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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
No I'm not worried about ratbastid giving arms and info to the enemy 
While there are some members of the left who have tried to do that sort of thing they tend to be the fringe of the lunatic fringe, though something like what Jane Fonda did should have been treason. |
Could this help to explain where it comes from?
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040322/burke
article | posted March 4, 2004 (March 22, 2004 issue)
Why They Love to Hate Her
Before going to bed at the US Naval Academy, a plebe shouts "Good night!" to the senior midshipman in the company, and the company commander answers "Good night!" in reply. A litany of good nights then passes down the chain of the company's command. At the end of this ritual courtesy, the plebe yells the final good night: "Good night, Jane Fonda!" and the entire company shouts its enthusiastic retort: "Good night, bitch!" Until that point, the performance has simply closed the day with a homage to hierarchy, with the lowest in the company, the plebe, showing deference to upperclass leaders. It reminds everyone of the rigid service academy structure, inherited from British boys' schools like Eton, in which upperclassmen dominate their juniors. The plebe plays the role of a child performing nightly valedictories to parents. But the final exchange, a unanimous curse of the former actress, former workout queen and former antiwar activist, serves quite a different end. The mock good night to Fonda reassures even the lowliest plebe of his insider status by expressing collective contempt for an outsider. According to an anonymous Naval Academy source, the ritual has been practiced by some but not all companies over the years, although in the past two years a few company officers have discouraged it.
But why Jane Fonda? Why not a more contemporary adversary? <b>Naval Academy midshipmen weren't even born when Fonda spoke out against having US troops in Vietnam; many of them don't even know who she is until they are introduced to the mythic Jane at the academy.</b> Soldier folklore during the Vietnam War and for several years afterward made fun of Ho Chi Minh, his "gooks" and the notorious VC, but those figures of ridicule stepped aside in the first Gulf War, to be replaced by Saddam Hussein and his fellow Iraqis ("ragheads" in the jokes, songs and stories), and most recently by the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. All, that is, except Jane Fonda, who even as a grandmother in her mid-60s continues to attract a seemingly endless stream of abuse. More than thirty years after her trip to North Vietnam, veterans fill cyberspace with their resentment, and new recruits learn that being a real warrior and hating Jane Fonda are synonymous.
Along with fresh recruits, both commissioned and enlisted, in other branches of the military, naval officers-in-training learn that just as military identity prescribes adulation for heroic military figures, it also encourages ridicule of despised civilians. In their plebe year, freshmen make the dramatic transition from civilian to military status, from home to barracks. They leave a world in which mothers have played a large part in their lives and enter an institution that remains largely male in numbers and traditions, despite opening its doors to women in the late 1970s........
......One urinal target reproduces the notorious 1972 photograph taken during Fonda's visit to North Vietnam: helmeted, smiling, seated at an antiaircraft gun (Fonda told O, the Oprah Magazine that she'd "go to my grave" regretting that photograph).
If the urinal targets offer the fantasy of retributive justice, fictionalized accounts of Fonda's 1972 visit with American POWs in North Vietnam charge her with conspiracy. In these word-of-mouth and Internet stories, which circulate widely among active-duty soldiers and veterans, the punishment inflicted on uncooperative POWs is linked to Fonda's presence. An oft-told variant of the torture legend depicts a single prisoner (generally considered to be POW Jerry Driscoll) who is forced to meet with Fonda and registers his defiance by spitting on the star: .......
........In a war that featured few heroes, prisoners of war, whose sacrifice could not be challenged, enjoyed a special status. So it is not surprising that it was stories of POWs and their fictional encounters with Jane Fonda that enjoyed such a long life and such wide circulation among members of the military. Those stories rebuke the civilian who inflicts greater pain on the war's unambiguous victims. In a war in which the enemy was not clearly defined, it sometimes seemed to the unappreciated soldier that the real enemies might be back home. <b>And in an important sense, Vietnam was a war of America against itself.</b>
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She was called the "British Queen of Baghdad". Dead 80 years and interred in a Baghdad cemetery, Gertrude Bell, a brilliant Arabist, fluent in the Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish languages, who drew the border lines of the modern state of Iraq. Her letters are as eeirily reminiscent of what the US experience in Iraq is today, as the '68 North Vietnamese Tet offensive was, three years after the US "Rolling Thunder" military aggression was supposed to neutralize the enemy's offensive capabilities. The failed Bush policy in Iraq, of "we will stand down, when they stand up, is Vietnam redux. <b>roachboy, I guess that it is impossible to "learn from history", to avoid repeating it, when some folks squandered their study time by spending it in the dysfunctional endeavor of fashioning a parallel, historical "universe", just as they've supplanted the one in real-time....</b>
....and see if this does not sound familiar....the young Sadr of today, acting in the tradition of his ancestor. Are "our leaders" really as blinded and stupid as this shows them to be?
Quote:
http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letters/l1439.htm
From the Gertrude Bell archive of letters:
[20 July 1921]
.....The vilain [sic] of the piece is Saiyid Muhammad Sadr, the son of old Saiyid Hasan Sadr whom I took you to see in Kadhimain [(Al Kazimiyah)]. Saiyid Muhummad was the man who first received us, a tall black bearded 'alim with a sinister expression. <b>At the time you and I paid our call, Saiyid Muhammad was little more than the son of Saiyid Hasan, but a month later he leapt into an evil prominence as the chief agitator in the distrubances. In those insane days he was treated like a divinity. Shi'ahs kissed the robe of men who had touched his hand. We tried to arrest him early in August and failed.</b> He escaped from Baghdad and moved about the country like a flame of war, rousing the tribes. It was he who called up the Diyalah [Diyala (Sirwan)] tribesmen and caused all those tragedies of which Mrs Buchanan's story is one. His next achievement was on the upper Tigris. In obedience to his preaching the tribes attacked Samarra but were beaten off. <h3>He then moved down to Karbala and was the soul of the insurgence on the middle Euphrates.</h3> Finally, when the game was up, he fled with other saiyids and tribal shaikhs across the desert to Mecca [Makkah] and came back, under the amnesty, with Faisal. He intended to be second to Faisal, if indeed Faisal were not second to him, but Faisal can't bear him and he finds himself relegated to a position of comparative obscurity, with us, whom he hates, and our friends, whom he hates equally occupying the front of the stage. He has still a certain amount of influence and it's a hand to hand conflict between us and him. We have won the first round. It was he who drafted the unofficial formula of allegiance of which I told you last week; Faisal has forbidden its circulation and we have issued an official formula through the Ministry of the Interior. Everyone is signing ours. <b>He is in a black rage and I feel as if we were struggling against the powers of evil in the dark. You never know what Shi'ahs are up to. But we are winning.</b> I've scored a minor triumph over him and I expect he knows it. The editor of one of the vernacular papers announced that he intended to publish an illustrated volume of biographies of the leaders of the Iraq revolt. I sent for the editor and pointed out to him that the moment was not propitious - the object of all should be to blot out the events of the year 1920 as though they had never been. Since he knew well that I could close down his paper tomorrow, the editor bowed to my arguments, and the projected book is still-born.
<b>Father, isn't it wonderfully interesting, to be watching over the fortunes of this new state! But it takes one all one's time. There are so many quicksands.</b>
Since his return, I hadn't seen Muhammad Sadr till today. This evening there was a great function to celebrate the opening of the Officers' School, our Sandhurst for the Arab Army. I arrived rather late and the first person I saw was Saiyid Muhammad sitting by Sir Percy in the seats reserved for great personages. He looked like Lucifer and scowled at me as I gave him the salute. I sat down two places away and after passing the time of day with my neighbour, a rather colourless 'alim, I asked tenderly after the health of his father, Saiyid Husain and said you frequently enquired about him! I expect that made Saiyid Muhammad furious - that anyone should think of Saiyid Hasan and not of himself; but since he was his father, he couldn't do anything but send you heaps of salams [sic]! Faisal then arrived and was installed between Sir Percy and Mr Cornwallis. There was an opening speech by the dear little Arab officer who is at the head of the school, Ahmad Haqqi, and then a couple of poems about the splendour of military service, followed by an excellent speech by Ja'far ending in enthusiastic gratitude to Sir Aylmer for the help he had given the Arab army. After which Sir Aylmer made a charming little speech - he is playing the game like a man - and Ja'far translated it into Arabic. No one paid the slightest attention to Muhammad Sadr who sat there scowling. He was left behind, bathed in scowls, and I saw him no more, when Faisal accompanied by the officers of the school, British and Arab, Sir Percy, Sir Aylmer and the rest of us walked round and inspected the premises, Faisal with his great charm and his evident pleasure in it all making the centre of the picture.
<b>I think we are going to beat Muhammad Sadr and all the other devils, but as I said before, it takes one all one's time.....</b>
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Quote:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5552563
Repeating History in Iraq?
Letters of Gertrude Bell, Circa 1920, Shed Light on Today's Crisis
All Things Considered, May 15, 2004 · The U.S.-led effort to bring stability and democracy to Iraq resonates with echoes of recent history. William Beeman is director of Middle East studies at Brown University and has written about the tumultuous period after World War I, when Britain and France divided the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. New countries emerged, including Iraq, forged by arbitrary political boundaries.
In 1920, Beeman notes, Sunnis and Shiites held mass demonstrations in Baghdad that quickly grew into a full-scale revolt. Several months passed before the British could regain control, and thousands of lives were lost.
Among the British nationals who helped establish Iraq was Gertrude Bell. Fluent in Persian and Arabic, she founded an archaeological museum in Baghdad. In letters home, Bell made detailed observations about the new country and its people. Today, U.S. and British leaders are finding new value in her insights. Her letters are circulated at the Pentagon.
Some excerpts from Bell's letters:
<b>March 14, 1920:</b> It's a problem here how to get into touch with the Shiahs, not the tribal people in the country; we're on intimate terms with all of them, but the grimly devout citizens of the holy towns and more especially the leaders of religious opinion, the Mujtahids, who can loose and bind with a <b>word by authority which rests on an intimate acquaintance with accumulated knowledge entirely irrelevant to human affairs and worthless in any branch of human activity. There they sit in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -- nor can they.</b> And for the most part they are very hostile to us, a feeling we can't alter…There's a group of these worthies in Kadhimain, the holy city, 8 miles from Baghdad, bitterly pan-Islamic, anti-British…Chief among them are a family called Sadr, possibly more distinguished for religious learning than any other family in the whole Shiah world….I went yesterday [to visit them] accompanied by an advanced Shiah of Baghdad whom I knew well. (continued in the following quote box.)
Quote:
http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letters/l1343.htm
....I rather fancy he is secretly a free-thinker. We walked through the narrow crooked streets of Kadhimain and stopped before a small dark archway.- which landed us in the courtyard of the saiyid's house. It was old, at least a hundred years old, with beautiful old lattice work of wood closing the diwan on the upper floor. The rooms all opened onto the court - no windows onto the outer world - and the court was a pool of silence separated from the street by the 50 yards of mysterious masonry under which we had passed. Saiyid Hasan's son, Saiyid Muhammad, stood on the balcony to welcome us, black robed, black bearded and on his head the huge dark blue turban of the Mujtahid class. Saiyid Hasan sat inside, an imposing, even a formidable figure, with a white beard reaching half way down his chest and a turban a size larger than Saiyid Muhammad's. I sat down beside him on the carpet and after formal greetings he began to talk in the rolling periods of the learned man, the book-language which you never hear on the lips of others. Mujtahids usually have plenty to say - talking is their job; it saves the visitor trouble. We talked of the Sadr family in all its branches, Persian, Syrian and Mesopotamian; and then of books and of the collections of Arabic books in Cairo, London, Paris and Rome - he had all the library catalogues, and then of the climate of Samarra which he explained to me was much better than that of Baghdad because Samarra lies in the third climatic zone of the geographers - I need not say that's pure tosh. He talked with such vigour that his turban kept slipping foreward onto his eyebrows and he had to push it back impatiently onto the top of his head. And I said to myself "If only that great blue turban of yours would fall off and leave you sitting there with a bald head I should think you just like everyone else." But it didn't and I was acutely conscious of the fact that no woman before me had ever been invited to drink coffee with a mujtahid and listen to his discourse, and really anxious lest I shouldn't make a good impression.
So after about ó of an hour I said I feared I must be troubling him and I would ask permission to take my leave. "No,no" he boomed out "we have set aside this afternoon for you." I felt pretty sure then that the visit was being a success and I stayed another hour. But I tackled this next hour with much more confidence. <b>I said I wanted to tell him about Syria and told him all I knew down to the latest telegram which was that Faisal was to be crowned. "Over the whole of Syria to the sea?" he asked with a sudden interest. "No" I answered "the French stay in Beyrout [Beyrouth (Beirut)]." "Then it's no good" he replied and we discussed the matter in all its bearings. Then we talked of Bolshevism about which he was very sensible. He agreed that it was the child of poverty and hunger, "but" he added "all the world is poor and hungry since the war." I said that as far as I made out the Bolshevist idea was to sweep away all that ever had been and build afresh. "If what has been is bad?" he asked. I replied that I feared they didn't know the art of building. He approved that.</b> Then as I made signs of going <h3>he said "It's well known that you are the most learned woman of your time and if any proof were needed it would be found in the fact that you wish to frequent the society of the learned. That's why you're here today."</h3> I murmured profound thanks for the privilege (with a backward glance at the third climatic zone and other points in the conversation) - and took my leave in the midst of a shower of invitations to come again as often as I liked.
On my way home I went to see Frank Balfour who was in bed with a touch of fever and heard from him the afternoon's news which was that Faisal had been crowned king of Syria and 'Abdullah king of the 'Iraq.
Well we are in for it and I think we shall need every scrap of personal influence and every hour of friendly intercourse we've ever had here in order to keep this country from falling into chaos. Even that afternoon's visit to Saiyid Hasan seemed providential. Today I've been to a luncheon party given by Haji Naji in his gardens to see the fruit blossom. He told me to invite the guests and I asked various generals and political officers and their wives. We had an extremely good lunch under flowering peach trees and Haji Naji was a perfect host.
Mrs Hambro is going home tomorrow for the summer. I'm very sorry she is going; she is a nice woman. She is coming to see you in London. Also I've told one of my nicest colleagues to go and see you, Major Yetts; he is going home on leave. He is an architect and an artist by origin but he has taken to political work like a duck to water. Elsa and Herbert would love him - will you introduce him to them? And I think Aunt Maisie would like him too.
Will you please tell darling Mrs Wilson that the yellow hollyhock seeds have come and I've sown them in my garden and in all the gardens of my Arab friends. I may mention I've got daffodils in flower - the first daffodils seen in Mesopotamia. Ever your very affectionate daughter Gertrude
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<b>June 14, 1920:</b> We have had a stormy week. The Nationalist propaganda increases. There are constant meetings in mosques where the mental temp. rises a great deal about 110. I enclose an exposition of the moderate party. The extremists are out for independence, without a mandate. At least they say they are, knowing full well in their hearts that they couldn't work it. They play for all they are worth on the passions of the mob and what with the Unity of Islam and the Rights of the Arab Race they make a fine figure. They have created a reign of terror; if anyone says boo in the bazaar it shuts like an oyster. There has been practically no business done for the last fortnight. They send bagsful of letters daily to all the tribes urging them to throw off the infidel yoke. The tribes haven't responded except with windy talk. I personally don't think there will be an outbreak either here or in the provinces, but it's touch and go, and it's the thing above all others that I'm anxious to avoid.
<b>June 21, 1920:</b> <h3>The second tale was … propos of the vaunted and wholly illusory union between Sunnis and Shi'ahs</h3> which was the feature of Ramadhan. "I got up at a gathering" said Mustafa Pasha "if the Prophet, God give him salvation, and the Khalifs Umar and Abu Bakr and the rest were here now, they'ld [sic] be on the side of the English." "How is that?" asked the company. "Because the English have united Islam." "You have no religion" they cried. But though meant as a compliment to us, or a gibe to them I don't know that we can get much satisfaction out of it.
June 12, 1921: We can't continue direct British control though the country would be better governed by it, but <b>it's rather a comic position to be telling people over and over again that whether they like it or not they must have Arab not British Government…</b>
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Quote:
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/may/beemanMay04.asp
The U.S.-Shi'ite Relationship in a New Iraq: Better than the British?
Strategic Insights, Volume III, Issue 5 (May 2004)
by William O. Beeman [1]
"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. . . . It is [not] the wish of [our] government to impose upon you alien institutions."
- British General Frederick Stanley Maude, Baghdad, 1917
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030401355.html
The Woman Who Put Iraq on the Map
Gertrude Bell, Resting in Relative Peace
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 5, 2006; Page D01
.....The last visitors here were a group of Britons who came several months ago and found and cleared one tomb, the grave keeper says. Vaguely art deco, the bathroom-size, domed tomb encases the bones of Lt. Gen. Stanley Maude -- "Dead of cholera whilst commander of the Mesopotamia expeditionary force," the English engraving on the sides notes.
In March 1917, Maude said: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," a statement still famous among older Iraqis, at least. Maude was then head of a British army that was closing in on Baghdad and about to overthrow Ottoman rule here. The British saw Ottoman support of Germany in World War I as a threat to their own survival, and they needed Iraq's oil for their war effort.
<h3>Maude assured Iraq's Arabs of "a future of greatness" but succumbed to cholera six months later.</h3>
Bell, a singular, gentle-born woman who had already established a name through Arab travels and scholarly writings rivaling those of any man of her time, arrived soon after. She stayed on for the rest of her life, as Oriental secretary to British governments, carving out and creating modern-day Iraq as much as any single person.
Bell sketched the boundaries of Iraq on tracing paper after careful consultation with Iraqi tribes, consideration of Britain's need for oil and her own idiosyncratic geopolitical beliefs.
<b>"The truth is I'm becoming a Sunni myself; you know where you are with them, they are staunch and they are guided, according to their lights, by reason; whereas with the Shi'ahs, however well intentioned they may be, at any moment some ignorant fanatic of an alim may tell them that by the order of God and himself they are to think differently," she wrote home.</b>
<h3>She and her allies gave the monarchy to the minority Sunnis, denied independence to the Kurds in order to keep northern oil fields for Britain and withheld from the Shiite majority the democracy of which she thought them incapable.......</h3>
.....The names and families have held through the decades. Bell's Baghdad landlord was from the Chalabi family, the key minister in the Iraq government was Jafar, and Britain's nemesis in Iraq was a scowling young Shiite cleric named Sadr.....
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Ominous Times
Despite the monumental events of the last year, Iraqi Shi'ites[2] see continuity in the political culture of Iraq. U.S. actions are viewed through the prism of a century of disenfranchisement and oppression, much of which can be attributed to the decisions of past colonizers. Nevertheless, there is every indication that Iraqi Shi'ites are going to fight to try and transform the political landsacpe; it may be their last chance in this generation to regain what they feel is their rightful place in Mesopotamia.
Iraq is facing a future less certain than at any time in its history—a future that will begin on June 30 when the Coalition Provisional Government ceases to exist and a new temporary governmental entity comes into being. There are some ominous signs that this transition has been extremely ill-conceived, and is likely to lead to more violence and breakdown. At this writing in late April 2004, the U.S. government is telling the world that Iraq will be granted sovereignty, but we now realize that the United States will not relinquish control of the military to the next provisional government. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman called this "limited sovereignty" before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before the same committee, also said that the new government was basically there to set up elections in January 2005.
In the eyes of Iraqis, and particularly the Shi'ites, who view events with cultural memory, the current "culture" is the same one that has pervaded for more than seventy years. Today's events seem like those of the earliest days of Iraq's existence.[3] Here it is important to make a clear distinction between what one might call "scientific history," dealing in objective causal explanation for events, and "cultural memory," in which events are "remembered" in a way that creates causal links between the present and the past, whether these memories are accurate or not. When they are widely believed, such memories have the force of fact, and can be strong motivators for public action.
A Replay of Colonial Patterns
Gertrude Bell and her superior in the administration of British rule in Iraq, Sir Percy Cox, were charged with creating a nation out of whole cloth that would serve British colonial interests.[4] They did their job well. <b>They created a Kurdish buffer against Turkey in the north under their control, rather than as an independent state. They installed favored Sunni rulers in Baghdad, with a Hashemite King, Emir Feisal of Mecca, at the head. Most importantly, they institutionalized repression of the Shi'ites in the South. The British governance of Iraq was, according to historian Charles Tripp, a combination of "direct and indirect rule."[5] This sounds suspiciously like Grossman's "limited sovereignty." If American's don't know their history, Iraqis definitely have a strong sense of theirs, and they see the United States as directly continuing the policies of Great Britain.</b> The British ruled under a Mandate from the League of Nations. The United States, too, has claimed a larger authority as justification for its rule in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's violation of UN resolutions has been used by the Bush administration as a mandate for both the American invasion and subsequent rule. The Iraqis read the American "mandate" as the equivalent of the British Mandate. It is also seen as just as illegitimate.
It should be obvious that the Iraqis are now revolting against the United States in a manner similar to the way that they revolted against Great Britain in 1920 and again in 1958, when the British were removed once and for all. The circumstances behind the revolt of 1920 and the revolution of 1958 are vastly different, but all three events stem broadly from a desire on the part of the Iraqis to strike out at what they see as oppression by an unwelcome outside power.
Charles Tripp writes that the Revolt of 1920 "began in Baghdad with mass demonstrations of urban Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, and the protests of embittered ex-Ottoman officers. The revolt gained momentum when it spread to the largely Shi'ite regions of the middle and lower Euphrates. Well-armed tribesmen, outraged by the intrusions of central government and resentful of infidel rule, seized control of most of the south of the country. It took the British several months, and cost thousands of lives—British, Indian and Iraqi—to suppress the revolt and re-establish Baghdad's control."[6]
The Revolt was the act that convinced the British that they needed to establish their puppet regime. Never mind that many Iraqis accepted Emir Feisal as king. His later rule and successors were seen as dominated by the British. If the United States now establishes its own puppet regime in Baghdad, the symbolic parallel with the British action after World War I will be complete, and nothing will be able to convince the skeptics in Iraq that the United States has any interest there except colonial domination.
Understanding Shi'ites
Despite her superb knowledge of Persian and Arabic, Bell never really understood the Shi'ites. Indeed, she would be at home in the current administration, for she feared that if the Shi'ites had control in Iraq they would soon be demanding Islamic rule that would be anti-Western and anti-modern. The world had to wait for many years before the first sympathetic pictures of Shi'ites emerged. Wilfred Thesinger[7] and later Robert[8] and Elizabeth Fernea[9] finally painted authentic, detailed pictures of these southern denizens. No one reads them, however, and the persistent image of Shi'ites as wild-eyed fanatics continues to be promulgated by the press, and more importantly by the Bush administration.[10]
However, one fact has hit home, due largely to the hugely important influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Najaf, whose opinions are followed by Iraqi Shi'a as if they were edicts from God. The Shi'ite community is likely to be the key to any stability or instability in the country and they have been waiting to assume what they consider their rightful place in the region for nearly a century. They are mad, they are frustrated, and once again, their colonial masters are trying to sideline them. Little wonder they are fighting back.
The U.S. government has apparently not the slightest appreciation about the nature or functioning of the Shi'ite community. It was clear from the very beginning that for Washington, a Shi'ite was a Shi'ite was a Shi'ite. Dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, the United States assumed that the Shi'ites in Iraq were natural allies of the Shi'ites in Iran. They learned that things were not so simplistic but the complexity of the Shi'ite world never filtered up to the White House-neither in Democratic nor Republican administrations.
This blind spot has led to the unwarranted assumption that if Shi'ites were to run a post-conflict Iraqi government, they would install an "Iranian-style theocracy" in Iraq, to quote Vice President Dick Cheney. Both Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have said repeatedly that the fundamentalist Shi'ites will be prevented from assuming power.
The Coalition Provisional council was said to be "balanced" with twelve Shi'ites and thirteen others. However six of the twelve Shi'ites are émigrés with no support in the Shi'ite community. Even if a political figure is nominally a Shi'ite, he or she has to have some way to garner the loyalty of followers in the community. Confessional identity is never enough in and of itself. Ahmad Chalabi, who misled the United States repeatedly in planning for the invasion, and who has zero credibility with Iraqis, was touted as a future leader of Iraq in editorials in the Wall Street Journal by Bernard Lewis, this administration's apparent house "expert" on things Islamic.[11] One of Chalabi's supposed credentials was that he was a Shi'ite.[12].......
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How many knew of Gertrude Bell's archive of letters? I didn't. But, we aren't responsible for knowing, and learning from the experience and incite contained in those letters. Bush and Blair were, and if they or their assistants did read them, the knowledge contained, did not sink in. |