Raed in the Middle

Raed Jarrar, co-writer with Salam Pax of Dear Raed, is writing his own blog. It will be listed on my roll soon. I'm not going to link to a specific post here, but check out the two most recent ones. Wow. What a coincidence: he is writing from an Iraqi perspective EXACTLY what I've been trying to say from a US perspective--here's an example:

Most of the people that I know (including myself) were against this war… and still are…
Why? Because we are Baathists and Saddamists? Because we are masochists who enjoyed living in the horrible life under the Iraqi government?
NO.
It was because we understood that the modifying must come from INSIDE… even if it took decades or centuries.

I know that I can’t come to Texas and tell people what to do…
Or to London… or to Madrid…
Not because I don’t have enough ideas… it is because my ideas will be OUT OF CONTEXT.

This is the exact situation of the Ideas of the Bush administration in Iraq, they are not bad at all… they are completely out of context…

Earlier:

Or play American football with the Army of the USA?

Which reminded me of something I wrote a while back (I don't feel like looking it up in the archive)--what Iraqis call football, we call soccer. A pretty minor difference, to be sure, but that's where the differences begin, not end.

And, if you go to the next post, Raed offers the kind of analysis of Iraqi society that the Bush administration should have been doing--with quite a bit more attention to detail--before embarking on such a fool's errand as an unprovoked invasion. But instead Bush et al chose to believe their own propaganda. After all, neither they nor their children will have to experience the consequences of such hubris.

The same arrogance and hubris seems to be part and parcel to the pro-Bush crowd as well--I've been checking out the comments over at The Angry Arab News Service, and find it amazing that they don't have the slightest problem with the logical flaws in their reasoning: in one breath, they're waxing at length as to the suffering of the Iraqi people, in the next, they're asserting that Islam is a gutter religion, and Iraqi cities should be nuked. It's almost like they have wife-beater's syndrome.

Iraq, for these folks, no longer matters as a country--if it ever in fact did. It's simply a political issue to be argued, namely, an expression of their fealty to all things Bush. Leader says it, they believe it, that settles it. Iraq isn't even a pawn on a chessboard--it's a focus group test.

Pretty ugly, if you ask me.