Thursday, June 03, 2004

Making the world safer for Americans

Juan Cole reports that the attacks on holy areas is turning Shi'ites everywhere against Americans. What a surprise.

The riots in Karachi on Tuesday, protesting a bombing at a Shiite mosque in Pakistan's major port, involved setting fire to American fast food outlets. This sort of attack had previously been common among radical Sunnis, but it is ominous that now the Shiite mobs are asking for very extra crispy KFC. Now I find that in my old stomping grounds of Lucknow, India, where the Shiite community had been so kind to me in the early 1980s, Americans are now unwelcome. Why, if the Bush administration has any more successes in the War on Terror, I just don't know how we'll be able to survive them.