The Telegraph notices the difference between bombast and performance. Heh heh...
Whatever policy the Americans pursue for Saddam's capital, his supporters are obviously incapable of mounting a coherent defence through the streets, on 1945 Berlin lines. To achieve that, one needs fanatics with the military skills of the Waffen SS, and there are none in Saddam's forces.
They have shown themselves fantasists of a kind familiar in the service of tyrants: masters of bombast, more comfortable in the torture chamber than on the battlefield.
The Allies take seriously the guerrilla threat that could be posed by some hundreds of would-be fighters who have been filtering into the country from Syria and to a lesser extent from Iran. But this is a problem for the security of Allied-occupied Iraq, rather than a danger to victory.
This war has provided yet another lesson on the chasm between a Western culture that means what it says, and a culture extravagant in the use of words, such as that which pervades most of the Arab world.
The Americans and British are literal-minded people. We encounter difficulties in diplomacy with the Irish or the Spanish or the Chinese, never mind the Iraqis, because other societies possess a different attitude to verbiage.
Before the war, many Western pundits found it difficult to believe that Saddam's people could deliver so many blood-curdling threats, without having some practical notion about how to implement them. Yet this week, few Iraqi units have stayed around to fight the Americans, and those that did so have been easily eliminated. Not to restate every theme I've ever mentioned, but the difference between saying and doing is a factor we will have to keep in mind in the coming years when we're dealing with other Arab and Muslim countries and organizations. The standards of truth aren't the same between the two cultures; the qualities that are revered aren't the same. Empathy isn't an Islamic virtue. Altruism doesn't exist. Gratitude is transient. As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, cause is usually not equated with effect.
Chivalry never arose in the Islamic world, so there's no cultural tradition for the strong to be gentle with the weak, merciful, or even humane. Women in the west complain about the way they're treated, but it's rooted in that chivalric tradition. We men open doors for them, we're supposed to protect them and take care of them. It's a cultural obligation, and when it's violated it's noticeable. Islamists keep women under wraps, literally, and expect the ladies to walk three paces behind them, also literally.
That penchant for bombast is what makes the Muslim world particularly susceptible to confusing guys with guns with soldiers. It's easy to buy a nifty uniform and strut around and make faces. There's comfort in being in a crowd, all doing the same thing. It makes you feel powerful, part of something greater than yourself, an irresistable force. The same thing carries over into the idea of the ummah, and it explains the peculiar liking in that part of the world for varieties of fascism — remember the imagery of the bundled fasces, each reed slender and breakable in itself, the whole, bound together (in this case by the party or by the Koran) and unbreakable.
It's when the massed forces of whomever's making faces and shooting guns come up against the immovable object of the west that the disillusionment sets in. The binding — belief — on the fasces breaks abruptly. Suddenly it's a bunch of individual reeds who're being picked off by .50s from Abrams tanks. Illusion meets reality and things end pretty quickly. The guys in the pretty uniforms melt away. |
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