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    Monday, January 17, 2005

    The playground fight

    The kids on the playground want the bully to leave them alone, so they proceed to kick him when he's looking the other way. Now they've taken the toy his mother gave him for Christmas... sounds a little illogical to me. Do they want to give the bully an excuse to beat them??

    4 comments:

    MGO said...

    Who represents the bully: Christianity (or the Catholic Church) or the US, or the Sunni insurgents? It is strange that they've captured a Catholic leader, since the Vatican is providing legal support for Saddam's (Christian) deputy Tariq Aziz against war crimes. A quote from Aziz according to the Telegraph: "I never killed anyone directly."

    Ostensibly, the support is because the Catholic Church opposes the death penalty, but the Church has a particularly left-wing social policy, and would like to see world peace achieved by unilateral Western disarmament.

    Triet said...

    the kids are Iraqis, the bully is western occupation. the mother is the Catholic church, or christianity in general since it forms the basis for our culture and ideology.

    I think the insurgents made a bad misstep here. They will have hurt credibility in countries anti American occupation, yet predominantly christian or specifically Roman Catholic. Plus it gives the Bush administration further political fodder for increasing martial law in Iraq.

    MGO said...

    You'll have to explain to me why the US is the bully in your scenario. Did you think the same when the US led the war in Kosovo?

    Triet said...

    The US is the bully in this scenarion because we are seen as the big, pompous man on campus. Foreigners see us as the land of opportunity, yes, but also as a place of debauched morals and a willingness to push smaller countries around to get what we want. Although we may not see ourselves as bullies, enough foreigners I talk to do for me to take that stance in the analogy.

    Kosovo is a different situation because although we led the occupation, it was still a NATO affair. That implies a plurality of countries agreed with the action and the reasons behnd it. We led a coalition of forces in stopping the atrocities whereas Iraq is something we went into alone (basically--talking to Brits tells me that Blair committed GB to follow USA against a LARGE percentage of the citizenry).