"You can't predict what "the crowd" will say, and the Arab "crowd" is no more symplistic than the American one. It does "work" somewhat differently, and does display different "mentality", whatever that means, but none of it is exploitable with any useful degree of certainty by cheap armchair psychologising." Again, I think you're missing the point here. All you need is one bin Laden to cause us a decent amount of agony. Half a dozen multimillionares with a fanatical hatred of the US and we might have a regime change over here. As for the rest of your post, you didn't respond to the one point so obvious I didn't bother making it: Israel. Add to that images of us running around any country with a drop of oil or two and they have the right picture: "You Arabs can continue living here as long as our access remains unimpeded." And again, the politics and local history are very near irrelevant. The US is there in Saudi, Israel, Iraq, and wherever...not the French, not the Italians, and not the Chinese or the Russians. -TD

From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: cypherpunks@minder.net Subject: Re: U.S. in violation of Geneva convention? Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 01:08:46 +0200

On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 05:06:55PM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

A thread that started out quasi-interesting has descended into non-Cypherpunk levels of triviality.

I thought it was trivial all along.

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The original point stands, and is valid. The Islamic world and, in particular, the Arabic part of the Islamic world, are probably going to forget their dislike of Saddam when they see those newreels of the great Dictator being rubbergloved and de-loused.

Oh please. They (well, many of them) sure didn't forget their dislike of the US when they saw those newsreels of the twin towers tumbling down.

...

For them it's almost certainly going to resound as a symbol of how we've systematically manipulated and fucked them over all these years.

Actually, they mostly systematically manipulated and fucked themselves over, with occassional help from different factions in the rest of the world.

And they already have a "symbol of how we've", etc. - American military presence in the most holy of Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia. That's one of the largest reasons for Al-Qaeda growth in recent years. Compared to infidel military bases somewhere near Mecca and Medina, whatever's done to some dictator who has presided over a mostly secular regime is insignificant. And American military presence in Saudi Arabia is actually subsiding now because Iraq is no longer a threat.

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They're not going to respect our "Power", they're not going to care much that WE supported Saddam in the first place. They're just going to get angrier.

This is just so much armchair psychology. Most of it is silly theoretising that has no grounding in reality.

One side says: look, we had to humuliate him publicly, because those Arabs only understand power, they only respect you if you clearly show them who's the boss, bla bla bla.

The other side says: we shouldn't humiliate him, because the Arab culture is built around the all-powerful concept of pride, and they'll never forget how we hurt their pride, bla bla bla.

Both sides are spewing idiotic garbage with some marginal relevance to reality, which is much, much more complicated than that. You can't predict what "the crowd" will say, and the Arab "crowd" is no more symplistic than the American one. It does "work" somewhat differently, and does display different "mentality", whatever that means, but none of it is exploitable with any useful degree of certainty by cheap armchair psychologising.

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Look for bin Laden to grow in status until he's just a notch or two below Mohammed.

This is inane.

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That Saddam was a cruel, butchering dictator will soon be nearly irrelevant.

Truth is always relevant.

-- avva

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