A little sunshine may be breaking through in the Middle East. If the Kuwaiti press is a credible source, people in Yemen were slapped in the face by the reality of people beating Saddam's picture with their shoe soles.

The naysayers and doubters and quagmire-callers would have us believe that this is not genuine emotion; apparently the Iraqis are incapable of that. No, it's simple sycophantry--the US got rid of Saddam, proving we're stronger than he is, so of course they will suck up to us. It couldn't be gratitude.

Cultural context, if I remember correctly in the Arab world showing someone the soles of your shoes is a major insult, unclean or something like that.

That's perhaps so. But the Loony Left is already claiming they don't *really* mean it, they're just doing that because they expect us to want them to--after all, they spent 20 years doing what Saddam expected them to do.

Den Beste has a great article about this: the fact that some of the Iraqis are criticizing us already, for not fixing everything perfectly immediately, shows they *are* capable of expressing their true feelings. I think that makes a lot of sense and I'm gonna point that out to everyone I see who expresses the sycophant theory.