Your Weekly Rush; why they hate us

Listening to Rush as I was driving around at lunch and he was talking about one of his favorite subjects; there's no reason to even be interested in why people in the Middle East don't like us. Specifically, he's saying that one of the reasons everybody is so upset with the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison is that there is a concern that it will inflame (and here is where it seems a little mixed up) terrorists to hate us more. According to Rush Limbaugh, the Terrorists hate for us is not going away, and we should stop thinking that it will. Even if we abandoned all of our western ways (like Britney Spears) and adopted Islam, they would still hate us.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you noted, Rush's argument goes off its rails pretty early. Because Rush confuses Iraqis with Terrorists. If we were to do a Venn Diagram of the Iraqi people according to Rush's theory it would look something like that.



You see there's not much connection between the two. Terrorists are terrorists. Good Iraqis are Good Iraqis. If you accept this postulate, well, Rush is right. There is no point in doing anything to make the Terrorists like us, and Good Iraqis are going to largely like us no matter what we do.

Unfortunately for Rush, most people assume (in my opinion, correctly) that an actual diagram might look something like this.



Now we might quibble about the relative size of the circles. We don't know, for example, how much of the Iraqi resistance is led by or aided by outside intervention. Some say very little, and other say all of it. I personally think it's a factor, but not a large factor.

At any rate what this Venn Diagram (and how often do you see Venn Diagrams on weblogs. I'm really blazing new territory today!) shows us is that there is a portion of the Iraqi people that is fighting United States Forces. But, unlike in the earlier diagram, there's nothing stopping people from moving in and out of that group. Some Iraqis seeing the events at Abu Ghraib prison or Fallujah might decide that it is time to take up arms against our Troops. Other Iraqis, seeing some of the good things our soldiers are doing, might decide that they should give us time to get out.

The implications are clear. Unfortunately, it seems that some member of our forces in Iraq have not thought this through entirely.