultural differences and a mistrust of just about everybody, some defining events over the last couple of decades. first, we let the shia down when they tried to rise up, in something that more than glangingly resembles our behavior at the bay of pigs. second, you can't tell the players even with a scorecard. third, the iraqis think we're crazy -- we're trying to figt this war without killing anybody, and taking casualties as a result. this is a kind of warfighting that is not only unfamiliar to them, it's pretty much unfamiliar to everybody. thus, on cbs yesterday we had this: "US Marines mistakenly destroyed an SUV filled with a family of Iraqi farmers, killing several of them. CBS was on the scene with the Marines, who came to help them with their dead. Amazingly, the surviving family held no anger toward the Marines, and thanked them for their help. One of the men of the family told the reporter that they understand why the Marines made this mistake, because Saddam is forcing civilians to take this route in hopes that Allied forces will make exactly this kind of mistake. In other words, these poor people, who had just seen their kinsmen burned to death by American bombs, blamed Saddam for the incident." we're seeing surprises on both sides of it. so when we don't quite understand how it's all playing out, to some extent it's because we're watching a cricket match and thinking in terms of baseball. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
