Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq Turn It Incendiary--Robert Fisk

[laststeamtrain]

That fine French historian of the 1914-18 world conflict, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, suggested not long ago that the West was the inheritor of a type of warfare of very great violence. "Then, after 1945," he wrote, "... the West externalised it, in Korea, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq... we stopped thinking about the experience of war and we do not understand its return (to us) in different forms like that of terrorism... We do not want to admit that there is now occurring a different type of confrontation..."

(snip)

It's weird the way we both despise and envy the "other". Many of those early orientalists showed both disgust and fascination with the East. They loathed the punishments and the pashas, but they rather liked the women; they were obsessed with harems. Westerners found the idea of having more than one wife quite appealing. Similarly, I rather think there are aspects of our Western "decadence" which are of interest to Muslims, even if they ritually condemn them.

(snip)

They want both to break out of this world and to express their moral fury and political impotence as they do so. They want, I think, to destroy themselves for their own feelings of guilt and others for the crime of "corrupting" them. Even if that means murdering a few co-religionists and dozens of other innocents. So on go the backpacks - whoever supplied them is a different matter - and off go the bombs. Something happens, something that takes only a second, between saying "I love you" and then hanging up the phone.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk07232005.html

[pocket]

1. Fisk should replace Kofe Annan

if Big Dog wont do it.

[laststeamtrain]

2. Fisk is the most 'been there/done that' guy in the Mid-East...

IMHO. He reminds me a bit of a character in a Graham Greene novel. The one GG would be writing if he was still with us.
I remember this one piece he wrote right before the Afghanistan action and he was talking about being in the Khyber Pass and finding old belt buckles and sword hilts from British troops left from their misadventures there. A perfect telling detail.