Interesting anecdote from CNN: A
Interesting anecdote from CNN:
A bus full of men in civilian clothes had been pulled over at a checkpoint. While one man was being questioned, he drew a finger across his throat, Tomlin and others on the bus said. Asked what that meant, he responded with a glare. ...Two things. 1) The grinning is disturbing. Not in the fear-inducing sense, but in an almost sad kind of sense. It would take me a page to explain my reasoning, but the long and the short of it is that this man is probably someone who would never be capable of living in a free society where people of different cultures intermingle. I say this because that kind of brazen threat is something that can only come from someone whose heart is so filled with hatred and his mind so devoid of reason that he cannot help but to endanger his own life by making such a threat in front of a team of Marines with M-16s."What you're saying is you want to kill me," Tomlin said to the man.
The Iraqi nodded.
"You're saying you want to kill me?" he asked.
The Iraqi grinned and glared.
At that point, a gunnery sergeant grabbed the man, threw him to the floor and bound his hands behind his back with plastic handcuffs.
The Iraqi was "crying like a baby," the sergeant said, and Tomlin said the other 30 men on the bus "knew we meant business."
And 2) Is this more support for the theory that the Arabs see us as weaklings? They clearly don't respect us, and after our performance in Somalia and the first Gulf War (where we failed to finish the job), not to mention our feeble response to the bombings of our embassies and barracks throughout the 80's and 90's, they have ample reason to think we are weak. Lacking in intestinal fortitude, so they say. It occurs to me that the Soviet Union at least respected us, maybe in part because they knew that we would defend ourselves if provoked.
Two decades of appeasement sends a message to an entire generation. It shouldn't be surprising that the guy was "crying like a baby" when his theory about American guts was put to a real-life test.
Posted by Matt at April 4, 2003 5:14 PM
