Re: Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change

"Sarah" <newsgroupsdon'[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts for Change
>
> By JOHN TIERNEY
>
> Published: September 28, 2003
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/international/middleeast/28CLAN.html
>
> or
>
> http://tinyurl.com/oyb3
>
> ============
>
> I really had a laugh when I read this headline. Some of you , may well
> recall my messages from last year about how in the end, regardless of
> how the Bush rush to war went, the US policy makers and empire
> building dreamers were bound to fail because they never learned to
> understand tribal people and kinship systems.
>
> American reservations are generally poor and destitute places with the
> exception of some of the smaller tribes close to populated area that
> have been able to use casino profits to better their positions. After
> stealing the wealth of land and resources of tribal people here, the
> US Govt. sought to civilize and coporatize them via reservations,
> housing projects that brought clans of families together, who would
> never have lived close by on their own (but that was the cheapest way
> to provide utilities), and to enforce BIA drafted constitutions on
> their governing bodies and citizens.
>
> They totally ignored the cultures of the tribes that are based on a
> kinship system that greatly expands relationships beyond what European
> standards considered family and where the status of an individual was
> based on his generosity towards his relatives and his band as opposed
> to gaining material wealth for him/herself.
>
> Had American citizens not worked so hard to erase the indigenous
> people of this land from their collective minds (except when they can
> use them for sports team mascots or they want to further deplete the
> scares resources tribes still own), and had all the brainy folks in DC
> considered the reality of what Iraq being a nation of tribes really
> implied (instead of simply focusing solely on the idea of their being
> Islamic terrorists), they would have seen this one a mile off. I am
> not the smartest kid on the block and I saw it.
>
> Everyday citizens can be given some slack for allowing what they want
> to blind them to reality. Those hired for their brains and expertise
> should not.

Do you lefties even believe your own bs??  It's really doubtful to me. You
treat other "indigenous peoples" like 6 year-olds in need of an
understanding Mommy, a role you folks always seem all too happy to assume
upon yourselves. So how are you so different from the folks that put Indians
on reservations??

There are few thing more phony than leftist that uses this kind of rhetoric
to keep people stupid, poverty stricken or divided along racial/cultural
lines.

And why so? So you self-appointed Mommy's can teach them how to live like
good little savages, apart from the modern western world you so hate?

Iraqis, as the mideast goes, are fairly intelligent and educated folks that
happened to have been under a brutal fascist dictatorship for the past 30
years. And Sarah does not need to try and justify his brutality by
dismissing it as just some kind of quaint "tribal" disorder that makes it
all understandable or justifiable (even if true).

Nor should civilized people accept the kind of 7th century barbarism and
murder that Osama scum or the Taliban crazies preach. In fact their version
of Islam is just modern fascism, the very brutal kind that does not tolerate
any dissent.

If you are so enamored or respectful of such noble "indigenous peoples" -
like the Taliban or Osama nuts - why don't you go live with them? I suspect
they would get your mind right in short order.

BTW... be sure and take head covering ....assuming you want to keep your
head that is :)