Ok so Mr Bush thinks that now the world is a little bit safer than it was before… now that we went to an arab nation and killed a bunch of little kids, women and elder… now that many people are without a home and many of the treasures of the ancient iraqi culture have been lost… now that the US is running a country in the Persian Gulf… right in the middle of the arab culture s heart… where the US has never been that popular anyways… now that we are also threating to invate Syria and Iran… Wow thanks mr Bush you do know how deal with extremists… But please and I ask all you americans don t forget Iraq such as you forgot so many agressions comited by the us before and you know why because I hated after the tragical september 11th to see people in national tv asking “but why us, why us that are such a peaceful nation?”
ps… I am not American so I appologize for my english and when I use plural foms I mean us the people from the countries that form the list of shame or as most people know it the coalition.
andres, I appreciate having posters from other countries on this board. It’s educational.
I assume your OP was meant to be somewhat sarcastic. However, I’m not certain of your point. Could you please re-state what you mean to say in a direct way?
Out of curiosity, what “we” are you talking about?
The only people I’ve noticed even making noises in that direction are members of the Bush admin “advisory coucil.”
I presume the point of the OP was that this Damn Fool War™ proves that the 9/11 attack was not perpetrated by people who Hate Us Because We Are Free™, but was instead perpetrated by people who think we are an evil imperial power. Furthermore, I think the OP would say that this Damn Fool War™ proves that, in fact, we are an evil imperial power.
Don’t worry about it. You’re written English is better than a lot of the emails I get from other Americans.
I can see where you’re coming from. The only problem with debating this is that none of us have any idea why people in the Middle East don’t like America. We can guess but that’s it. Now, will this war increase anti-US sentiment in the Middle East? Yeah, probably. But they hate us anyway, Osama has hated us for years, and I don’t think that 9/11 was caused because of our imperialistic-moves (or our interference in Middle East conflicts over the years). I personally think that they don’t like us because we’re so incredibly different (We’re western, we’re much more advanced, we’re liberal, we’re a democracy) and because we are so powerful (and intimidating) to them. I think this war will do more good in the long run and I doubt that any terrorist activity will arise directly because of this (and not due to their general dislike).
We’ve seen worse typers on this board who are American.
Maybe the Muslimworld can come cry to me when the death toll for Iraqi Freedom is significantly higher than the death toll from 9/11. Yes I am aware that Iraq probably has nothing to do with 9/11. The point I am trying to make is that the Muslim world’s philosophy of “its wrong to kill innocent civilians but it’s understandible because of American foreign policy” works both ways. Just as American meddling “instigated” the 9/11 attacks, the policy of nations like Iraq, Afghanistan and others - harboring terrorists, spreading anti-Western propaganda and oppression - led to our response.
Here’s the diference between the US and the Osamas/Sadaams of the world. The Osamas/Sadaams kill 3000 civilians for the sake of killing people in the name of their religeon or to strengthen their power. We unintentionally kill 3000 civilians and risk the lives of our own people to bring freedom to a country who may or may not appreciate it.
This is rather misguided. Most Arabs do not hate the US; they just dislike, or at most resent it from afar. However, actions such as this war are apt to produce more Arabs who really do hate the US, substantially increasing the recruiting pool for people like bin Laden.
Can you really call it “unintentionally” killing 3000 civilians when, before you initiate the war, you understand that many civilians will perish as a part of collateral damage. And do you really believe that invading Iraq was about bringing freedom to that country? You really think Bush, Cheney & co give the slightest shit about the plight of the Iraqis? That’s like Osama saying he was trying to free American’s by destroying the home of their oppressive oligarchy (the World Trade Center).
Better start weepin’, bub:
So that’s 12,000 Iraqis killed from warfare, according to the Pentagon. If we use the first Gulf War as a guideline, we can toss in a ballpark guess of another 50,000 who will die from post-combat diseases and whatnot. And while this war doesn’t have any Saddam-supressed uprisings, we do have rioting in the streets of Baghdad, Takrit, et al., which are probably killing a few hundred people as well.
Add that up, and we’re talking a minimum of 12,000 to 60,000+ Iraqis who have been killed (or will get killed) from this Damn Fool War. Is that “significantly higher” than the 3,000 lost on 9/11 for ya?
Then you’re just giving the Islamic fundamentalists more ammunition to terrorize with, since you’re admitting you’re simply targeting Muslems for the sake of being Muslems.
Do you ever stop listening to White House propaganda and try thinking for yourself for a change? :rolleyes:
The moral basis of the War on Terror is very simple. It is bad to kill good people, but good to kill bad people. Bad people can be identified by the fact that they kill good people or support those who kill good people. In contrast, good people can be identified by the fact that they kill bad people or support those who kill bad people.
That’s the difference between the horror of 9/11 and the collateral damage from our Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks were good, so we know those who attacked us were bad. There’s no way to try to explain such behavior; it is simply in the nature of bad people to attack good people. Saddam supported those people (at least morally, if not materially) and therefore he is bad and we had to go after him. It’s true there’s been a lot of collateral damage, but the Iraqi people gave material support to his regime through their protracted refusal to overthrow him. They were bad people as well. We’re the good guys, so it’s okay for us to kill them because they’re bad guys. Deaths of bad people don’t matter.
No, I don’t really believe this is true. It’s so simple only a child could agree with it, but it has a great emotional resonance for me. I’d like to say I believe that Iraqi war dead are morally equivalent to Americans, but deep down I don’t know if I do. Everywhere I look in our culture, I see the message that Americans are just plain better than foreigners. I suspect many others feel the same way, even if they don’t realize or won’t admit it. I suspect this sense of superiority is the driving force that gives power and appeal to a hawkish foreign policy.
Someone else might start with the assumption that the Americans are the bad guys. Then the September 11 attackers were justified in going after us. It’s true there was a lot of collateral damage, but those people were all giving support to the bad American government by their use of American buildings and airplanes and were therefore bad themselves. Being bad, it’s only natural that the Americans decided to attack a good country like Iraq and kill a lot of innocent people.
There’s no logical way to pick one of these viewpoints over the other. If you start with the premise that one side is bad and the other is good, every conflict between them reinforces that premise. In the rational sphere, this type of circular reasoning is a fatal flaw in an argument. In the emotional sphere, a circular chain of justifications can be difficult to break out of, even once you recognize that it exists.
Do you have to pick one side or the other? Clearly not. I understand that in reality neither side is totally right and neither is totally wrong. But figuring out moral shades of gray can be extremely difficult, and I’m tired right now. At some level I dearly want to believe that things are just black and white. It would just be so much easier.
IMHO JasonFin gets 10 out of 10. If more people could approach the madness with such honesty, maybe that would cut back the rate of madness a bit.
Yes, thanks. We can now see that ignorance is a world-wide phenomenon.
*Ok so Mr Bush thinks that now the world is a little bit safer than it was before… *
Do you have a cite for this or do you have magical insight into the mind of our president.
now that we went to an arab nation and killed a bunch of little kids, women and elder…
So THAT was our purpose there! Thanks for filling us in. :rolleyes:
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now that many people are without a home and many of the treasures of the ancient iraqi culture have been lost…*
The treasures that the Iraqi army revere so much that when they aren’t stationing artillery next to the Iraqi people are looting from? Those treasures? -
now that the US is running a country in the Persian Gulf…*
We are? Which one? -
right in the middle of the arab culture s heart…*
I thought that was Saudi Arabia. Mecca and Medina and such.
where the US has never been that popular anyways…
Never?
- now that we are also threating to invate Syria and Iran…*
We are? Got a cite for that one too?
Wow thanks mr Bush you do know how deal with extremists…
We deal with them better than the Iraqi people were able too.
- But please and I ask all you americans don t forget Iraq such as you forgot so many agressions comited by the us before and you know why because I hated after the tragical september 11th to see people in national tv asking “but why us, why us that are such a peaceful nation?” *
Which aggressions would those be?
50,000? Care to breakdown that math for us.
Post-combat diseases? Right. Sadaam took care of the civilian population by hording medicine and food for the civilians. Maybe the U.S. will build a couple of palaces like good ol’ Sadaam did instead of taking care of the civilians.
Let’s see, 35,000 deaths by Sadaam vs. a couple hundered by looting and rioting. Yes, I see now. So very close in number.
Propaganda indeed.
So, ThunderBug, what are you saying? The war wasn’t about saftey? What other rational are you willing to provide? Are you calling the OP out on the carpet on the basis that this Damn Fool War™it could have been for oil, a personal grudge or maybe to pave the way for Salvation’s Purse to tell the infidels about Jesus?
Are you saying woman and children weren’t killed? Oh, we are calling them “collateral damage” so it doesn’t count.
Oh, I get it. If some people don’t show respect for works of art and historical value, nobody should. If there exists a New Yorker who would loot the Mueseum of Modern Art, then nobody in the world should respect anything in MoMA. I see how it works. Thanks for educating me.
He is probably referring to the one where the country where the only people who have weapons are americans and british.
Perhaps you should do some more research.
What a stinging rebuke. Well, I guess before 1776, they just disliked the british.
Perhaps you should read the papers
Yeah, we put them in the highest office of the land.
Your feigned ignorance (or perhaps real?) bores me. Pick up a book about the CIA overthrowing democratically elected governments one of these days.
So, as long as we only kill 34,999 people we are morally superior. Got it. Thanks.
Do you have any sites for your “ballpark guess” or are you just pulling numbers out of your ass?
According to this site:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
they put the civilian body count somewhere between 1300 and 1900 people.
This site:
http://www.militarycity.com/iraq/1752319.html
estimated 10,000-15,000 military personal (GUlf War I, I believe)
Compare:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/2002/1202hr.htm
“In Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, 100,000 Kurds were killed or disappeared in 1987-88 alone”
“Political prisoners faced “inhumane and degrading” conditions, the report said. Some prisons were “cleansed” of prisoners, including the Abu Ghraib prison where 4,000 prisoners were executed in 1984”
“Saddam’s regimes led to an average of perhaps 200,000 a year”
“…since Saddam took over [in 1979], things have changed. At least 4 million have Iraqis have left Iraq, at least 2 million have died”
How are those numbers for you?
So I guess that it boils down once again to the old “is it worth a few thousand lives in order to save a few million?” question.
I look forward to more of your irrational rhetoric. It’s a perfect example of how when you don’t like someone (in your case the Bush administration) you will go out of your way to find every possible thing to not like about them. It think it’s a perfect metaphor for the Middle East.
Right…wrong…Whatever. I pick the side that isn’t trying to fly airplanes into where I live.
I gave my cite link in the original message, though I see I made a bit of a goof in my original math, so let’s revisit that…
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The Pentagon estimates 10,000 Iraqi soldiers dead and 2,000 Iraqi civilians dead. Total: 12,000
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From the Columbia University study, 3,500 Iraqi civlians died in the first Gulf War, and another 14,000 died from post-combat pollution. That gives us a post-war civilian death ratio of 4:1.
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Applying the 4:1 ratio to the 2,000 estimated Iraqi civilian deaths, we can extrapolate that another 8,000 civilians will die from post-war problems. (this is where I erred originally, btw)
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12,000 + 8,000 = 20,000 Iraqis killed, significantly higher than the 3,000 killed on 9/11.
Sure, and the Pentagon estimates 2,000 civilians killed, which is within the same range. iraqbodycount.net is not counting post-combat deaths, however.
Which would be fine and dandy if this Damn Fool War was about liberating Iraq, which it wasn’t – Colin Powell didn’t go before the UN and asked for authorization for military action because he wasn’t able to sleep at night, what with being haunted by the wailing of repressed Iraqis. The only reason the Administration is playing the “liberation” horn now is because the “WMD” horn has gone flat.
Pencil
Please provide the following:
Where Bush has said that the world is now safer or the ability for humans to read each others minds.
A singular, black and white, concrete reason for the war with Iraq.
Iraqi respect for their archeological treasures OR a U.S. disrespect for such.
The country you refer to when stating “where the only people who have weapons are americans and british”. It certainly isn’t Iraq, or are you claiming that the US/UK removed all weapons from the Iraqi populous?
A historic and universal dislike in the Arab world for America. That is an awfully wide brush, and if they all hate us and always have I’d really like to know.
A cite that Iraq is the heart of the Arab world.
The US plans to invade Iran and Syria. Maybe I don’t get the same papers where you live, all the ones I’ve read have us denying invasion plans.
A cite that one of those democratically overthrown governments that the US has overthrown has caused Islamic Fundamentalist hatred and is linked to 9/11.
We ARE morally superior to Sadaam’s regime. Are you claiming we aren’t?
msmith537:
Right…wrong…Whatever. I pick the side that isn’t trying to fly airplanes into where I live.
ThunderBug:
We ARE morally superior to Sadaam’s regime. Are you claiming we aren’t?
IMHO there are two types of people. There are those that have the strength of character to objectively examine themselves (and their own nations) and correct the faults they find, and then there are those that lack this ability. The two quotes above are classic examples of the former which is also the frame of mind that President Bush represents. That frame of mind is dangerous because it asserts that one is always right in the face of overwhelming evidence; it prevents one from taking a look in one’s own back yard and seeing if there’s anything that can be cleaned up.
I am suggesting, ThunderBug, that the US has no claim whatsoever to moral superiority. No doubt you would wish for me to cite a basis for that claim but the fact is that whatever example I site would be contended and justified by you. You seem to maintain some naïve and even childish notion that politicians never lie, that there isn’t any corruption in the US system and that the President is truly and deeply concerned about the plight of the oppressed Iraqis. Take a good hard look in your own back, sir. (Your back yard being the USofA.) You might be less quick to judge the moral quality of those you claim to villains.
And I would like to propose, mssmith537, that perhaps your tendency to polarize and vilify “them” as opposed to “us” is promoting the very same frame of mind that flew the planes into the WTC. You ever stop to think that you are spreading the same cancer that killed three thousand in New York? You realize nuts like Bin Laden want a war between the US and the Arab world and that the nuts in Washington are playing right into his hands? Your “picking sides” omits to consider what the truth of the situation is: Both “sides” are committing crimes against humanity and therefore are actually both occupying the same side of the good/evil equation.
I would like to add a couple of links that demonstrate how welcome the Americans liberators are in Iraq. Maybe CNN failed to show this story.
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6291696^1702,00.html
Andres:
Your English is about 10,000x better than my Greek, so you won’t hear any complaints from me about a few misused plurals.
I can’t say I agree with your post, though. If many in the Arab world don’t like the US policies, certainly there are better ways to show that then flying a plane into a building. A building that, by the way, had quite a few Muslims in it.
How about flying a plane into a building in Badhdad? Saddam killed 100s of thousands of Muslims. I’m not recommending it, I’m just wondering why the target of Muslim extremism never seems to be against Muslim countries.
No, I think it’s not as simple as you are implying. I don’t claim to understand it myself. Hate that fierce is beyond my comprehension.
This has got to be one of the more bizarre statements of the past few weeks. It’s been debated and analysed endlessly for the past year and a half, both on this board and in the real world. Here’s your top three choices in the order suggested by OBL in several pre-9/11 interviews (and who, I guess we can assume, has a vague idea as to why 9/11 occurred):
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US forces in Saudi, protecting the Saud family and the oil but also infringing on the holiness of Mecca and Medina.
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No Palestinian State despite 50 years / 3 generations of refugees.
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US capitalist imperialism; control of the mechanisms of trade, world banking, cultural imposition, etc. etc.
In other words, US interference in the region in pursuit of it’s own world-wide capitalist interests and acting to the perceived detriment of Islamic society as a whole, as well as the ‘lot’ of Muslims.
- My view, but I’m also paraphrasing Kissinger’s statements post-9/11 and before the White House gagged him. And linked to in the archieve here.
As an aside, one might think this interersting or not, but at least two of the three (above) issues on OBL’s agenda are addressed by the liberation of Iraq; less dependence of Saudi oil, possibly paving the way for a US withdrawl or at least reduction of military in Saudi and, also, the ‘Middle East Road Map’ re-addressing the Palestinian question.