Exercise 3
"An explosion ripped through a busy street Friday as worshippers streamed out of a Shiite Muslim mosque after midday prayers in the central town of Baqouba, killing at least two people and wounding dozens of others, doctors and officials said.
In Saddam Hussein�s hometown, Tikrit, some 300 U.S. soldiers swept through the city overnight, detaining 30 Iraqis � including a dozen suspected insurgents � in one of the biggest raids since the end of the American-led war to oust Saddam."
ΩIgnore the blasphemy, the dissonance of religious fundamentalists bombing a street in front of a mosque right as it filled with worshippers. Ignore the Koranic strictures against exactly that. Ignore the impossibility of what's taking place right now in Iraq being somehow completely separate from "the American-led war to oust Saddam" because surely that's over, Saddam is in fact ousted, so that "war" whoever was leading it, is over, and it says this right here in the Herald Tribune, "...since the end of the American-led war to oust Saddam."; and yet there's nothing in the last ten months to mark the end of that war but an increase in the killing and the detention of people who were first marketed to us as captives in need of liberation and have now been rebranded as insurgents and overall as generic enemies, haji, all looking the same and speaking the same language and increasingly sharing the same look of terror and defiance when they see "our" troops.
But look at that phrase, "...swept through the city overnight, detaining 30 Iraquis - including a dozen suspected insurgents..."
Practice answering these questions until it becomes nearly automatic, so that later the lag time won't get in the way:
1. Are we supposed to think of the dozen "suspected insurgents" as being already under suspicion? That their names were known already, their images available on the stainless steel combat laptops the troops carried with them?
2. If the dozen were insurgents, or "suspected" insurgents, what were the other eighteen? Possibly suspected? Was someone getting ready to suspect them?
3. Using only the text given, can you make a clear distinction between "Iraqi" as a citizen of the country known as "Iraq", and "Iraqi" as a member of a dark reservoir of terrorists and "insurgents" whose only motivation is a hatred of freedom?
