Andrew Bostom provides some historical background to this absurd incident at The American Thinker:
The brutal complexities of Iraq demand strategies informed by a serious, intellectually honest understanding of the local jihadist culture-both Shi'ite and Sunni-and an end to the ongoing cognitive dissonance of our policymaking elites "interpreting" daily events, if we are to avoid a real cataclysm.
Yes. Read it all.
What a fine article.
If you only knew Americans by their intrepid and resolute leader, Dubya, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the title was an oxymoron.
It's good that the Iraqi - and Afghani - misadventures are being put in the "naive Utopian" column .
Naive and Utopian indeed .
And to think we have conservatives supporting such hogwash too
And there still exists a none changing mindset that was apparently somewhat understood by Gertrude Bell some nearly 90 years ago. The role of the Al Sadr family has been left intact to commit to the same status quo, and anti western behavior that was displayed during, and after World War I and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
Not so far from Bell was another famous British life at the time who had also been an Archeologist at the Carchimist diggings in the Saudi territories, but whose sympathies lay with the Arabs of that era,who fought against the Turks, and who also attended the Paris peace Conference of 1919--- EH Thomas Edward Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). Lawrence was a man of books, and letters until his untimely death in 1935.
One is tempted to research Lawrence's reflections on Muslim, and Arab attitudes of that era, he knew many of the actors of that time including Gertrude Bell. Could we find letters of interest in this territory now called Iraq in his books such as The Mint,The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or a Biography of Lawrence written by Flora Armitage called the desert and The Stars?
Yes History certainly has away of repeating itelf if it is not clearly understood.
Correction: Carchemist diggings where in Northern Syria and Lawrence met Gertrude Bell in 1911 and was strongly influenced by her from then on.
It is less than amusing to find none of the usual "anti leave IOraq" pundits on this site now failing to comment on this well thought out and historical piece by Bostom.
Could it be an indication of a touch of "Cognitive Dissonance"?