perfidy

Ironicly, they really are impotent.

Actually. I've been told by Marines who handled captured Fedayeen that many of them were drug addicts. So stories about them having poor judgement are not surprising.

Bram,
S'funny, some of the cultural forces at work.

Special forces folks I've spoken with who were in Afghanistan in '01 and '02 held the Arab fighters they found there in low regard.

Independently, each man I spoke with mentioned utter cowardice when furriners were captured. When faced with American special operators, alone in a small room, the jihadi reaction ranged from frantic, animated efforts to sell out the rest of his cell, to open weeping, to urinating on themselves in terror.

Those particular Arabs in that particular fight were real badasses when operating in groups against women in burkas, but wanted no truck one-on-one agin burly Ranger types, or worse, handed over to the Northern Alliance, who yearned on more than one occasion to skin such prisoners alive.

All of which sound totally different from the Iraqi fedayeen, given their eagerness to fight in the open.

So I wonder now whether the ones captured in Afghanistan were from places other than Iraq, and therefore susceptible to different aspects of cultural exploitation. Or the fedayeen are from elsewhere, or...

I handled a lot of prisoners in the first Gulf War. I would not even rate most of them as soldiers - just untrained conscripts who knew they had been screwed (and bombed, shelled, and shot).

We did hold a few Republican Guard Officers who were captured in Kuwait city - they tried to act like bad asses around U.S. Marines. They must have known we would not hurt them - they complained about the food and even how close they had to sleep their own enlisted men.

A couple of days after the cease fire, a group of Kuwaiti officials investigating war crimes shows up and plucks all the Republican Guard officers out of our camp. At that moment, they had to know they were fucked. We laughed in their faces as they were hauled away by vengeful Kuwaitis.

Apparently the Republican Guard had been systematically raping, looting, and murdering their way through Kuwait City. The ones the Kuwaitis got their hands on after the war were properly tried then properly hanged.

Bram,
That's a good one. Gosh, where was Ramsey Clark when those pricks were hanged?

Have a peek at General Singlaub's biography sometime; I forget the title off the top of my head. He was a Jedburgh back in the day and a China hand later on.

He has a neat little chapter about liberating a Japanese POW camp somewhere in SE Asia. He, a radio operator, and a translator I believe were the sum total of the liberation team. It was up to them to parachute into Japanese territory, make contact with the camp leadership, and inform them that Japan had surrendered, the prisoners were to be repatriated, and he would accept their surrender.

There were many cross-cultural observances and mind-fucks that Singlaub new about and exploited, but things came to a head pretty quickly; the camp commander just wasn't having any of it.

So after a few days of increasing recalcitrance, Singlaub finally told the commander something like, "Look, if you don't want to deal with me, that's fine. Representatives from the 1st Chinese Army will be here in a few days, and they'll be happy to accept your surrender."

Chinese officers weren't expected in fact, but the effect of the remark was vastly increased cooperation.