Usually I enjoy your “letters” from far-flung places. They give insight into what’s going on on the ground. That said, what the heck were you guys thinking when you published Wade Savage’s “Letter from Baghdad” [The Rakish Angle, March]? Is the fact that a Minnesotan was there, like a Kilroy on the wall, more important to your editorial needs than the accuracy of the facts asserted therein? Good grief, people! Just because a local yokel travels to a particularly verboten portion of the Middle East does not mean he is qualified to judge what goes on there. If Mr. Savage had managed to read a history book published after 1930, he would have known that pan-Arabism, which is what he says is most Arab’s profound dream, was given a whirl by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 60s. He began the Ba’ath Party in Egypt, and while it had limited organizational success, spreading to Syria and Iraq, it failed miserably because they could not unite under the common goal of one Arab nation-state. Why did it fail, you ask? Perhaps because, while the goal was noble, the cultural differences from one country to the next were insurmountable in practice. For Mr. Savage’s information: there is an Arab EU: it’s called the Arab League. There’s also OPEC, if you really want to delve into economic cooperation issues. Mr. Savage, despite his travels to Iraq, would be well served by sitting his butt down in a college level Middle East History class.
Kathleen Nelson, Edina
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