Michael Totten has a new report up on the goings on in Fallujah. He covers a subject that I have touched on a time or two. The importance of pornography in changing our opposition. If you want a look back you might like Jewish Porn Sweeps The Arab world and Defeated By Pornography. How about a look forward at what Michael Totten has to say.

At the Amariyah station in a village just outside Fallujah, several Iraqi Police officers sat at the dispatcher's desk and watched explicit pornography streamed over the Internet. They whooped and yelled and elbowed each other as the video kept getting racier. I sat at a desk just behind them and tried to work on an article, but they kept trying to get me to watch the video with them. Several Marines shared this work space with them, and all of them ignored the Iraqis and tried to pretend the porno show wasn't on.

Marines aren't even allowed to check their personal email accounts while they're on duty, let alone watch explicit sex videos on a laptop.

Irony abounded in that room. Iraqi culture is orders of magnitude more sexually conservative than American culture. Soldiers and Marines in particular are not shy or restrained when it comes to sex (except when they have to be while they're on deployment). Yet the Americans in the room were the ones put off by the pornography. It wasn't because they are uptight or square, but because porn on the job could hardly be less professional. Some of them rightly accused the Iraqi men of hypocrisy. "How come you guys cover your women but you sit around all day looking at our women without any clothes on?"

As I have been saying all along. Contact with American culture (especially the sexual aspects) will liquefy the Middle East. Osama agrees.

Cross Posted at Power and Control