Soiez effrayé, soiez très effrayé!!
Looks like Rummy is on the trail of the Frog turncoats who sold out their NATO partners for a mess of pâte. The evidence will come out sooner or later. And the best thing is there isn't a dang thing they can do about it. Somebody should be watching for reservations on flights from Paris to North Korea or maybe Iran, although I'm not sure either surviving member of the Axis of Evil wants to play host to the leader of the Axis of Weasels. Trial lawyers representing the families of Americans killed in Iraq should be petitioning courts everywhere to freeze French assets in anticipation of litigation.

Shock and awe, indeed!
The seismic shift in the Middle East was so great that it apparently reached all the way to New Hampshire. As a New Hampshireman for many years - I went to prep school, college and law school there - I have to say it's a bit of a shock to realize that the next time I head up through Franconia Notch the Old Man won't be there looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, maybe it's like the Olympics in ancient times. When a resident of a Greek city-state won in the Olympics, the people of the town tore down the walls to say, we don't need them any more since we have a great champion to protect us. So George W's butt-kicking of the Taliban and then Saddam must have convinced the Almighty that his particular protection was no longer necessary for the USA. But what will replace the Old Man as New Hampshire's symbol? A mall? A tourist from Taxachusetts rendered penniless? At least we've still got "Live Free or Die".

Dirty Canadians!
So it's capitalism that pollutes the environment, eh? The Canadians in their socialist glory apparently have a little problem with pumping poisons into their - and America's - air. Say, you don't think it could be prosperity, brought on by that nasty capitalism, that allows people to clean up whatever messes they make, do you? Nah. The Russians and Chinese have always put pristine cleanliness ahead of materialist values such as production of limousines for the elites. Haven't they? The story didn't even mention the "greenhouse gases" that must be churned out by "the largest single air polluter in North America." But wait a minute. Didn't Canada sign the Kyoto Accords? And nasty old US didn't? And yet:

Murphy reports that a recent study found that while air pollution is on the decline in the U.S., it's on the rise in Canada.

I'm confused.

About time
Plans to pull US troops out of Germany seem to be real. Considering that I first went to Germany at the age of three when my father was assigned to Wiesbaden as part of the occupying force and that in a couple of months I will become an official senior citizen, this action is coming not a moment too soon. And aren't we all sad at the prospect of not being able to funnel billions of US taxpayers' dollars into the German economy any more? Maybe Poland or Bulgaria won't betray us the next time we need support in the War on Terror. It's odd. I used to see announcements like this and figure, "Sure, like that's going to happen." But ever since W came to power, I hear and I believe. It sure is good to have someone in the White House whom I can trust to do what he says he will, even if I don't always agree with the "compassionate" (ick!) side of his agenda.

Unpredicted consequences
None of the US media seem to have picked up on this story from Britain about the shocking results in local council elections. One might have expected that the glorious results in the Iraq war would have given a boost to Labour prospects, since Blair is the Labour leader. Quite the contrary. The Tories gained hundreds of seats, and even the third party Liberal Democrats gained many more seats than expected. The fourth party British National Party, described as "right wing", known informally as "British Nazi Party", gained significantly, mostly at the expense of Labour. The gains were so significant that Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader, "guaranteed" that the Tories would win the next general election. BBC, of course, emphasized the Labour gains in Wales and the BBC's roundup of how the papers in Britain treated the election emphasized that all parties had some gains in various places. The BBC refuses to recognize what looks to me like a (an? or is that too self-consciously Anglophile?) historic victory for the Tories.
So why did the Conservatives gain so much, when the leader of Labour is just coming off a huge foreign policy coup? First, the Tories were much more solidly behind the liberation campaign than the Labour Party. The split in Labour was gaping. And the traitor Galloway is a Labourite. Those stories could not fail to have been lost on the electorate. Of course these were local council elections, so something must have been going on at the grass roots, too. Perhaps the locals are just finally fed up with closet - and not-so-hidden - Socialism. Maybe it was the in-town tax in London that showed the electorate where Labour was heading, maybe the proliferation of cameras everywhere, maybe Blair's fondness for the Euro and the Continent, when the French and Germans turned out to be less than staunch when it came time to act on Iraq. Labour must have been seen as the party of big government, favoring encroachment on traditional British freedoms. Whatever the reason, a political turning point seems to have been passed. Years from now we may look back on the liberation of Iraq as the event that triggered many much-needed changes. We may have escaped dystopia by the skin of our teeth.

Having a bit of a tough slog
I'm being besieged on all sides over on Light of Reason. I've taken a bit of a provocative stance on homosexuality and the hounds are in full cry. Here's the stance:

I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just say it. I simply don't comprehend how you can say:

In order to gain the toleration of someone like Santorum, I would have to go back to the view I had of being gay in the 1960s: that it is something fundamentally wrong about me, that I should never act on it, and that I should do absolutely anything to try to change it. If that's not an attack on who I am as a person, then what on earth would be?

You have obviously considered that homosexuality may be wrong and rejected that view. But haven't people with other sexual proclivities said exactly the same thing about their "disorders", however obviously mad they may be? I know that one doesn't just trust one's own reason about a matter. That's not reasonable. You may, after all, be wrong. The social judgment about the harmfulness of homosexuality may be changing in the West, but in many cultures across the globe it's not. The climate may be becoming even more repressive with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And even in the West, many, like Santorum, doubt the wisdom of "tolerating" anything and everything. I just don't understand how you, as an Objectivist, can be so sure, just because of your deep feelings that homosexuality is "part of you as a person", that practicing homosexuality is moral or advisable. Feelings are no basis for behavior. Is the prevalence of promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse and misery among homosexuals due only to "repression" or is it something inherent in what, again, brutally, may be seen as imitation heterosexuality?
For what could be more inherent in what it means to be a man than to function as a man with a woman? And how could failure or inability - however seemingly 'hardwired' - to function as a man be anything but destructive to mental balance? And to think and act as though rejection of one's genetic role as a man should and will incur no psychological costs is simply to deny reality. You are not a "person", infinitely malleable and undefined. You are a man.

And here's my comment at the (present) end of the onslaught:

Hmm. "Stupid" "homophobe" "baffled" "must get out more" "want Wahhabism to take over the world" I'm taking notes so I can improve myself. I wonder if I'll ever be right. I think I am right about the misery that is homosexuality, though not because of some "oppression" by the "straight" tyranny we live under, but by its very nature.
It's odd to hear Objectivists defending priestly celibacy and saying people just ARE one way or another, that they can't control their behavior. Sounds like victimology to me. Because it's behavior we're talking about here, not skin color or gender. I don't think I have a "solution" for homosexuality, any more than I have one for shyness or alcoholism or child abuse or murder. I'm just trying to define what Rand meant by "man qua man". Thanks, all, I think I might be a little closer. By the way, yes, Sean, I do know there are women who behave homosexually, but I have long ago given up trying to understand how women's minds work.

I'm not a troll, really I'm not. I can control my commenting behavior any time I want. The opinions I have I don't just take out of the air. I have been sharing them with Andrew Sullivan, too. I think he's getting a little exasperated at how dense I'm being about how homosexuality is just fine and just like any other kind of sexuality. But wait, wasn't that Santorum's point, in part at least? That sexuality is controlled by the state because it's bad, and homosexuailty is just like the other kinds of bad sexuality? He may be wrong but he's at least consistent. And who would deny that sex is, after hunger and thirst, the strongest drive we have? And how do laws get made except by taking the pulse of the people? My whole point is really that one needs to take a much closer look at behavior before pronouncing it as beyond criticism like skin color or gender. Point made. How come I can't stop? How about this: having second thoughts about the wisdom of social legitimation of homosexuality is not an attack on a man but on his behavior. Could that be more obvious? But, wait, again, didn't Santorum say that too? Uh-oh, I'm becoming a gay-basher.

The Lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Now that Iraq has been delivered from the hands of the Ba’athists and most of the killing and dying and destruction has stopped, we can step back and consider what we know that we didn’t know on March 20th.

First, we know that Saddam was a paper tiger. As most, but certainly not all, military analysts had predicted, his Russian arms and rigid military hierarchy just plain didn’t work. The only part of his apparatus that surprised US military thinkers was the Fedayeen Saddam, a good part of whom turned out to be foreign terrorists. Their tactics, reminiscent of Stalin’s political police in their brutality and utter disregard for the lives of soldiers and civilians, managed to kill a small number of US troops and may have slowed down the advance to Baghdad, if only by a few days.

And we know that the Iraqi people were not deprived by sanctions or US bombing, but by Saddam. The contrasts between Saddam’s palaces and the starving people, especially in the South, prove beyond a doubt that UN oversight of the Oil-for-Food Program was, typically, non-existent and that Saddam never gave a moment’s thought to his people’s well-being, especially if they were Sunnis or Kurds. It’s important to remember how much traction the “sanctions are killing children” lies got before the war and to look around and hear the deafening silence now.

We also know that Saddam was running Terror Central. The boxes of documents we’ve uncovered will provide ammunition for years to keep the lid on terror organizations around the globe. The Left will never admit it, but the victory over Saddam was crucial to the War on Terror. The links to AlQaeda seem indisputable. The wackos among us even think links to Timothy McVeigh may surface. It's a euphoric time. The Weapons of Mass Destruction still are proving elusive, but I have a feeling they will turn up, too. After all, as I've seen a couple of places on the blogosphere, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why did he fight? He could have just laid out the disposition of the WMD that were documented after the Gulf War and probably survived the muted outcry about the Al Samoud missiles that had longer ranges than allowed. He was temporizing and resisting the inspectors for a reason. And to those who say, well, why didn't he use them in extremis then?, I say that he may very well have tried to but could find no one to carry out his orders. Or he shifted them to Syria or to Tikrit or Western Iraq at the last moment, hoping to conduct a fighting retreat and got caught by surprise, perhaps killed, when his armies folded. I will admit that exact scenario is cloudy right now. But we're still learning.

We know France, Germany and Russia are not reliable allies. Britain is. I don’t know why there hasn’t been more publicity about the overwhelming evidence of Russian double-dealing and outright hostility to US goals in Iraq. They supplied weapons, trained Iraqis and diverted intelligence. France and Germany did many of the same things, but Russia’s behavior seems, so far, to have topped them both. France seems to be taking all the heat at the moment, but I have a feeling Russia’s turn will come. I feel Putin is frozen in fear, knowing more will be revealed that will deepsix friendly relations with the US for a long time. He's almost totally dependent on IMF loans right now and cannot survive politically - perhaps physically - if the US blackballs him. The Russian arms salesmen are putting a brave face on the arms situation, touting the performance of their Cornett (sp?) anti-tank system. They don't seem to realize that's like waving a red flag to George W.

And that's another thing we know. George W. is a mensch. Sure he garbles words a bit, smiles at perhaps not quite the right time. But he means what he says and now the whole world knows it and knows the US armed forces are solidly behind his every word. That's an inestimable advantage and a huge change from Clinton. US citizens will feel safer anywhere they go. Governments around the world will respect our flag and our passports because they will know they mean something. And governments will look at the UN and know there's no "there" there. The there's in Washington, not New York. I am overcome with how different, how exactly opposite all these new bits of knowledge are from the predictions of the antiwar crowd. It's almost like war meets antiwar and peace results. A real peace this time, a just peace, a true victory.

Haiku time
Loud cars
Hippos bellow
"This river has crocodiles"

Paperwork
Leaves catch in my hair
Time for a fire

Lunchtime
The wildebeest dragged down
Lions line up

Israel as Islam in microcosm
Another tidbit I picked up from Lewis: Israel is a real puzzle, an infuriating, inexplicable conundrum for Muslim intellectuals. For millennia, since the Diaspora in about 70 A.D, Jews have lived in the Middle East and other lands that in the seventh through tenth centuries became Islamic. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many more came to live in the Middle East and North Africa. The status of the Jew was laid out in the Koran, along with that of other unbelievers. They were generally tolerated, although nowhere did they have as many or as secure rights as Muslims. Jews continued to live alongside Muslims until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Then, most were expelled from Islamic lands like Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya, among many others. This movement of over a million Jews can be seen as the mirror image of the Palestinian "Naqba", when, for whatever reasons (I'm not getting into all that!) many Arabs who had lived in what is now Israel left. Other Jews, of course, came from Europe to Israel.
The frustrating fact for the Arab intellectual is that when the Jews who for millennia had lived in the Islamic world came to Israel, they prospered on the whole as well as the Jews from the West. And even the over a million Arabs who stayed in Israel did much better than their brethren who left and went to UN-sponsored terrorist nests in the West Bank and Gaza or to other Islamic lands. So it isn't contact with Islam, growing up in an Islamic society, race or religion that makes Islam so poor compared to the shining city on a hill that, despite the best efforts of the terrorists, Israel has become. It's not being in the Middle East, or being persecuted by the West - who was more persecuted than the Jews by Europeans? Judaism had been regarded with "contempt", Lewis says, by the Islamic world, even though the faith followed and provided much of the tradition of Islam. It just wasn't as developed as Mohammedanism. Mohammed as the "last prophet" had gone beyond Moses, Abraham and especially Jesus and had brought religion to its final perfection. So why then does the Islamic world seem powerless today? In Israel the West and the East had met and successfully synthesized a powerful and wealthy society, based on a religion chastised by Mohammed as imperfect! Why could the same process not work in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq? Perhaps it can. Perhaps the Islamic world's mistake is in not taking Israel as an example rather than a reproach. We in the US should not be hesitant to play the role of the new Mongols, shaking things up and allowing the consideration of such heretical ideas as religious equality, capitalism, and separation of church and state if that intervention can bring the Islamic world to a better place. No guarantees!

What's going right
I just finished reading Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong?", a survey of the relative decline of the Muslim world. What a time to read such a book! I'm reminded that the border between present-day Iraq and Iran was for centuries the border between the Arab caliphate and the Persian world. Baghdad, at least until the last time it was conquered, in 1258, was the outpost, marking the extent of Islamic power to the rest of the world. With the conquest by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the later expansion by the Turks into the Persian and Arab lands, Baghdad became less important. Looking through Muslim eyes, a conquest of Baghdad can be expected to have consequences. Also looking through Muslim, and especially fanatical Muslim eyes, the toppling of the statues of Saddam takes on an importance not much remarked on in the West. The modern, quasi-Fascist regimes of Saddam in Iraq, the Assads in Syria, Pahlevi in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, have been blamed for much of the weakness of the modern Islamic world, especially after the cataclysmic losses to Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and the continuing failure of the Palestinians to push the Jews into the sea. In classic Islam, statues were forbidden. Even portraits were not considered kosher (ha!), although, as Lewis points out, that stricture was much ignored, especially by the Ottomans. Few Americans realize how much modernization was attempted by the authoritarian Islamic regimes and how much these measures, such as the education of women and the introduction of infidel science, were resented in the Muslim world. The Iranian revolution in 1979 gave us a clue. The Shi'ite resurgence in Karbala and Najaf last week is another sign of that deeply conservative strain. So, to topple a statue is not just a rejection of the regime of Saddam, who did after all have a Koran written in his own blood. It's also a rejection of Westernism and infidel ideas such as statues. The discovery of pornographic paintings and liquor in Saddam's henchmen's hideaways would have reinforced this impression. To hear the Shi'ites cry "Down with Saddam" and then in the next breath, "Down with America" seems to say the least ungrateful. But it's perfectly consistent. The fall of Saddam is a gift of Allah, a conquest over modernity and the infidel. It is not surprising that Allah used the Americans and the British to accomplish this. Didn't he use the infidel Mongols in 1258 to sweep aside the Persians? Did not this conquest lead to the expansion of Islam? Looking from Isfahan and Qom, it might seem that the tide has turned against the Sunni, thanks to the M1A1 and GPS-guided bombing. It's a funny world.

Muhammad-envy
OK, so I've just read Bernard Lewis's "The Middle East' and think I know all about it. And I've had a bit of Pusser's rum, which let's face it most of the British mariners who in the sixteen hundreds landing at Byzantium had also had. And heard the muezzin and seen the mosaics. But I think Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld and W. and even Chalabi himself have perhaps a case of envy of the Prophet. For who could have foreseen this, one year ago? Who could have imagined, as Zappa said of Kansas, who could have conceived of the freak-out, as Zappa said of creamcheese, and here we are in Najaf and Karbala and Mosul and Baghdad itself, the home of the caliphs? This is history, folks, history of the American sort, revenge of the Yankee kind, millions for defense but not one cent for oil.

Randi on a roll
James Randi has a great website. His current weekly journal is a corker - astrology, numerology, witchcraft, atheism, Pepys - how can he hit so many of my hot buttons at once? Read. My only difference with Randi - other than that his name is just one character away from Ayn Rand's - an obvious clue that he's sub-etherically connected to her spirit - is that he leaves no room at all for the influence of the unknown. Maybe that's what makes me an agnostic rather than an atheist. I don't pretend to know for sure that there is not and could never be a God as conceived by the religionists, even Vernon Howard. I would consider it a tragedy if the question were uncontrovertibly resolved one way or the other, since that would spell the end of inquiry. But I do know for sure Uri Geller cannot bend spoons with his mind.

Stop, go, honk
Can't believe this NY Times article where they say that without working traffic lights, Baghdad is in chaos. I've never been to Baghdad, but in Cairo, no one pays any attention to traffic lights, unless there's an armed guard standing at the intersection, which there hardly ever is. They just steam right through, standing on their horns, merging wildly with whoever is coming from whatever other direction. The concept of obeying a traffic regulation when there are no immediate consequences is foreign to the Arab world. But these same people will voluntarily refrain from even having a drink of water all day in Ramadan because the Koran is interpreted to say they have to. Maybe it's because traffic lights are a Western innovation, or because if you can't depend on Allah to protect you from dying in a traffic accident, what's the use of all that praying and refraining anyway?

Complete victory?
Well, maybe not completely, totally, utterly, incontrovertibly, but pretty darn close. Abbu Abbas has been captured - in Baghdad! And over 100 prisoners have been released from Saddam's Security Police HQ in Baghdad. And I passed the bar exam! Quite efficiently, I might add. So a good day was had by me.

Yes/No
I get my Florida bar exam results tomorrow. Thumbs up or thumbs down. I am somewhat miffed to think that a few words on a piece of paper will determine how I spend the next three and a half months, either setting up my future or going back over mountains of material to be ready for the July 29 exam. This powerless feeling may be good therapy, though. And in either case I'll have to wait a few more months to be vetted by the background screening, which seems to be on a par with that accorded candidates for CIA cryptology slots. I never want to get myself in this situation again. Now that I no longer own a car, I am a bit freer. I no longer am chained to auto insurance and loan payments. Now if I can divest myself of my debts, my house, my job, perhaps I can taste freedom, more, pace Janis Joplin, than "nothing left to lose" but certainly including that concept.

Update
The big day is here, and of course the web page listing the results of the exam is unreachable. I've been watching with interest my reactions in these last hours. I never realized how profoundly physical nervousness is. I am periodically flooded with adrenalin, producing "butterflies in the stomach" and shaky hands and mental confusion. As Vernon Howard instructs, I do not try to repress these feelings, just observe them with interest. They are much more widespread and intense than I had ever noticed before, once you really look at them. I don't like them. I want to be free of such feelings forever. The fear complex will go away, so VH teaches, just by letting it have free rein and not seeing it as a failing, thereby giving it power. It's making me nearly sick to my stomach. But I know it's false, artificial. So I can do anything I want. I can wait for the letter, which should come tomorrow, or go to the web site any time I want. I don't have to let my fear programming, product of my conditioned self, dictate my actions. Either outcome is equally tolerable. In fact, I have come up with good reasons why failing may even be better. I would be forced to study the law intensively for another three months, therefore becoming more learned and, presumably, competent. The other path of the future, passing and being certified, is less certain, perhaps, therefore, more nerve-wracking. But that could also be interesting, as it's a second chance to do what I didn't do when I passed the New Hampshire bar in 1985, that is, create a satisfying legal career. I'll be back with the full results and my conditioned self's reactions whenever I can get them. Hey, it's different from the war news!

Tehran thinks again
The Iranian regime - why is it whenever I see that word, I subconsciously put "change" after it? - seems to be wasting no time looking at its bread and determining which side has the butter :
"Now that the ruling ayatollahs have realised the danger that looms over their head, that this American Administration is serious in its menaces, they try to get out of the pit in which they had plunged themselves", commented Mr. Ahmad Ahrar, a seasoned political analyst.
You don't think their stance could have been affected by remembering that the most modern tanks they have are Russian T-72s? Yes, those same T-72s that in the "vaunted elite" Iraqi Republican Guards' hands never landed a single shot on any of the US tanks and were wiped out to the number of nearly 800? That consideration could concentrate one's attention. As well as the thought that the new democratic government in Baghdad may eventually acquire some Abrams and Bradleys and some real military training and the esprit de corps that democracy can inspire. You have to admit, however, that the Persians have a talent for realpolitik:
"Our ideology is flexible. We can choose our interests on the basis of Islam. Still, to put the country in jeopardy on the ground that we are acting on an Islamic basis is not at all Islamic", he said, noting that Iran's stance of distancing itself from the US is "political rather than religious".
As Reynolds would say, "heh!". (Has he copyrighted that yet?)

Appointment in Samarrah
The wonderful news of the freeing of most of the prisoners of war who had been captured in the 507th Maintenance Group's contretemps in Iraq was made more interesting by the fact that it occurred near Samarrah, a name that has certain connections:

Appointment in Samarra


A merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market.
The servant returned, trembling and frightened. The
servant told the merchant, "I was jostled in the market,
turned around, and saw Death.

"Death made a threatening gesture, and I fled in terror.
May I please borrow your horse? I can leave Baghdad
and ride to Samarra, where Death will not find me."

The master lent his horse to the servant, who rode away,
to Samarra.

Later the merchant went to the market, and saw Death in
the crowd. "Why did you threaten my servant?" He asked.

Death replied,"I did not threaten your servant. It was
merely that I was surprised to see him here in Baghdad,
for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."


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December 2002


And it has been used as an analogy by a famous writer. Perhaps it's another case of an oracle being misinterpreted. It may be the collectivists who came to grief at Samarra.

Lies and delusions
Just when I thought the Guardian might have been coming out of its anti-Bush hysteria, it prints a tissue of lies and insults and denials of reality that stagger even me. At some point one finds it impossible to believe that anyone can honestly think this way. The wishing away of the pictures of liberation in Baghdad in this screed becomes more than an emotional response, it appears as an intentional weapon to strike back at anyone who could possibly think Bush and the American military could ever anywhere do anything right. And it refutes itself, just as the leftists yesterday, so I heard (can't find the link) compared the toppling of Saddam's statues to the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan. Huh? Sometimes I just have to accept that people are speaking an entirely different language from the one that I use to describe reality. And they're doing it with evil intent. As far as I'm concerned, they can go join Saddam in his sewer and wait for the MOAB to come visit. Look at this idiocy:

Not even the smallest part of the anti-war argument rested on any illusion that a broken-backed third world regime could win a set-piece military confrontation with the most technologically advanced fighting force in history

Has this writer even been watching the news? Saddam was not defeated in a "set piece military confrontation". He was defeated because his fighters would not fight and because hardly any of his citizens respected him. Only foreign mercenaries stood up to the US military and their intent seems to have been more like that of a suicide bomber than a soldier. Notice also his equation of democracy with the UN. And how many members of the UN are democracies? Not a majority, not even on the Security Council. Certainly not on the Disarmament and Anti-Proliferation committees. And in how many countries has the UN effectively installed democracy? Hint: it's a whole number between -1 and +1. In many ways it's good for one's enemies to be blind and embittered. It's useful to be the only ones able to see the truth. But it's frustrating that some actual human being can live with a brain so screwed up as Seumas Milne's. Unfortunately, some of the same kind of cementheads run entire countries.

Where's my oil?
We all know this war was fought only for the Iraqis' oil, right? So, when am I going to get my share? It's going to be great, not having to go down to the gas station any more. But wait a minute, where am I going to put it? Saddam had the second-largest proved reserves in the world. I must be due for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of gallons. Guess I'll have to put in one of those underground tanks.

The Nothing-but-spin Zone
The Iranians are as shocked as most other Middle Easterners about the victory for freedom in Iraq. But they've adopted immediately a bizarre set of conspiracy theories. Conveniently, these theories explain that Islamic armed might was not defeated by the armed might of the US. The armed forces were sold out by the leaders of Iraq, whom the Iranians have several hundred thousand reasons to hate. If the army had not been "stabbed in the back", the despised Satanic Crusaders wouldn't have stood a chance. This is convenient for Iran because it defuses criticism of armies like those of Iran. The Iranian army would not do any better against the US Army and Marines than the Vaunted Elite Republican Guard did. But the sellout theory allows the Iranians to keep living in their dream world.