<OT> We won't back down...

[dep]

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
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