...he [a young American soldier, recently returned from Iraq] was absolutely insistent that most people in Tikrit were very pro-American, ecstatic about being liberated, and were terrified that the U.S. would leave; and that the media is not reporting this. Very young fellow, very earnest, couldn't possibly be saying this merely on behalf of his superiors. Just offer this up as an observation.
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I don't doubt the truth of this.
Well, the statement about the media not reporting on pro-American feeling seems counter-intuitive. NPR, to name the acceptable *liberal* end of the spectrum, has reporters in various locales who obviously strain to find pro-American Iraqs for human interest stories (the baker who's back on the job thanks to re-construction, the cab driver who says *Bush good*, schoolchildren playing soccer with GIs and so on).
The fact that it seems to be getting very difficult to find many people willing to unequivocally praise the US is telling I think. What incentive does the corporate media have to present consistently bad news?
Sensationalism perhaps, but this impulse would be checked by other, domestic political factors.
And of course, there's the problem of assuming that people who've been there know the full story. My grandfather, who served in a tank battalion during WW2, insisted till almost his dying day that if only the US had re-directed its war machine against the USSR immediately following Germany's defeat victory and peace (i.e. no cold war) would have been the result.
Now, unlike me, my grandpa was there, he faced hard core Waffen SS in pitched battle on the road to Berlin and, once he opened up and began sharing his war stories, had some harrowing tales to tell. So there's nothing I could tell him about combat. And, If direct experience alone was a guarantor of comprehensive knowledge, I'd have no choice but to accept his analysis.
But of course, he was wrong and the result of the aggression he believed in would have been disaster. So, despite his direct experience, he lacked a comprehensive knowledge of many of the factors in play at the time. When it came to this topic, he was always thinking like the triumphal, smooth cheeked killer he was in 1945.
So this young man is, I'm sure, reporting his experiences and impressions accurately. But Iraq is a big country with many millions. If 10 percent (for example) of the population decides that America must go and is willing to fight to bring that about, it's a minority but still quite significant.
For every 100 smiling faces and warm handshakes he encountered, there may have been 10 people who wanted to kill him but were biding their time. Or, people who, on Tuesday, thought he was a liberator but, by Friday after losing loved ones to a nervous GI who fired on a minivan killing the family inside, changed their minds.
This pro-American, anti-American sentiment thing is very fluid I think. The efforts of both pro and anti war people to find a fixed star of Iraqi opinion by which to navigate is a fool's errand.
Understandable, but still foolish. Like it or not, we've got to re-train ourselves to accept nuance.
DRM