Robert Fisk writes about how the Iranians are using the footage of the 15 British sailors to humiliate the West: “Blair will fulminate and Bush will roar and the Iranians will sit back and enjoy every second of it.” This was obvious when they chose to display the one woman captive first. Bush’s casual (I assume) use of the word “hostages” Saturday, by the way, ratcheted up the diplomatic tensions in a way that makes it harder for Iran to back down. Almost as if he wanted a crisis for some, you know, reason.
Though Fisk points out that Iran understands us much better than we bother to understand Iran and is using this knowledge to manipulate Western reactions, he doesn’t explain something that’s been bothering me for days: the first letter ostensibly written by captive Faye Turney was obviously written for her by someone with a less than fluid grasp of English. [Update: here’s an analysis by a linguist.] That was pointed out in every story about it, Iran must have been following those stories, but the 2nd and 3rd letter were no better. They didn’t care that the letters weren’t even slightly plausible, and I’m not sure why.
Here’s the thing about George Bush: you can photoshop him to make him look stupid, like this picture illustrating The Onion’s story “Bush Refuses To Set Timetable For Withdrawal Of Head From White House Banister,”
but you really just cannot make him look stupider than he does naturally (Reuters, yesterday):
No comments:
Post a Comment