Lying as a cultural imperative

Captain’s Journal brings up the issue of the future of our forces in Iraq. He then focuses on a serious cultural issue that can drive us apart.

Are lies being told to obtain blood money payments? Some insight comes in this response to the collapse of the British trial by Stephan Holland, a Baghdad-based US contractor.

I’ve been in Iraq for about 18 months now performing construction management. It is simply not possible for me to exaggerate the massive amounts of lies we wade through every single day. There is no way - absolutely none - to determine facts from bulls*** ….

It is not even considered lying to them; it is more akin to being clever - like keeping your cards close to your chest. And they don’t just lie to westerners. They believe that appearances–saving face–are of paramount importance. They lie to each other all the time about anything in order to leverage others on a deal or manipulate an outcome of some sort or cover up some major or minor embarrassment. It’s just how they do things, period.

I’m not trying to disparage them here. I get along great with a lot of them. But even among those that I like, if something happens (on the job) I’ll get 50 wildly different stories, every time. There’s no comparison to it in any other part of the world where I’ve worked. The lying is ubiquitous and constant.

I have always been a supporter of what has been ineptly called “The War on Terror” which is really a war we are waging against Islamic Fascism. After Afghanistan, Iraq was the next logical battlefield. It appears that for the moment Iraq has been won.

We must be careful to understand what the original objective was. It was not to build as Iraq that was a democratic model. It was to remove Iraq from the list of countries aiding Islamofacism. I have been assuming that a pacified Iraq would be a staging area for the next objective in what has been termed the “Long War.” That would be either Iran or Syria. But if our cultural differences are too great, the use of Iraq for that purpose may not be the best approach.

We must also keep in mind that we are not fighting nation-states as such, but an ideology that is embedded in certain parts of the world where Islam is the official religion. It has no well defined borders and acts much like water seeping into cracks and crevices. In the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, the regimes there were actively aiding and abetting the Islamofascists and were our avowed enemies.

In the case of Saudi Arabia we have a more complicated situation. The rulers are both outwardly friendly to us and hostile to those – such as al Qaida – who wish to destroy them, while at the same time funding the extremist religion that breeds the Islamofascists who do the actual fighting killing. We must realize that such an internal contradiction cannot last and be prepared for the fall of the Saudi regime at the hands of the Islamofascists.

Meanwhile behind our lines we have the Islamization of parts of Europe. We have a long struggle on our hands and many on our side … are not on our side.