[Tax-chick]

It could be worse ... in the Really Bad Old Days, people married their half-brothers or sisters, nieces and nephews ... like Abraham and Sarah.

I recall reading an article by an American doctor in Saudi Arabia (maybe in the WSJ?) who called the Saudi royal family "an irreproducible laboratory of genetic defects."

[isthisnickcool]

In my neck of the woods this is ain't a big deal....

[solzhenitsyn]

Thanks for the interesting story, sarcasm.

"My brother and I against our cousin; my cousin and I against the stranger." -- old Arab proverb

[SeaDragon]

Her reaction was typical in a country where nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins, a statistic that is one of the more important and least understood differences between Iraq and America.

"Deliverence" time. Do they have many banjos there??

[SeaDragon]

"Do you know why Saddam Hussein has not been captured?" asked Saleh, the oldest son of Sheik Yousif. "Because his own family will never turn him in, and no one else trusts the Americans to pay the reward." Saleh dismissed the reports that Americans had given $30 million and safe passage out of Iraq to the informant who turned in Mr. Hussein's sons. "I assure you that never happened," Saleh said. "The American soldiers brought out a camera and gave him the money in front of a witness, and then they took him toward the Turkish border. Near the border they killed him and buried him in a valley. They wanted the money for their own families."

And this is the mentality that we must deal with every day??

Sheesh!

[Capriole]

There are a lot of times I think that these people are not worth saving and we should have left 'em to the tender mercies of Saddam. However, I do have to agree that it's cruel and pitiable that American families are so fragmented and that parents and children live thousands of miles apart. This is a sorrow and a great mistake. Today we Americans let educational and career goals part us, and we are rarely reunited after the children reach eighteen. We have our social, emotional, and sexual needs met by strangers who have little in common with us besides superficial tastes and interests. I'm not saying we should marry our cousins--sheesh, there's not one of my cousins I'd want to marry!--but we shouldn't so readily move away from home to seek our fortune.