This is the way it was supposed to be - neocon neverneverland

[oblivious]

Inside Iraq, a trip to a safe haven

-snip-
Located in the heart of Iraq's relatively tranquil Kurdish region, it's a place where Americans can walk the streets without helmets rather than crouch inside an armored vehicle with weapons at the ready, where the local citizens not only smile, but begin every conversation with "My friend," where U.S. soldiers are greeted with a small cup of hot tea, not incoming mortar shells. -snip-

...Mistah! Shoe shine? Shoe Shine? Mistah! Mistah!"

Like metal filings to a magnet, they surround the Humvees in the parking lot next to the computer store - an ever-expanding pack of street-smart young boys who have learned in the past year that as the American soldiers go, so goes a gold mine of U.S. currency.

... Wherever Spc. Melissa Zadakis, 19, of Mexico goes, a crowd of adoring males follows. By mid-afternoon, she's beginning to look a little dazed.

"It's crazy," she says. "They just all stare at you and they want to touch you and everything."

One young Kurdish woman offered 2,000 Iraqi dinars (about $1.50) just to have her picture taken with Zadakis. A young man, smitten by the blonde woman with the M-16 slung over her shoulder, proposed on the spot.

...there's a sign over the Mazi Mart - still visible through the dust of the departing convoy... It says, "Dream City."

http://news.mainetoday.com/war/insideiraq/040428nemitz.shtml

[aquart]

1. I like Kurds.

I have met exactly one but I am capable of extrapolation.

[oblivious]

2. They certainly sound loveable.

"You're not going to believe it," says Sgt. Dee Robinson of Sidney as Sunday's 11-vehicle convoy heads north toward the mountains that separate Iraq from Turkey. "But I'm telling you, the kids will break your heart."

[rockymountaindem]

3. I have an Iraqi friend who is of Assyrian descent...

The Assyrians live in northern Iraq near the Kurds. They are the remnants of the great Assyrian empire, and now there are only about 100 thousand left. They are Catholics, and as such they were pretty low on Saddam's list.

Anyway, he said that the Kurds always get positive media coverage in the west because they hate Saddam. However, according to my friend, the Kurds are despised in the region because they supposedly were and are "raiders" and violent folks. My friend said that his grandfather told him a story about how the Kurds kicked his family out of their ancestral village in the 1920s.

When I asked my friend about the massacres of the Kurds at Halabja and other places (and keep in mind that my friend lives in Canada now because his own family was persecuted by Saddam and forced to flee), all he could say was that, basically, "they had it coming to them".