Posts From Iraq

For a while now I have felt Mike Totten provides some of the best Western insight into Middle-Eastern culture, something many of us in the West have so little knowledge of. Mike will take you into the streets, souks, and bizarres and show you the Iraqi countryside, so much like California's. In his latest post he takes you to Kirkuk, an oil rich city that could rival Dubai, Bahrain, or Kuwait as a glissening modern city and instead thanks to the rot of Saddam's tyranny is nothing but a vast bombed out slum. It is Kurdish and if they get their way it will become that shining city for all Iraq to look upto.
Though I greatly admire Mike Yon and Bill Roggio for the work they do as independant journalists, they imbed with the military and are thus under their cloak of protection, Totten ventures out into the public with an interpreter and driver and little else though he sticks to the calmer regions. He has lived in the Levant and knows the customs and how not to stick out as an American so he gets stuff other MSM jounalists will never get and delivers a feel of the people that goes way underreported.
Mike Totten's compatriot Patrick Laswell has posted video while wondering around a souk, an open market like those favorite Al Qaeda targets in Bagdad, in Suleimaniya. From what Mike has posted about Kurdistan it sounds more like NoCal and our quaint towns and villages replete with history though ours is far less deep and intriguing. I must say that Iraq has moved into my top five countries that I want to visit along with Israel, the British Isles, Australia, and Thailand, as repository of unimaginable history from the earliest days of the written word. Egypt should be included in any Mid-East tour as well, I should add. My reasoning, Britain for golf and history, Austalia for eco-tourism, Thailand for culture, food and eco, Israel and Iraq, history and Christian religious pilgramage but alas that is still a dream.

I have been watching the "America at a Crossroads" series on PBS and have been impressed so far with how it has dealt with radical islamist, neo-fascist jihadism. They have not tried to gloss over it to much at least as I expected them to being as liberal as they are at PBS. Tune in, it is worth watching.

Update: Sadly tonight's is anti-semitic and fails to recognize there was never a Palistine and Israel fits within their historic region. I take my fairness compliment back!

PS: A tale of two houses, one green gasbag Al Gore's, the other President Bush's Crawford Ranch, from The American Thinker.