Embracing the suck in Fallujah, by our friend Bill from INDC:

Once perspective is established, fatalism helps. If your number comes up, it comes up. Almost - but not quite - as silly as the sentiment that "it will happen to me," is the idea that "it can never happen to me." A bunch of maniacs shooting RPG's, sniping, slinging mortars, triggering bombs and loosing machine guns are bound to hit something. And they do. But if you take reasonable precautions, keep your eyes open and do what you're told by people with experience, the overwhelming odds are, you'll be fine. And if you do get hit, at least you did everything prudent to avoid it.

Michael Totten has recently been embracing the good in Iraqi Kurdistan. Little suck to be embraced in the other Iraq. But wouldn't you know, in a part of Iraq that Hitchens thinks is destined to become the model of Middle East democracy, Totten accidentally stumbles into the suck, and manages to find an enclave of crazies in this otherwise picturesque country:

They were supposed to be social democrats, the people Patrick Lasswell and I met yesterday in a compound outside the city of Suleimaniya, the cultural capital of Northern Iraqi Kurdistan. We had it all set up. We were to meet Abu Bakr Mudarisy and his associates for lunch at 11:00 A.M. and learn what we could about the anti-government resistance a few miles away in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Our driver Yusef misunderstood and took us to the wrong place. He did drop us off where we met left-wing dissidents from Iran. But these weren’t the moderate English-speaking leftist intellectuals we were looking for. Instead we found ourselves in an armed camp of the military wing of the Iranian Communist Party.

They were the nicest Marxists I've ever met, even if the meeting was by accident.

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