For a president that often boasts about his devout religious faith, his Administration seems surprisingly dismissive of other faiths. From today's New York Times:
"They now suspect everyone here," said Lt. Col. Ahmed Ibrahim Ali, the commander of the Iraqi Army battalion. "We feel like we live in a prison."Separately, Captain Uthlaut said, "We are a little more careful with searching these guys. "The fine line is treating them as partners, while not treating them like prisoners."
For their part, Iraqi soldiers grumble about poor food, prisonlike conditions, insufficient salaries, outdated weapons, lack of access to medical care and lack of contact with their families. Their sleeping quarters are cots on a concrete floor, not much worse than those for some American soldiers here.
...The Iraqis, for their part, complain bitterly about the preserved, ready-to-eat rations that come in sealed bags, saying the meat inside is not slaughtered according to Islamic practices.
"We throw everything away but the biscuits," said Tahsin Ghanim, a 22-year-old Shiite Muslim soldier from Baghdad. "Can you imagine a soldier operating just on biscuits?"
Dhia Qathim, also from Baghdad, said some of the rations contained pork. "The Americans are Christian; they would not understand," he said.
American forces would be well-advised to avoid unneccesary cultural conflicts, especially those surrounding religion and basics like food. The British learned the hard way when they ignored the religious practices of their Hindu and Muslim troops, leading to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857.
Historians like J.A.B. Palmer and John Kaye trace the origins of the soldiers' rebellion at Meerut, in which South Asian soldiers rose up against their colonial officers, to the Lee-Enfield Rifle. It was developed at the Enfield arsenal by James P. Lee and fired a .303 caliber ammunition that had to manually loaded before firing. Loading involved biting the end of the cartridge, which was greased in pig fat and beef tallow. This presented a problem for native soldiers, as pig fat is a haraam, or forbidden, substance to Muslims, and beef fat is, likewise, deemed inauspicious for certain Hindus. Thus, the revolt occurred as a reaction to this particular intrusion into Hindu and Muslim culture, and then caught on as a national rebellion.
The cartridges were the spark that ignited the powder-keg of already inflamed religious insensitivity on the part of the British. Iraq is already a powder keg that hangs on a loose thread - this is the last thing we need to send it all over the brink. Of course, hoping that the Bush Administration would learn the lessons of history is already hoping for too much...
Leave it to the British to insult Muslims and Hindus at the same time.
Posted by: Quaker in a Basement | December 30, 2004 at 05:41 PM