Sorry. I posted in haste, won’t happen again. :o
well, I damn sure see all the broken eggs. Don’t see any omelette.
As to the gender equality of the corpses, that may be ideally true, but in fact, when you kill one male fighter, you likely engender one more enemy, his nearest kin, his son, that sort of thing. Kill a woman, engender two more enemies, kill a chlild, four. Do it while bombing a religious symbol…you better send for more ammo.
Its the damnedest thing. I kinda thought something like this would happen, it was on my list of dreadful possible consequences. And yet, strangely, now that what I thought would happen is happening…I can hardly believe it.
Well, that is potential rebels, granted. However, kill a kid’s parents, and he’ll grow up with a loathing that can’t be trained or bought.
We’re doing a lot of that right now.
Kinda reminds me of hitting the Chinese Embassy. That was surreal. There must have been some crazy back channel work going on to prevent that from being even worse than it was. Then we hit the bloody Red Cross compount in Kabul twice… we aren’t very good at not bombing people O_o Probably lots of stuff we don’t hear about at all, considering how hard we have to dig for what we DO hear about.
This is my own nightmare scenerio. For a long time I’ve worried about a more general uprising that forced the US to harsher measures. Not exactly a recipe for peace and harmony with the general population when you kill innocent civilians.
Since everyone is throwing around cliche’s, I think the most appropriate to the current situation is: Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t. 
The next move? I’d say we are committed to dancing the steps now. We are there, unfortunately, and this thing is exploding in our face…also unfortunately. THIS blow up might not even be our fault specifically (leaving aside for a moment that its ALL our fault for being there in the first place), but that makes no difference…it IS blowing appart.
At this point we have to put this thing down as hard as we can while still attempting to do everything in our power not to kill any more innocent civilians caught in the middle as we can…and do a lot of hoping and praying (for those of you who pray). How will we accomplish this trick? Beats the shit out of me…I haven’t any idea. Most likely we won’t and innocents will die, further angering segments of the population.
Its all hanging by a thread now…a very small thread, and it could all go tits up with just the smallest push. While I don’t blame the military specifically for civilian casualties in a fire fight like is being described, at any time a fuck up, a mistake, a badly aimed rocket, etc could throw the whole thing into the fire.
-XT
Well, most of this is going right over my head, but for some reason I’m a little mad at the cynical fighters who barricade themselves inside a mosque and surround themselves by women and children to begin with. This alone shows they have no interest in ‘freedom’ for the people; it’s all about power again, and if they get it back they’ll probably have the same respect for civilians as the average Sudanese militiaman.
How does that prove that they have no interest in freedom for the people? The civilians they surround themselves with are volunteers, not hostages - they know that the best way they can fight for their freedom is by hindering the US forces.
Is it a screwed up way to fight? Yes. Does it show that the people are just after personal gain? No.
They simply know how we work, and use that against us. Just because someone doesn’t have a gun does not mean they aren’t actively resisting the occupation. It makes the line between “civilian” and “rebel” very thin, and it has been doing that for a very long time now, by many people.
Hell, I wouldn’t put it beyond Americans, in the unlikely event we were to ever get invaded, and be fighting street to street.
Uhm…cite that they’re volunteers? The Beeb and AP don’t have that tidbit. If it’s true, nice to see these guys take a page out of Saddam’s playbook (remember the crowds spending the night in the palaces?)
I don’t doubt that there’s probably some true believers in the crowd that think that “freedom” now instead of on June 30th is worth fighting for, but I can’t believe that their puppetmasters who recruit mothers to bring their children to shove in front of guns have the best interest of the people at heart.
But at least they’re gambling on the American’s humanity, which is refreshing.
I was speaking more generally - this type of fighting is all too common. I do not know if in this specific instance this was the case, but if you were in a mosque and people started shooting, would you hang around?
That’s simple. They don’t believe (quite rightly) that they will be getting “freedom” on June 30th. What will happen is that we will install a prime minister that we approve of, give them an administrative government, which, of course, will ask for us to stay for the security, to which we’ll agree. The government won’t have that much freedom to do what it wants, and the military will retain control over the situation. This is how it was always planned. There will be no “freedom.”
They don’t think like we do. We have the advantage of sitting around at computers talking about their situation - they are in a position where they feel that they are fighting a desperate fight against a tyrannical evil nation invading them that will rob them of their way of life. Sound vaguely famiiliar? Well, the difference is that we actually did overthrow their government and occupied them militarily.
They may have opposed Saddam - but they oppose us, too. I point to the old legends of a person saving and caring for a snake, and once bitten, they ask the snake why. It replies, “look, you knew I was a snake.” Trying to tell ourselves that they will love us and accept our rule with open arms is foolish.
Well it is urban warfare. Civilians would have to make the choice between hiding behind as many walls as possible, or ducking out through the crossfire. Brick walls are very appealing when the bullets start to fly, but they don’t stand up well to high explosives. Happily, I don’t have to make this decision.
A lot of people hate freedom of one sort or another.
Why, right here in the United States, a majority of the population doesn’t want gay people to have the freedom to get married. And a smaller (but still politically well organized and influential) group didn’t even want adults to have the freedom to have various kinds of consensual sex.
I’m sure Bush goes to church with people like that, and he certainly counts on their support at the polls.
What gets me is that this ‘they hate freedom’ caricature of his doesn’t seem to have gained any depth or nuance since right after 9/11, when he first uttered it. It’s like he’s modeling himself after a DC-comics hero of the 1960s, where there were good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys were just evil, not for any particular reason, but just to be evil. No complexity involved, no deeper understanding necessary. Same deal here - if they ‘hate freedom’, those who oppose us are beyond our comprehension, so there’s no point in trying to understand them. All we can do is make war on them.
Same thing when, in the Tim Russert interview, he repeatedly called Saddam Hussein a “madman” (six times, by my count). A madman will act unpredictably and capriciously; he is unconstrained by self-interest. We don’t know what he might do to us or when, and there’s no point in trying to figure him out; all we can do is to take him out.
This is a very simple view of the world, to say the least. Saddam was clearly motivated by self-interest; he did respond sensibly to real threats. He hadn’t invaded anyone since we kicked his ass in 1991; he hadn’t used bio/chem weapons on anyone since then either, as best as we can tell. After he tried to have Bush the Elder assassinated in 1993, Clinton blew up his intelligence HQ via cruise missile, and let him know there was more where that came from, if called for. And no one (outside the fevered imagination of Laurie Mylroie of the AEI) has managed to trace an instance of terrorism outside Iraq back to Saddam since then.
Similarly with al-Sadr’s followers. A violent crackdown (i.e. what we seem to be doing right now) will convince many Iraqis who weren’t all that keen on al-Sadr that they need to fight the intruder, not the local bad boy. Under the hating-freedom model, people who desire freedom won’t have a problem with the defeat of those who hate freedom, so our attacks on al-Sadr’s militia can’t generate new enemies for us, in BushWorld.
In the cartoon universe that is BushWorld, one can draw an X through the face of each al-Qaeda lieutenant killed or captured, measuring progress in those terms. (Bush wanted to do exactly this, according to Clarke, whose facts haven’t successfully been contradicted yet.) And one can measure progress in Iraq by how many of the infamous “deck of cards” have likewise been killed or captured.
No, Bush isn’t really a moron. But he plays one on TV, and in real life too.
It is starting to feel like the US is basically in the middle of an Iraqi civil war.
Solution? hmmmm
I had some similar thoughts while reading the recent additions to the thread.
I agree with what I think you’re trying to say. Without making any decisions about whose fault is what, we’re responsible for what goes on in Iraq even when things that go on are our fault. Kind of like if a storm blew a tree limb through your window- it’s not your fault, but it’s your responsibility to fix it.
Well, GW seems to be a very simple, insular and unreflective sort. It is breathtaking to me when I, from time to time, can comprehend that this guy is actually President of the United States.
It sure looks like it, doesn’t it?
After Sunday, I was hoping we’d tell al-Sadr, “Okay, it was all a big mistake. Here’s your newspaper back,” and see if things calmed down. Instead, we’ve gone the massive-retaliation route, time-tested as a lose-the-hearts-and-minds technique.
I think we’re fucked. The only question is, how bad is Iraq fucked, and how can we best minimize their fuckedness?
Our best chance to preserve something out of this mess, ISTM, would be to find out what Sistani wants, and give it to him. The result would be a Shi’ite theocracy under Sharia law, but there would at least be an Iraq when we left, and someone in charge who would presumably have the power to mostly hold it together.
If we hand over power to Chalabi and friends, they will be swept away. The Bushies’ dreams of fostering a Western-style democracy in Iraq are clearly down the tubes. (If you were going to pick a country for this experiment, dudes, why didn’t you at least pick one with no significant religious or ethnic divisions?) Not that there’s ever been any sort of road map to get there, or even a clear idea of what ‘there’ might look like: the Admin’s line was always, “we don’t want to tell the Iraqis what sort of government to have,” but never did our leaders even lay out any competing possibilities for how a democratic Iraq might be organized.
But we were quite happy to tell them that they had to open the floodgates to foreign investment, privatize state-owned sectors of the economy, and stuff like that.
Right now, our main goal should be the prevention of out-and-out civil war once we purportedly hand the keys to the Iraqis. We could be looking at a “war of all against all”, a civil war with no front lines, and too many factions to get a handle on. There are far worse things in this world than Saddam, or even a radical Islamic state. And this is one of them.
So we take the most powerful person around, give him the keys, wish him luck, and get the hell out of Dodge. That would be Sistani. Works for me.
Try comprehending that a few thousand less than half the country supports him unquestionably. O_o
I wouldn’t mind this mental 6-year-old and his nannies running the government so much if I knew that half the population wasn’t ready and willing to march off in whatever direction he points without asking why (because, after all, we are at WAR).
I think even Reagan had a more sophisticated worldview.
And I’m aware of just how scary a thought that is. But I really think it’s true.
Somebody please wake me up and tell me the past three and a half years have just been a bad dream.
True ! Except for one thing, the Shia and Sunni aren’t fighting each other.
Instead, they’re increasingly united in one aim, to rid the country of the occupying army.
From Juan Cole’s blog:
Looking at CNN, it looks like today was more of the same.
Other than last November, there have been more combat deaths in Iraq this month than any month since Dubya did his victory dance on the aircraft carrier. And the month’s only a week old.
Look at Mr. Wayne for example.
Fellow Dopers, we’ve been plundered. Exploited by that scurillous temple of deliberate hokum, The Onion. If you read the link, you will have no doubt that a form of plagiarism is afoot here.