Re: botched diplomacy (a rant)

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 02 2002 - 14:43:40 MST


--- Jeff Davis <jrd1415@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I was just watching the news yesterday, interviews of
> people on the street, in Iraq, women mostly. As
> surely as domestic propaganda has destroyed the
> average American's grasp on reality--replacing it with
> the war cry--so the Iraqi press appears to have
> completely and successfully persuaded the Iraqi people
> of Saddam's rectitude and of the evil of the
> American/Zionist plan to destroy Iraq.

Have you even considered the possibility that Iraqis on the street have
been so terrorized by Saddam's secret police that, much like Soviet
citizens pre-1990, most were too damn scared to say anything on western
tv that deviated one whit from the government propaganda line?

Of course not, since Saddam is so obviously a far more trustworthy
source of fact than the US....

> I mention this
> because American TV tries to persuade Americans that
> the war will be easy--a turkey shoot like 1991--that
> the Iraqi Republican Guard will defect, that the Iraqi
> people, in a constant state of disaffection and an
> imminent state of rebellion will welcome the
> Americans, and that the Kurds and the expatriate Iraqi
> opposition can handle the ground fighting for us like
> the Northern Alliance did in Afghanistan. There is no
> hint that the Iraqi people, being as completely
> indoctrinated as are the Americans (but of course from
> the opposite perspective) may not cooperate.

Yes, this is why only 100,000 of them surrendered to us in two days in
'91.... I'm sure that their patriotic resolve has changed significantly
since Saddam only executed 10,000 of the POWs we returned after the
war...

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