Blonde for Barter
A friend recently gave me a copy of October 2009 Journal of Military History, which includes a review of Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. This anecdote caught my eye — as it could hardly fail to do:
Titled “Blonde,” [one] vignette tells how soldiers in Iraq “came up with a great way to search villages” (pp. 134-35). While looking for weapons in villages around Mosul, they put a blonde female soldier on top of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and notified the Iraqis by loudspeaker that the American woman was for sale. As Filkins tells it, the male Iraqis began to bid excitedly — “offering their goats, trucks, all their money” — to purchase the blonde American woman. While the Iraqis were distracted by the auction, other American soldiers conducted searches of all the homes in the village, and uncovered and seized “a huge pile of guns.” Their mission accomplished, the Americans then cancelled the auction, telling he Iraqi men that their bids were too low for the sale to be consummated. The Army captain who told Filkins about this novel search method concludes wistfully that the idea was “brilliant,” but it was stopped by his superiors once they heard about it.
A great story, free from the slightest taint of credibility. In order to believe it, you need to have a very low estimation of Iraqi intelligence. For all that the locals may be unfamiliar with American culture, when has an invading army ever sold off its women to the defeated people? JMH reviewer Fred Borch cautions readers “that the truth of facts and events related in The Forever War is difficult to verify.” I haven’t read the book, so perhaps this incident is impeccably sourced, or suitably hedged. But it sounds like a good tall tale, one that someday a gullible neocon will recite as fact. I can just about imagine VD Hanson firing up his laptop already…
Addendum: Here an excerpt from the book’s own account.
“you need to have a very low estimation of Iraqi intelligence”
And so you should. Lynn’s estimate is 87 – just like Mexico.
It’s a scene out of “The Blues Brothers.”
[to man in restaurant]
Jake: [fakes accent] How much for the little girl? How much for the women?
Father: What?
Jake: Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters… sell them to me. Sell me your children.
gcochran:
Or the Irish in Ireland. One of the largest studies in Lynn’s IQ book found that the 1970s Irish IQ was precisely the same—87!
I wonder why the British never thought of using that same trick against the IRA…
[..]But it sounds like a good tall tale, one that someday a gullible neocon will recite as fact. I can just about imagine VD Hanson firing up his laptop already…[..]
Hanson is likely to compare it to the incident recited in Herodotus’ Persian Wars whereby the tyrant Pesistratus, seeking to reestablish his rule over the Athenians, utilized “a device. . .which. . .was the silliest to be found in all history, more especially considering that the Greeks have been from the very ancient times distinguished from the barbarians by superior sagacity and freedom from foolish simpleness, and remembering that the persons on who this trick was played were not only Greeks but Athenians, who have the credit of surpassing all other Greeks in cleverness.” The ploy was to dress up in armor a comely woman who was nearly six feet tall, place her on a carriage and proclaim her to be the goddess Athena who was bringing back Pesistratus to her own citadel. The citizens were persuaded that she was Athena, worshipped her and received Pesistratus back. Herodotus, Book I.60. If he were alive today, Herodotus would probably enjoy the tale of the blonde for barter.
RKU: Everything that has happened over the past few hundred years in the Middle East – or in Mexico – is about what you’d expect from those numbers. Perhaps it’s all part of an elaborate ruse.
RKU, the British did not have to utilize ruses or deceptions to search for Republican arms caches during the Troubles, the Brits simply barged right on in and locked up everyone. They could hold people on no charges for many days.
Our military is handcuffed as compared to British troops in the north of Ireland.
This sounds suspiciously like the corny hawker’s line used by every carpet salesman and camel-ride pitchman in the Arab world to visiting American tourist groups. Something along the lines of:
“I give you five camels for her! Ten!”
I’m sure that if they aren’t blowing themselves up by opening their own parcel bombs that were returned to sender because they wrote their own return address on them, they are trying to demoralise American soldiers with propaganda that Bart Simpson is probably having an affair with their wives.
gcochran:
Ha, ha! I guess that Lynn’s IQ numbers must then just be totally wrong, or at least the studies done in Europe and based on the largest sample-sizes.
And frankly, I’m not totally sure whether the history of the last few hundred years in Ireland is such a shining example of the tip-top peaks of world civilization…
A great story, free from the slightest taint of credibility. In order to believe it, you need to have a very low estimation of Iraqi intelligence.
I’m not sure you do. Making this a story about Iraqis with low IQ’s falling for an obvious sham misses the point. Complete credulity is one thing, simple attention is another. The Army’s plan needed only the latter to succeed, and sexy blondes get attention all over the world.
Whatever the ruckus or the joke, it gave the search parties time to do what they wanted. I suspect that most of the Iraqis were just playing along, and who wouldn’t?
Gregory Cochran’s Mexican comparison is apposite: would anyone try this stunt as a way of dealing with the cartels in Ciudad Juarez? Is any Mexican drug lord going to leave his stash of drugs and guns unguarded while he goes to play along with DEA agents auctioning off one of their own?
From the sound of the review and the excerpt, this isn’t a story that’s been corroborated by a dozen witnesses. It seems to emanate from one guy, and maybe a few of his buddies. Now, if someone has the sense of mischievous humor to pull off a stunt like this, do you think he might also have the sense of mischievous humor to make up a b.s. story for a journalist? Maybe the trouble here is that it raises the question of just how many cool war stories are tall tales for credulous civilians.
Daniel McCarthy:
It is not even clear from the vignette you related whether the idea was merely conceived but not actually executed because it was stopped by superiors:
[..]The Army captain who told Filkins about this novel search method concludes wistfully that the idea was “brilliant,” but it was stopped by his superiors once they heard about it.[..]
Sounds like a tall tale to me, unlike the story related by Herodotus about the tall, comely woman successfully passing herself off as the goddess Athena 2500 years ago.
The story also smacks of those urban legends one encounters on the internet about how General Pershing stopped the Moslem guerrilas in the Phillipines by burying dead guerrilas with pigs. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pershing.asp
It’s not about intelligence. It’s about culture.
Dear god what nonsense. We are to believe that the Iraqi males were so amazed by blonde hair that they ran from their homes, left them unlocked and didn’t notice US soldiers sneaking in and tearing their places apart. Also, their wives and daughters, who presumably were less enthralled by a light hair female, didn’t notice either.