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Flypaper revisited
It must be rather galling to the U.S. Marines, to be sent into the winding streets of Najaf, Iraq, at the risk of their lives, among bystanders of strange language and unknown sentiments, against the lethally-armed streetfighters of Moqtada al-Sadr's "Imam Mahdi Army", to do the Iraqi government's own dirty work. And then the same government sends a delegation to the al-Sadrites -- to the people you are trying to kill, and avoid being killed by -- to negotiate an end of the fighting, and their retreat to safety, as if the Iraqi government were a neutral party. Such missions are very hard to sell, politically, back home in the United States; and it is a grace that the Western media are not following the plot, or the unhappiness Stateside would be greater.They couldn't follow it if they tried, for they are locked in their own cultural prison, unable to imagine the complexity of the situation on the ground in Iraq. It was the same when members of the U.S. Senate expressed outrage on learning that Ahmad Chalabi, the erstwhile American ally, now abandoned to his fate, had had dealings with the ayatollahs in Tehran. So does everyone have; just as everyone except Mr. Chalabi had dealings with Saddam Hussein. Mr. Chalabi had an office in Tehran long before the Iraqi invasion. Posted by: tipper 2004-08-19 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=40996 |