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January 29, 2007
Gullibility & Iraq
In reading this article on Iraq from The New York Times on the "Shiite Cult" and the claimed plans to storm Najaf, perhaps best read in context of articles like this from The Guardian two phrases came to mind: "settling of scores" and "useful idiots" - although perhaps "useful dupes" would be better.
I have, and I shall be charitable, a hard time giving credit to either the evolving spin around this operation (which was gone from Sunni to Shia as far as I can tell, and interesting numbers as well) or even the background story. The Shia cult I rather strongly suspect can be rephramed as "Stupid Rivals We Managed to Liquidate with the help of the useful dupes, the Americans."
It is painfully clear the Americans are being manipulated, and sadly, don't even understand-given their impoverished knowledge of the parties and lack of fundamental human capital resources to rectify- who or what is doing the manipulating.
And now they propose to lash out at the Iranians, which will only compound their problems, multiply their enemies and generally confirm an emerging sensation in the region that Americans only desire to kill Muslims, blindly.....
It is sad, terribly sad that the grotesque incompetence of the current American administration has led the US into this dark place, so eerily reminiscent of the Soviet's situation in Afghanistan - including the war crimes and useless, counter-productive brutality.
Posted by The Lounsbury at January 29, 2007 06:44 PM
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Iraq
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Comments
Dear L,
Juan Cole has a pretty good take on this particular "event".
It looks like intra-Shi'ite rivalries + millenarianism. The NYT (& others) conflate Shi'ite and Sunni concepts of "the mahdi".
I've put the link in my Iraq article up on the main Aqoul site.
--MSK
Posted by: MSK at January 29, 2007 08:12 PM
One reason I've been raving about the foolishness of the Lancet casualty report and why it matters is this very incident. If one does the math, one comes up with a death toll that is so ridiculously high that something odd happened here, including really falsified accounts. But if one accepted the Lancet figures, the death toll here would not be extraordinary per day and on one would start red flagging an anomaly. This is why Lancet's slapdash study is worse than nothing at all.
Posted by: matthew hogan at January 29, 2007 09:40 PM
