“The mainstream media continues to cooperate with the Bush Administration’s policy of giving short shrift to the Muslim psyche, and especially the Iraqi sense of place.

In the West — where the expressions ‘family, national pride, and friend’ are tossed about like so much salad — we are less likely to recognize the importance of diverse cultural perspectives, above all when they are linked to unassailable and even unwise fidelity.

So sayeth not the irresponsible and sometimes non-curious American news media, where nowhere have we heard a word about stunning Arab loyalties, even between those of contradictory opinion, that might be our ‘enlightenment’ answering the question concerning why exactly Saddam Hussein has not been ‘discovered’ — and may never be.

It is the Arab term ‘Dakhil’ which provides the underpinning for the arrangement in which the hunters, namely the US Military, and the hunted, namely former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, now find themselves.” — Jeff Koopersmith, —American Political Journal

I asked the other day about the senseless illogic of surrounding an Iraqi town with razor wire because of Saddam Hussein’s supposed role in planning the ongoing insurgency against the American occupying forces. Koopersmith knows why it will not succeed. “Tribal vigor is on the rise in Iraq. Make no mistake about that fact — and, therefore, their ability and propensity to protect and hide their own increases each day…One need only think of a mother and child to come close to understanding this fealty.” I also wrote about mistrusting the academic objections to the similarities drawn between Iraq and Vietnam, that this is a matter “too important to be left to the academics.” The role that American ignorance of the cultural underpinnings of the indigenous struggles of these two peoples will play in our failure is one of those generalities worth paying attention to instead of drawing scholarly distinctions. (As Koopersmith concludes, “It is their, our, and our leaders’ almost complete failure to understand the Iraqi ethos that is indefensible, and that which may come to consume us, far more than today.” Substitute Vietnamese for Iraqi in that sentence, and it reads as true.)