"The colonists learned how to minimize the chances of enemy ambush, sometimes employed a hit-and-run style of fighting, often utilised a mobile strategy, and not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture, killing women, children and the elderly, the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies….warfare in the colonies came to be associated with a manner of fighting that England’s career soldiers variously called ‘irregular war’, ‘bush war’ or simply the ‘American way of war’".*
Which all sounds suspiciously like the methods currently used by Arabs of all stripes against the American occupation of Iraq.
The moral is that Epicureans should always think, "Is this information spun? What is the agenda? What could be the other side of the story? And then think for themselves! It’s what education is for.
(P.S Epicureans never use the word utilize, when use or adopted can be inserted equally well – – always be careful of people who utilize things. They are usually in the military.)
Yesterday I heard a quite hysterical person giving a speech to some nationalistic, self-congratulatory outfit called Americans for Prosperity, claiming that the Founding Fathers faced hanging, drawing and quartering for rebelling (something abandoned about 2 centuries previously), and that the widows would have had their homes and every portable possession taken away from them had their husbands been caught by the British. Then they turn round and call the President of Iran ignorant! I never cease to wonder!
Do you mean the Arabs of all stripes who support the Americans, or the Arabs of all stripes who do not? Please, be a little more specific! Right now, the Sunnis are flooding the offices of the “occupation” with job applications, the oddest rebellion I ever saw. An avalanche of forms, a tsumai of paper!! But, Arab ways are strange to western eyes.
Especially Basra, that hotbed of resistance! The bastion of a free Iraq! Which will never give up, never ever, no, not ever! Except, that, well, there are only a thousand or so troops there now. All those gun shooting, machine gun loading, bomb driving, resistance folks have flown the coop, aparently. They have been reduced to vicious stares, which has done nothing to improve the service at the local lunch counter, I can assure you.
You are actually in Iraq, yes? How interesting. Tell us more about it.
Oh how clever! Because I’m not actually in Iraq (just like yourself! even more clever!!) I can’t possibly be well informed about what’s going on there! Not, NOT POSSIBLE! I am as oafish and dull as Putin, or that Iran Hitler guy! Oh yes, you have put me down fatally!
Keep smiling!
It has taken how many years of war (longer than the Second World War) to get those guys to fly the coop (if they have). Not only that but around 100,000 (who knows?) Iraqis have been killed, most of them totally innocent. Al Queda is reported to be on its knees – – so it damn well should be! Please don’t start boasting about the success of this war!