When I saw the headline, I thought it would have been really awesome if it were true: Iraqis Offer Tips Over U.S. Blackout. Unfortunately, at least from the tone of the AP reporter, most of the tips were rather snide.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.Finally those uppity Americans who spent hundreds of lives and billions of dollars to rid us of the monster responsible for our terrible infrastructure are getting what they deserve.
"Let them taste what we have tasted," said Ali Abdul Hussein, selling "Keep Cold" brand ice chests on a sidewalk. "Let them sit outside drinking tea and smoking cigarettes waiting for the power to come back, just like the Iraqis."That's right. After all, why show sympathy or support for those who have given so much for your benefit, when you can instead take advantage of an opportunity to revel in their misfortune.
The tips aren't exactly revolutionary, either.
SIT IN THE SHADE. Many Iraqis head outside when the power's off. "We sit in the shade," said George Ruweid, 27, playing cards with friends on the sidewalk. Of the U.S. blackout, he said: "I hope it lasts for 20 years. Let them feel our suffering."Thanks, that's fantastic.
I have a suspicion (based purely on my general negative opinion of the journalists in Iraq) that the reporter found the most insulting and provocative people in Baghdad in an effort to stir up controversy. He must have been irked with the headline writer for coming up with such a neutral title. What about "Iraqis gloat over benefactors' misfortune"? Or "Allah takes revenge on infidels, say Iraqis"?
Personally, I hope that the Iraqis get their infrastructure fixed as soon as possible. The faster it's over the better. I can't wait to get my hands on their precious, precious oil.
When writing this, did you have even a tiny little voice inside your head pointing out that you might be about to come off like a petulant child? Or has the fact that the president displays a similar degree of maturity in his public statements and foreign policies innoculated you against that reaction?
I apologize for being snide. But seriously, for you to sound hurt and resentful that the quoted Iraqis might be sounding hurt and resentful kind of boggles my mind. I mean, if you can manage to take it personally when they merely fail to show what you feel is the proper gratitude, how can you be surprised that they take it personally when we invade their country, kill and maim thousands of non-combatants, overthrow their (admittedly nasty) government, and then betray a profound lack of planning or concern in our lame effort to deal effectively with the chaos that follows?
Boggle.
Mr Callender's is typical of what is worse in the left. How many non-combattants were being killed daily by Saddam? It is not too difficult to calculate that even by taking the inflated figures of the left about the war, the invasion cost in Iraqui non-comabbatnt lives has already been largely paid-up by the savings due to Saddam's ousting.
It is like in Vietnam where the left accused the US soldiers of being baby killers while the number of civilain casualties due to VC and North Vietnamese action was ten times higher (and let's not forget the Hue massacres), or in Aghanistan where the left never cared about Taliban's massacres at Mazar-el-Shariff or Bamyan (plus the hundreds of little ones in mere villages) and about the thousands of deaths due to Taliban's economic and health policies (like restrictions to medical care for women) but started screaming at the first US bomb.
The fact is that the Iraquis, along the Afghans, the Vietnamese or the Cambodians were never considered as real human beings by the left. Only as tools whose blood was useful
Yeah, but that's not at all how the human brain works. Even if it is true that Saddam was killing more people than the war did (and you'd have to provide some independently sourced evidence for that assertion before I'd be willing to accept it, and Rush doesn't count), people learn to tune out a known evil like that.
Try this thought experiment: Pretend that al Qaeda came up with a new, really nasty car-bomb technology, and started planting hundreds of car bombs all across America. Five hundred people a week were being killed! Egads.
So, while we tried to figure out a solution, everyone stopped driving their cars. Undaunted, the nasty al Qaeda operatives, while continuing to plant car bombs, switched to injecting poison in various food items at the supermarket, such that they were _still_ taking out 500 people a week.
I realize this is a silly scenario. But bear with me.
Now, would you expect at that point that the people of this country would feel _gratitude_ toward al Qaeda? After all, they were only killing 500 people a week, while the cessation of driving was actually _saving_ nearly twice that many lives, that being the normal weekly toll from traffic accidents. True, the loss of driving privileges (like the loss of power and safe drinking water in postwar Iraq) would be a major inconvenience, but next to all those lives that were being saved, we could surely overlook that, right?
Saddam's evil was a _known_ evil, one that the people of Iraq had grown accustomed to. True, he exacted a terrible price, and in objective terms it might be true that they are better off today, even with the maimed children and rolling blackouts and unclean water. But it's foolish to think that the Iraqis will see it that way.
I was aiming for "sarcastic" and "dismissive" rather than "petulant", "hurt", or "resentful", but oh well.
John makes an interesting point about perspective, but just because the Iraqis may view the change in their country in the way he describes doesn't mean that that's the correct way to see it.
What he, and Europeans, see as a "lack of maturity", I see as a blunt regard for the truth. It is a fact: they should be grateful. That they aren't grateful shows me that they're ignorant and brainwashed, and perhaps neither of those should surprise me considering the state of their civilization.
Well, if you're going to apply standards like that, then I would say this:
It is a fact: Those who were fooled by the Bush administration's lies on the nature of the Iraqi threat to this country should be outraged. That they aren't outraged shows me that they're ignorant and brainwashed, and perhaps neither of those should surprise me considering the state of their civilization.
Oh brother. Our civilization is at its highest point ever, and far surpasses any achievements of every civilization in the past.
Perhaps you should consider the possibility that the majority of Americans are not sheep merely because they disagree with you. Most Americans don't think the Bush administration lied, and that's why they aren't outraged.
You come across as very elitist.
In thinking about the issue, I've realized that what I personally (and maybe others) object to is not the administration's stance on the presence of WMDs -- but rather their insistence that Iraq was actually a *threat* to us because they possessed WMDs and planned, or were likely, to use them on us. Whether or not the WMDs were present in the first place (an issue which seems insoluble until some evidence turns up), did we have any reason to believe that Iraq was actually planning to use them? I'm asking because I honestly don't know. I guess I kind of assumed that the phrase, "The administration had no evidence of WMDs" included the idea that "The administration had no evidence that WMDs were going to be used against us, or that Iraq was a threat."