I will not believe for a moment that German (and other European) news has no bias. You’re seeing just as much slant as we are in America.
Straw man.
Invoking knee-jerk patriotic jingoism. You seem to be saying Iraqi’s went back to fight for their “home town” because they saw a US soldier raise a US flag in Basra 7 / 10 days ago ?
Good argument ! … but I supect your getting a little emotion cloud ypour judgement.
As a Leftie, woolly bullshit thinking like this makes me very sad, and apprehensive for the future.
Well, back to op. I wondered the same thing. I kept hearing on the news that the last thing the Iraqis should do is engage the Coalition in open warfare.
I imagine SH’s own regulations may have caused difficulties for the republican guard. They have to protect Baghdad, but they are not allowed in Baghdad. Therefore they have to engage the Americans on open field.
Spot the poster trying to do too many things at once …
I was referring to the blond and blue eyed statement.
But since you bring the argument:
Having experienced US media first-hand for several years, I tend to disagree with you. Few US media outlets, aside from CNN on the TV field and the NY Times on the newspaper field, have the international coverage that people take for granted in Europe. While I was in the US, I perused newspaper websites in three different languages from even more different European countries (Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and occasionally Ireland) to supplement the half-page international news in the local paper.
European media feel much less need to fall in line behind the government in times of crisis. Quite the contrary, at no time do they watch the government with more scrutiny than when the going gets tough.
Not the least, Europeans have it much easier to get news from abroad. The same satellites feeding news to the Brits feed them to the French, Germans, Italians and Spanish. All that matters is a)can your TV display the standard and b)do you understand what is being said. More, there’s international crossborder stations like Arte, a Franco-German cooperation staffed by an international team, and regular, non-satellite broadcasts don’t stop at borders, either.
More, we can see CNN in Europe-we even can see NBC. But can you see German or French public television?
I can read the Times of London, largely pro-war, and the Guardian, pretty much anti-war. Can you read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or the Frankfurter Rundschau? (Well, you can buy them in select stores, a week late, but are you personally capable of reading them?)
No, I am saying no such thing, but you’d know that, had you actually read my statement instead of jumping at a single word in it. Or did you want to imply US tanks did NOT roll into Kerbela, Holy City of the Shiites?
Sorry, but if you don’t understand people, regardless of the culture, like to be their own masters, and that such is even more true with a people with bad historic experiences with foreign rule, you cannot be helped.
Take lightly? No, indeed, they seem to be quite emotional:
“Confounding the Arab media and the pundits who had talked darkly of a new spirit of Iraqi patriotism resisting the invaders, the people of Basra braved gunfire to dance in the streets and cheer for the British troops who finally broke the grip Saddam’s dreadful regime had exerted on Iraq for so long. This reporter saw one Basra citizen even kiss a British tank.”
Yet another strawman. You are merely asserting that you can peruse different media throughout the international community. That is irrelevant to my point.
What I asserted was that the German and other European media (or really ANY media anywhere) contains bias, per human nature.
Your your statement:
- see, unfortunately for your argumentation, it is well-documented that Iraqi ex-pats unfettered by Iraqi security, WENT BACK TO IRAQ to defend their home country.
You see -no, obviously, you don’t- people tend to not take lightly if foreign tanks are rolling through their home town and hoisting their flags there. That happens to be true regardless of how brutal a dictator they are relieved off.*
<Insert my response>
** You reply:**
No, I am saying no such thing, but you’d know that, had you actually read my statement instead of jumping at a single word in it. Or did you want to imply US tanks did NOT roll into Kerbela, Holy City of the Shiites?
Huh ? Where do you mention Kerbala, Shiites, ‘Holy Cities’. Are you now arguing that Shiites returned to defend Kerbala specifically, or that, as you did initially, Iraqi’s returned to defend Saddam (see my first post in this thread) because of some flag-waving soldier … sorry, you’re not making sense ?
Regards, Confused in London
[QUOTE]
what OliverH wrote
quote:
I would suggest you take a closer look at demonstrations in Europe. You will find plenty of signs ‘No to Saddam, No to this war’. You can find an Iraqi under just about every such sign.
(emphasis added)
The inane responses
People, people. OliverH’s contention was that the large majority of anti-war protesters in Europe are expat Iraqis. Given that the Iraqi expat population in Europe is small and the number of protesters is very large, it would take a demographic miracle to allow OliverH’s statement to be true.
Sua
Well, Sua, I am sorry then to have to bother your ripe intellect with yet another inane response.
If we are going to mark words here in our usual genuinely non-inane way, let’s once and for all find out that:
(I) there are demonstrations against the war.
(II) there are plenty of signs in these demonstrations saying X.
(III) under just about every such sign, you will find an iraqi.
Does not imply that “the large majority of anti-war protesters in Europe are expat Iraqis”. It implies that there are an equal or greater amount of iraqis in the demonstration as there are signs saying X (stated to be “plenty”).
Maybe you can work your own logic from now on, Sua?
As to the actual claim of Iraqis and signs saying ‘No to Saddam, No to this war’, I have no clue if it is correct or not. I would focus more interest on this part: "…and plenty of those not going back [are] still opposing the war. " As that was the point Oliver was really making (in my interpretation).
Oliver:
Sorry for butting in! 
Very well, Randy. I would contend that, given the popularity of the “no to Saddam, no to war” slogan, it would still take a demographic miracle to cause the large majority of such sign-wavers to be Iraqi expats in Europe.
All you have done is make it a smaller subgroup of protesters. That doesn’t change the fact that there just aren’t many Iraqis in Europe.
Perhaps OliverH, despite his great knowledge of Europe, is unable to distinguish between Turks, Moroccans, and Algerians, who make up most of the Muslim population of Europe, and Iraqis.
'Cause, you know, they all look the same. :rolleyes:
Sua
I’m more interested in the OP than in this other pissing match, so:
Mostly, there was a low ceiling on the potential effectiveness of the Iraqi military.
First of all, the US and allied forces owned the air. Second, we’ve undergone a revolution in precision-guided armaments since Gulf War I. So the Iraqi ground forces had the Hobson’s choice of massing and getting blown apart, or dispersing and being unable to oppose massed U.S. armor. (Or taking off their uniforms and melting into the woodwork.) Either way, the ‘tank-plinking’ ability of the air support was going to cut down on the effectiveness of Iraqi armor before they got a chance to make use of it.
Things they could have done that they didn’t: they could have blown up the bridges over the rivers. They had plenty of them wired, but didn’t push the plunger. As has been suggested, maybe they weren’t all that eager to slow the American advance.
The Iraqis also didn’t use any bio/chem weapons. My take on this is that they’re not really very effective militarily, and even Saddam loyalists probably didn’t feel the slight battlefield advantage they might confer would be worth the risk of being tried for their use once the war was over.
There may be other things the Iraqi army could have done but didn’t, but those are the only two that come to my mind. But I’d love to see a critique of Iraqi tactics from the guy who won the war games last year while playing the Iraqi pieces, so to speak.
Sua that’s a bit off of the actual claim. OliverH(while certainly hyperbolic) never claimed “the large majority of anti-war protestors in Europe are expat Iraqis”. His claim was that of the Iraqi expats who have NOT returned to Iraq to fight coalition forces, many of them still oppose the war, AND oppose Saddam. Thus the ‘No to Saddam, No to this war’ signs. Of the subset of protestors in Europe who bear signs with this, or an equivelant, message, how many of them are expat Iraqis? OliverH contends that “You can find an Iraqi under just about every such sign.”
I don’t have numbers on the prevelance of this type of message on signs(although I’d guess it to be fairly small because messages against local government, the US, the coalition in general, and war in general surely take up a fair percentage of the total number of signs) at anti-war protests in Europe. Nor do I have numbers on the national origin/ethnicity of people under these signs, but I can certainly imagine that Iraqi expats would want to send exactly this message.
Enjoy,
Steven
I can imagine, too. I think that the contention is that OliverH is imagining it as well, along with the idea that most or all of iraqi’s (expat or not) want us to quit it with the war, and the idea that everything coming out of the ‘US propaganda machine’ is total bunk. Attempts to demonstrate that his “examples” are bogus simply try to cut out the rhetoric and ask for some kind of reasonable support for his apparent position, I think.
Sua:
As I said, I have no opinion on the accuracy of the number of iraqis with such signs. Your rendering of Olivers statement, though, was oviously false. I feel, though, I should also point out to you that claiming (one) iraqi (in the crowd) beneath most such signs does not equal the majority of wavers of such signs being iraqi.
But frankly I find your entusiasm for debating strawmen through the proxy of careless wording bothersome. If you read Olivers post in whole, you clearly see that his actual claim is that Iraqi ex-pats are to a substansial part against the war. Why not debate that instead?
Cite, please? There are a couple of millions of exile iraqis. The biggest numbers are in the middle east. Here in sweden Iraqis are the second largest immigrant group.
As a statement about peace protesters in europe this is not exactly false, but certainly misleading. Blond haired, blue eyed people are in minority here in Sweden. Compare that to popular stereotypes and you will appreciate that blond, blue-eyed people are scarce in europe as a whole.
I have to agree with begbert2. OliverH has made hyperbolic statements in another thread and would not or could not provide supporting cites (sorry, with the exception of one, the Wash. Post web site). Methinks OliverH statements may be taken as more credible with some supporting evidence, vice plain old rhetoric.
The other thread.
I’m not sure I follow you. How might they have prevented their tanks from being destroyed? Wasn’t that done from the air?
So they say. Right now, I have the feeling that most of this talk of ex-pats and Arabs rising to join the fight againt the coalition infidels is so much rhetoric and empty boasting. (In case you haven’t noticed, the Muslim world does seem prone to exageration in their media. It’s one thing to talk big in front of the cameras. It’s quite another to try and face down a column of tanks with an old bolt-action hunting rifle.
The US made that same assumption in Southeast Asia and as everyone knows here, however overmatched the North Vietnamese were against US military might, they still won the war. The basic difference between this 2 situations is the people. The North Vietnamese believed in their leader and were willing to die for him by the millions. Saddam only controls the elite republican guard in that way and they only number in the tens of thousands.
If the cities and villages in between Kuwait and Baghdad had civilian uprisings, civilian martyrs, public and spontaneous demonstrations, if they were willing to stand in the streets to block US tanks (like they did to protect their Mosque in Najaf) If they made an organized effort of civil unrest and became volutary human shields. This war would be so bogged down militarily and would be practically dead politically. As it is, this war has been so relatively easy because most of the civilians got of of the way to give the US military a clear shot at the Iraqi regime.