I probably missed the point of Christian Parenti's article in The Nation ["The News From Planet Falluja."]. It's the story of one Tariq, "an upper-middle-class Canadian medical student of Palestinian origin. He is a Muslim, fluent in Arabic and English, very smart, very young, brave and a bit naïve." He went to besieged Falluja to help out in local hospitals.
Basically, he was kidnapped by the local resistance, which Tariq claims is mostly Iraqi and "surprisingly uninformed and self-contradictory" about politics. "They don't even watch the news," he says. "They just watch DVDs of sermons and speeches and muj music videos. Even the top guys had no idea what was going on in the rest of Iraq." Elsewhere, he says of the mujahedeen, "They really are simple people...it's all about trust and family. They have no idea about security, technology. It is just God, kin and the nation. It's Alabama in Arabic."
Mr. Parenti seems to suspect that Falluja was a scene of American defeat (the Marines "attempted" ground assaults; they "had essentially given control of the city to the insurgents;" they "tried to enter the city," etc.).
Could be; I'm not there, so I don't know, really. But that's not the nit I'm after.
Which is this:
Tariq repeatedly requested placement in a hospital or clinic but was instead held by this cell and given a tour of life among the fighters. Every few hours he was moved from house to house in cars packed with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and modified Sidewinder missiles (originally developed in the United States as air-to-air missiles, they had been taken from Iraqi warplanes by the mujahedeen, who now used them as shoulder-fired rockets).
Now, according to the US Navy, the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile is 9 and a half feet long and weighs 190 pounds with a fin span of just over two feet. It uses a Thiokol Hercules & Bermite MK 36 Mod 11 single-stage, solid-propellant rocket motor. Its warhead alone weighs over 20 pounds.
In contrast, the Stinger--which actually is shoulder-launched--is five feet long and weighs about 34 pounds, total. The M136 AT4 light anti-tank missile system is 40 inches long and weighs just under 15 pounds. The M-47 Dragon anti-tank missile system is 33 inches long and weighs 22 pounds. The Javelin is about six feet long and weighs 61 pounds.
My point--and I just know you see where I'm going with this--is that there's no way in hell that mujahedeen hayseeds with "no idea about technology" converted an American-made AIM-9 Sidewinder into a "shoulder-fired rocket."
Mr. Parenti is sharing an "otherwise empty hotel" with two other journalists in Baghdad. I don't doubt Tariq's story; neither do I doubt that it was colored a bit as it passed through Mr. Parenti's Green Zone lens.
But Baal-on-a-pogo-stick! How can you be covering a war and not know that you can't just lop the fins off a Sidewinder and shoot it off from your shoulder? I'm no expert, and even I know that's a load o' camel-droppings.
Just had to get that off my chest. It was really bothering me.
