2007.8.14.1

I’ve been speaking today with several members of my battalion who recently returned from a rotation in Iraq about their feelings on which direction the country may be headed, what is working and what isn’t, and why we are where we are.

Understand that their views (and mine) are generally pro-invade-Iraq, but working as Special Forces and not just regular Army, we work at a different level and interact much more closely with (even live with) our Iraqi counterparts. That being said, we tend to absorb and adopt some of the views of our counterparts over time and while not necessarily sympathizing with them in every respect, tend to at least understand where they are coming from and how their views were formed.

Understanding the enculturation a person has been exposed to does not mean that you can’t have judgemental views on their society (as a culture or even a foreign subculture), how its run, or have very strong feelings against the way they do things.

This examination will probably lead to a few essays over time that I’ll post elsewhere.

Unless they never materialize. I’ve got a horrible backlog of essays on other important issues as well… enough that a few folks have actually complained. Which is weird, since i thought nobody ever read this blog.

This particular issue is so strongly influencing our society today and will determine the direction the world will head later on down the not-so-distant road, however, that I feel compelled to explain the views I and most of the SF community have developed over a period of involvement with terrorism and Second and Third World problems that is much, much longer than this particular event we call the Global War on Terror.