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The abuse of Iraqi POWs and the Arab street
Iraqi Abuse and the "Arab Street"
By Larry Schweikart
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 10, 2004
Amidst all the apologies, I want to suggest we all (Hillary Clinton here) take a deep breath and consider something that no one in the administration or Congress has (publicly) considered:
The POW photos are having an unintended effect on the Arab "Street" and the "resistance."
By now, everyone pretty well knows that Arab societies base everything on power and perceptions of power. In part, that is why so many Freepers and conservatives got their panties in a bunch because it appeared in public like "apologizing" was a sign of weakness.
Ah, my friends. You aren't thinking like an Arab. The "street" and, indeed, the leadership doesn't trust much of what we say---they only look at what we do. It would have made no difference if Bush formally apologized and sent each detainee a bouquet of flowers---the "street" would see that as a sham, a pretense, a distraction from the "real" policy.
No, I suggest something else. That the Arab "street" and especially the "resistance" has taken from those photos a message we didn't intend to send, but one that strikes fear into the very heart of them---a message of pure power and dominance. The submissive positions of these "tough" Iraqi men under the heels and attached to the leashes of WOMEN (and relatively small women, at that) sends a very powerful message to the "street."
Don't screw with the Americans. Oh, they'll "apologize," be we know that when the hearings are over, and the attention is off, they can do what they want.
I want to reiterate: this is foreign to our way of thinking. Unless you're a hard-core Democrat, you don't pathologically lie to achieve your objectives. But we must start thinking like the enemy.
Consider the following:
*Norway's Nettavision reported that a comedienne caused an outrage from her "stand-up stunt" where she demanded that a local fundamentalist Mullah be "tested" to see if he was really a "fundamentalist."
*One of the abused prisoners said "he will go home to his family in Nasiriyah but his shame will not allow him to stay." ("The Humiliated Man Beneath the Hood") He said through a translator that the sexual humilation was the worst part of the interrogation.
*Right after the fall of Baghdad, reporters went into the Egyptian street to find outrage. They found it . . . at Saddam, for being so humiliated. Those interviewed were distraught they had believed Baghdad Bob and were ashamed of the ease with which American forces overthrew the "strong man of Iraq."
*MSNBC reported in "The Secret War" that "as American armored columns pushed down the road to Baghdad, 400-watt loudspeakers mounted on Humvees would, from time to time, blare out in Arabic that Iraqi men are impotent." The Feyadeen, the article reported, could not bear to be taunted (especially about their manhood) and rushed out to attack . . . and be killed. What you say is many times more important than what you do in this part of the world, says a senior U.S. psy-warrior.
The prison photos spoke volumes, but to the Arab resistance, it was a totally different message than the one heard on Capitol Hill on Friday.
Whether intentional or not, the prison photos have sent a message about strength, dominance, and especially the power of women over men in a society that cannot bear such an inversion of "the proper order." It is a profound message.
Has anyone noticed that we virtually walked into Najaf this week, unopposed? Al-Sadr did nothing---in fact, he moved his operations into the British zone, after all his bluster! Has anyone noticed that Fallujah is quiet? Very few roadside bombs/suicide bombs in the last couple of days. This could all change, but it is eerie that when a message of power is sent out all over the Middle East---unintentionally on our part---it resonates. Big time.
Of course, for many reasons, some good and some bad, this episode will be investigated, and some heads will roll. But the Arab street will not take that as a sign of American or western-style "justice," rather it will interpret this as another psy-op campaign designed to conceal the real message---that American women are "stronger" than Middle Eastern men.
The man makes a very valid point, while, I am not saying it justifies the behavior of our soldiers in any way, I think it is a far more accurate perception of how the Arab street will percieve the situation.
Iraqi Abuse and the "Arab Street"
By Larry Schweikart
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 10, 2004
Amidst all the apologies, I want to suggest we all (Hillary Clinton here) take a deep breath and consider something that no one in the administration or Congress has (publicly) considered:
The POW photos are having an unintended effect on the Arab "Street" and the "resistance."
By now, everyone pretty well knows that Arab societies base everything on power and perceptions of power. In part, that is why so many Freepers and conservatives got their panties in a bunch because it appeared in public like "apologizing" was a sign of weakness.
Ah, my friends. You aren't thinking like an Arab. The "street" and, indeed, the leadership doesn't trust much of what we say---they only look at what we do. It would have made no difference if Bush formally apologized and sent each detainee a bouquet of flowers---the "street" would see that as a sham, a pretense, a distraction from the "real" policy.
No, I suggest something else. That the Arab "street" and especially the "resistance" has taken from those photos a message we didn't intend to send, but one that strikes fear into the very heart of them---a message of pure power and dominance. The submissive positions of these "tough" Iraqi men under the heels and attached to the leashes of WOMEN (and relatively small women, at that) sends a very powerful message to the "street."
Don't screw with the Americans. Oh, they'll "apologize," be we know that when the hearings are over, and the attention is off, they can do what they want.
I want to reiterate: this is foreign to our way of thinking. Unless you're a hard-core Democrat, you don't pathologically lie to achieve your objectives. But we must start thinking like the enemy.
Consider the following:
*Norway's Nettavision reported that a comedienne caused an outrage from her "stand-up stunt" where she demanded that a local fundamentalist Mullah be "tested" to see if he was really a "fundamentalist."
*One of the abused prisoners said "he will go home to his family in Nasiriyah but his shame will not allow him to stay." ("The Humiliated Man Beneath the Hood") He said through a translator that the sexual humilation was the worst part of the interrogation.
*Right after the fall of Baghdad, reporters went into the Egyptian street to find outrage. They found it . . . at Saddam, for being so humiliated. Those interviewed were distraught they had believed Baghdad Bob and were ashamed of the ease with which American forces overthrew the "strong man of Iraq."
*MSNBC reported in "The Secret War" that "as American armored columns pushed down the road to Baghdad, 400-watt loudspeakers mounted on Humvees would, from time to time, blare out in Arabic that Iraqi men are impotent." The Feyadeen, the article reported, could not bear to be taunted (especially about their manhood) and rushed out to attack . . . and be killed. What you say is many times more important than what you do in this part of the world, says a senior U.S. psy-warrior.
The prison photos spoke volumes, but to the Arab resistance, it was a totally different message than the one heard on Capitol Hill on Friday.
Whether intentional or not, the prison photos have sent a message about strength, dominance, and especially the power of women over men in a society that cannot bear such an inversion of "the proper order." It is a profound message.
Has anyone noticed that we virtually walked into Najaf this week, unopposed? Al-Sadr did nothing---in fact, he moved his operations into the British zone, after all his bluster! Has anyone noticed that Fallujah is quiet? Very few roadside bombs/suicide bombs in the last couple of days. This could all change, but it is eerie that when a message of power is sent out all over the Middle East---unintentionally on our part---it resonates. Big time.
Of course, for many reasons, some good and some bad, this episode will be investigated, and some heads will roll. But the Arab street will not take that as a sign of American or western-style "justice," rather it will interpret this as another psy-op campaign designed to conceal the real message---that American women are "stronger" than Middle Eastern men.
The man makes a very valid point, while, I am not saying it justifies the behavior of our soldiers in any way, I think it is a far more accurate perception of how the Arab street will percieve the situation.
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it is shameful that our soldiers acted this way while representing us, whatever one can say about other cultures and other countries, I think we have a right to expect our representives to be held to the standard to which we aspire, and not sink to the level of the lowest common denominator
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Maybe apologizing will make the middle easterners(not such nice people themselves), aka our biggest suppliers of oil will less pissed off? Yeeaahh..
As for the rest of the world that is demanding explanations, *cough* it itself isn't all that innocent of committing atrocities in wartime, and I'm sure there's a good chunk of the world that is struggling too hard to care. Can't they just move on and get the training and transfer over with and get the war over with. And then come back and deal with this?
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I just got to this line. Being a hardcore democrat who has never lied to achieve an objective, I am now forced to dismiss everything else this guy has to say, as it is likely some cheap justification for an administration who has, infact lied pathologically to achieve its objectives (in Iraq and elsewhere).
continued...
The reality is, in Iraq women had far more power than this asshat claims. My wife was recently participated in an interview/discussion show (It was community access, or I'd have given you a link... I think I can still get a copy if you are interested) that included the current ambasador of Iraq, who was a woman.
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Fajula is quiet because the US isn't going in, members of the Iraqi military are... As for Najef: American soldiers have killed 13 Iraqi militia loyal to renegade Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and have detained 14 others in overnight fighting near Najaf The fighting is still going on, and really hasn't ever stopped. Similarly, if his hypothesis was true, why would Sadir go to the British zone?! They had pictures... even if they weren't from this conflict, they were from some conflict... Putting those pictures aside, from everything I have read most semetic people (the Jews included) have absurdly long memories. Does this clown really think they don't remember the shit the Brits pulled the last time they occupied Iraq?
I have too little time to waste it reading such rubish... It's a shame to because I suspect there is likely a kernel of truth to it, but I can deduce the kernel without getting my bloodpressure up by reading his crap.
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one more thing...
Consider this article from the WSJ about some guy in MA giving away a 50 foot schooner:
Mr. Christensen's Schooner
Took 17 Years to Create,
But He Can't Give It Away
By ROBERT TOMSHO
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 11, 2004; Page A1
MARSHFIELD, Mass. -- The hull of the 50-foot schooner that Jack Christensen built is so broad and deep that friends ribbed him about being a latter-day Noah. But at least the biblical patriarch got to sail his ark.
After 17 years spent meticulously crafting the Queen Jean, Mr. Christensen has found the cost of getting it to the water and finding a dock to be unaffordable on his retirement income. Because the self-taught boat builder has no sailing experience, insurance is unavailable.
Thus, the imposing craft rises from makeshift scaffolding in Mr. Christensen's back yard. Its twin 56-foot masts are detached and resting on sawhorses; the trapezoidal sails are stowed in the nearby workshop.
And while a manufactured boat of similar size might be worth as much as $400,000, the quest to put the Queen Jean to sea has lately hit another shoal. "I can't give it away," says the craft's burly 68-year-old builder.
Large-craft boating, as Mr. Christensen has discovered to his dismay, has become a more complicated and expensive pastime. Boats are bigger and there are more of them fighting for dock space. In 2002, there were an estimated 17.3 million recreational boats in the U.S., up 16% from 1997. Over the same period, annual sales of outboard motor boats longer than 21 feet increased by 90%, to 46,000.
Meanwhile, developers have gobbled up waterfront acreage, and marina operators who want to expand have run into a rising tide of environmental regulation. At New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, boat owners now pay up to $60,000 to buy individual docks. The waiting list to rent one of the 24 city-owned boat slips in Delray Beach, Fla., is 375 names long.
Not that Mr. Christensen was paying attention to such trends during the years he was teaching himself how to build the schooner. Although he lives in a small coastal town south of Boston, he didn't even know how to sail. An engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he figured that would be a snap compared with piloting a bomber, which he had done in the Air Force.
Mr. Christensen had always relished a challenge. In the 1970s, he surprised his wife and four sons by coming home one day in a battered Greyhound bus that he then spent months transforming into a motor home. Later, he taught himself to build violins.
But nothing compared to Queen Jean, named after Mr. Christensen's wife, who thought her husband had something modest in mind when he announced his boat-building plans in the mid-1980s.
Mr. Christensen had other ideas. He had been poring over books about shipbuilders who, beginning in the 17th century, built all manner of big brigs and schooners along the North River, a tidal waterway that snakes through the local salt marshes before flowing into the Atlantic. Some of those ships were so large that to cross the river's shallows, the vessels had to be tilted steeply to their sides and carefully towed by men manning lines from the shore.
Mr. Christensen used his own calculations to expand on a small blueprint he found in one boat book. He laid out the schooner's wooden ribs in a local church hall. To make his anchor, he taught himself to weld. When someone advised that his sails were too small, he went back to his sewing machine and started over.
"He tackled things that would just boggle the mind of a weaker individual," says Paul Coolidge, a friend who frequently stopped by to check on the project's progress.
continues
Then he called Simms Brothers Marine, a local boat hauler. Company dispatcher Richard Torrey, who sized up the schooner, says the Queen Jean would be a wide load that would require a police escort along with one truck for the masts and a second for the boat itself. The price for a five-mile trip to the water: about $2,800.
Jack Christensen and his 50-foot schooner, Queen Jean
Mr. Christensen was further rattled to learn that private docking spaces for 50-foot boats were few, and nearly all area marinas were full anyway. The waiting lists for less-expensive public mooring spaces were exasperatingly long. "There's just not much turnover," explains Leonard LaForest, the harbormaster in Marshfield, where some local boaters have been waiting for a mooring spot since the late 1970s.
Mr. Christensen began to brood and lose sleep. Insurance is mandatory at many marinas, and as a neophyte skipper, he didn't want to risk accident liability in any case. But some insurance companies didn't even respond to his applications for coverage. Local insurance agent Peter Platt was sympathetic but advised that, unless Mr. Christensen hired a professional crew or gained experience on a much smaller boat, it was useless to plead his case with marine underwriters. "They would laugh at me," Mr. Platt says.
In the end, wrestling with such seemingly unsolvable problems proved to be too much for Mr. Christensen. One day in March, he walked into a busy barbershop near the harbor and handed proprietor Rocco Prestia a snapshot of the Queen Jean. "He said, 'I'm giving it away,' " Mr. Prestia recalls. "I thought he was crazy."
Having concluded he couldn't afford to own or sail his boat, Mr. Christensen hoped to donate the craft to a sailing school or some other nonprofit entity that could get it in the water, correct any of his mistakes and use it to teach others to sail. Perhaps, in the process, he might also negotiate a trip on his creation and get a charitable tax deduction for his donation.
But giving away the schooner hasn't been easy, either. The Duxbury Bay Maritime School, in neighboring Duxbury, Mass., was interested but concerned that the schooner would need far deeper water than its shallow mooring area. Others worried about the cost of getting Mr. Christensen's boat to the water to test its seaworthiness. "We can see he was a pretty good craftsman," says Jim Ouellette, founder of the Marblehead Sailing School, in Marblehead, Mass. "We just don't know that he got it all right."
With his schooner still high and dry, the boat builder has tried to focus on what he has already accomplished. "I have truly enjoyed building it, and that's almost enough," says Mr. Christensen, who has also begun mulling new challenges.
That makes his wife a bit edgy. "Now," Mrs. Christensen says, "he's talking about building an airplane."
Re: continues
Re: one more thing...
I'd be happy to take it off his hands but I dont know some how it doesnt feel right.
I might see about asking if I can view the boat when I am in boston, sounds like an amazing thing.