Do we have any figures on the number of deaths from Iraqis shooting Iraqis? If not, its dishonest to suggest that casulties of a very limited segment of a population is equivilant to casulties of an entire population. Unless the number of US soliders in Iraq is equal to the entire population of DC, then the comparison is hardly valid.
Although I would be interested in hearing if we have figures for Iraqi shootings.
I have heard that reports of the problems in D.C. have been exaggerated. Crowds of citizens cheer the police and throw flowers at them. But the journalists just aren’t covering it.
Anacostia…Is that that cute little neighborhood with all the old brownstones just begging for DYI fixer-upper attention?
In seriousness, near one of the government buildings I saw a life-sized statue of a man grimacing in torment. He was seated on the ground (at the top of a short base) seemingly reaching out to the cars that passed. As we passed in our car, I saw that his eyes followed and then his body moved. It was a human being. His clothing and his face were all one grayish mud color. He wasn’t even pretending to be a statue. The memory haunts.
dc is a very contrasting city. within a very small area, you have abject poverty, and unimagined wealth. it really is a microcosom of the US.
yes, property prices are going through the roof, but only because every suburb is now clamping down so hard with the “not in my backyard” mentality, that most of the youppies are having to move back into the city. as they move in, they clean up the neighborhoods (mainly booting out the gay men and lesbians that moved there first and really cleaned it up fo the drugs, prostitues, and crack houses (ala dupont circle, and now logan circle, and slowly moving east)). when i first moved here 9 years ago, I lived near logan. it was the cheapest place I could find. this little white boy from the small town was really afraid fo the locals, specially one time when trying to use the pay phone on the big black guy on the corner told me to get out of his F*ing neighborhood. many friends have been assaulted, robbed, stabbed, ect. in dc. but to compare it truly to iraq is not fair. if you are saying that before we remove the splinter from another’s eye, we need to remove the plank from ours, I agree.
but also, urban blight does not fund terrorist orgs that blow up buildings full of innocent people. most of the deaths in dc are drug related, and are now primarily, IIRC, confined to the anacostia neighborhood. yes, the deaths are awful and tragic, but is there really anything that bush or the military can do about it? Iseems to me the one war we are really loosing in thsi country is the war on drugs, specially when those who are so trodden upon can make a better, if shorter, life dealing rather than legitimately.
sorry for the hijacks.
Really? How are we going to “deal with the challenge” of simply being a foreign occupying power? That fact isn’t going to change, and there’s no reason to expect its effects to subside in the foreseeable future, either.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/15/international/europe/15EURO.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Three thousand deaths is far above the sum of coalition casualties plus civilian casualties in Iraq.
(The intended point again is that Iraq presents challenges we can deal with, not reasons to surrender all hope and simply look for scapegoats.)
The intended response again is that you offer no basis for that belief, nor, by your continued extreme stretching for analogies, that you have any understanding of the situation.
So if I thought Iraq presents challenges that the current US administration can’t deal with, I would necessarily be “surrendering all hope” and “simply looking for scapegoats”? I couldn’t be looking for more effective alternatives whilst retaining hope? I couldn’t soberly be asking for accountability from decision-makers?
Anyway, it’s a quagsand. That’s quite different.
How should France have dealt with the heat wave? Who is being scapegoated there?
Hint: Those deaths were essentially unavoidable, and not the result of anyone’s actions but of nature. How you compare them to avoidable deaths in an avoidable war is, I’m sure, the subject of your next limerick.
I’m a little confused by this “natural disasters cause more problems than the invasion of Iraq, hence there was no reason to oppose the invasion of Iraq” line of argument.
We have no control over the weather. We do have control over the actions of our troops. Hence, drawing analogies between the results of the weather and the results of our troops’ actions is about as useful as drawing analogies between the public speaking abilities of George W Bush and Winston Churchill. The problems arising from weather we can do nothing to prevent. We can only deal with them as they arise. The problems arising from willfully ignorant foreign policy, on the other hand could have been avoided if only certain people (Rummy, I’m looking at you) would have pulled their heads out of their asses and faced reality.
Obviously at this stage the thing to do in Iraq is not “to surrender all hope and simply look for scapegoats.” The situation exists and must be dealt with. However, pointing out the erroneous thinking and blind arrogance that got us into this mess is not simply looking for scapegoats - it is criticism that is meant to prevent the continuing blind arrogance of the Bush administration from making the situation ever worse. Not, I might add, that there seems much hope of remedying the blind arrogance, as there seems to be precious little anyone can do to make those asshats recognize the error of their ways.
december, your entire line of “argument” in this thread is ridiculous. Imagine, if you will, that your teenage son has gotten into a fender-bender damaging your car, and did so as a result of simple carelessness and overconfidence in his driving abilities. Now imagine that when you express your displeasure with the situation, and tell him to take more care and take a realistic view of his abilities, he responds by pointing out that the damage to your car cost less to fix than the damage it received from the hailstorm last summer. I think the appropriate response to your son here would be one of baffled confusion as to what how he could possibly think he’d made a relevant response. If you think you’ve a valid point to make here, that says rather a lot about your ability to think critically. On the other hand, if you recognize that this entire thread is a load of dung, then you really are just stirring shit. Which is it?
Or, imagine that he has gotten into a fender-bender while saving the lives of thousands of people – that is, people who will not be murdered by the Ba’ath regime.
Yu think the overthrow of Saddam was a mistake. Fair enough. That’s a valid POV, although I don’t agree. The point of this thread is to suggest that those who do agree with you argue their point directly, rather than snipe at it by exaggerating the immediate post-war problems.
December
It may be true that more people are being killed in DC than in Iraq. It’s also true that more people nationwide die in bizarre S&M accidents. As DeadJesus said above,
How many helicopter crashes have there been in DC? Has the Smithsonian been looted? How many kids have been taken out by unexploded remnants of cluster bombs in our nations capital today, December?
Have excess of 6,000 civilians been killed in the last 3 months by agents of an invading power in DC?
I want to help some people. I have this great idea: I will break into Decembers house in the dead of night, kill him and his family, steal everything they have and take the proceeds and distribute them amongst the needy. For the price of a handful of lives I can help a lot of hungry widdle babies.
Can’t argue with a positive net gain like that, can you?
Completely misses the point of the analogy. I suspect you do this intentionally. The point, for those playing at home, is that the son’s response to criticism is completely and utterly irrelevant to the charge being made against him, as your argument in this thread is to criticism of the US actions in Iraq. Or are you too stupid to see that?
Bullshit. I don’t think that the overthrow of Saddam was a mistake per se. I do think that the manner in which Saddam was overthrown was a mistake of grotesque proportions. It’s not “sniping” or “exaggerating immediate post-war problems” to point out that the situation in Iraq betrays a complete lack of planning for what to do after the initial military phase. The situation in Iraq is a serious problem. One which requires serious solutions - solutions involving tens of billions of dollars, now, not next month. One which requires sensitivity to the cutural milieu, in which political realities are different from what they are in the US. It is not going to be solved by partisan hand-waving and blind allegiance to ideology. Grow up.
There may be some reason why you are more capable than I of understanding what’s needed in Iraq. I’ve never been there. I don’t speak the language. You may be more expert than I am. OTOH, maybe, like me, you only know what you read in the papers and on the internet.
I doubt that you’re more expert than the current US coordinator, General John Abuzaid. He’s an Arab-American who does speak the Arabic language. He’s on the scene. What makes you think that you are qualified to second-guess General Abuzaid’s planning and execution?
Because, after all, Gen Abuzaid had a free hand in planning this excursion right from the start. Obviously, no aspects of its nature where dictated by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, or even Bush himself. Nor do any of the latter control the overall policy decisions or pursestrings of the reconstruction “effort”. :rolleyes:
I suppose the impact of the undisputed expertise of Mr. Abuzaid is made clear by the fact that even the parts of Iraq which were initially more receptive to the invasion and occupation have started to riot, kill occupation forces, and generally become pissed off with the state of affairs. Hell, even the Marsh Arabs are beginning to say they preferred Saddam to the current state of affairs, which is downright disheartening.
The problem right now isn’t the the expertise of people on the ground in Iraq. It’s twofold - the manner in which the invasion was carried out was far from optimal, and current administration-level policy is still blindly arrogant.
With regards to the former, the largely unilateral invasion (and yes, I know there were numerous countries in the Coalition of the Bribed, but it was seen by the Iraqis as being a unilateral US/UK operation, and it’s their perception that matters) should, ideally, have grown out of a much broader international consensus, most particularly among other Arab and Middle Eastern nations. Had the Iraqis been liberated by an army which included Arab troops, Saudi, Jordanian, Egyptian, and what have you, it would have been seen by the Iraqis more as a liberation and less as an invasion, and they would in all likelihood have exhibited much more patience with reconstruction. However, Bush et al apparently lacked either the will or the diplomatic savvy (or both) to put together an alliance that would have been seen by Iraqis as having legitimacy, and so the fact of the matter is that they see coalition forces as oppressive occupiers, and not as benevolent forces temporarily providing security during the reformation of the Iraqi government. This failing is not something on which fluency in Arabic on Mr. Abuzaid’s part is going to have much impact.
With regards to the latter, we still have much evidence of obtuse ideological thinking that “freedom” is a good that trumps all other goods, and that Iraqis should be so grateful that they can now say bad things about their erstwhile dictator that minor inconveniences such as carjackings, power outages, and water shortages will all be endured with good humour. Get a grip, already. The riots in Basra are clear evidence that the general population in Iraq is getting fed up with general state of affairs, and that the only thing that will turn the tide in this regard is concrete results in establishing security and reliable access to basic goods such as water and electricity, and that sugar-coated rhetoric is about as useful as tits on a boar.
I suggest, if you want to be blindly Republican on this issue, that you model yourself after Senator Lugar, rather than Ari Fleischer.
December, even I have to agree that your point is ridiculous. The existence of a random sniper in Washington in NO WAY makes the situation there comparable to Baghdad. First of all, Baghdad has a LOT of violence. That more soldiers aren’t being killed is more a testament to the fact that A) they are armed, B) they are wearing body armor, and C) they are professionals who are very wary.
For every attack that kills a soldier, there are by all reports half a dozen attacks that don’t.
Plus, you’re comparing attacks on soldiers with attacks on civilians. Perhaps if 13 police officers had been shot in DC you’d have a better comparison.
But frankly, the whole argument bites. It’s nothing more than a clever little ‘dig’ at those who see gloom and doom. While that may be satisfying for you, it’s hardly worthy of Great Debates. It should be in the pit.
In other words, your OP is (once again) arguing a point which you do not actually espouse, in order to garner a response to your false position.
There is a word for this, which board rules do not allow me to use.
Even Sam Stone and John Mace agree, however, that the OP is unworthy of any real debate. Give it up.
The word for it is “satire”. Granted, George S. Kaufman had a harsh evaluation of satire’s success in the theatre. And, I will also grant that the OP was not the cleverest of satires. Gulliver’s Travels is safe.
There is more to gaining information and sharing it than reading and regurgitating. Two people can both get all of their information about a country second hand and one still be more informed than the other. Much depends upon the critical thinking skills of the reader and the reliability of the sources.
Keep in mind also that one educated person who is observing from inside Iraq and who speaks Arabic can interpret what she sees and hears totally differently from another person who speaks Arabic and who sees the same events. Being there doesn’t mean that you are unbiased or fully informed.
The thing is, December, Great Debates is not the right forum for posting clever little satirical posts. It’s just noise. Likewise, if you have a good Howard Dean joke we might like to hear it, but if you post it as a fake ‘debate’ in GD, you’re in the wrong. Just go post it in the pit.
This post from the right-wing website Free Republic is worth reading. The poster took the trouble to combine Centcom reports for the last two weeks. It shows American deaths and injuries, and it also shows what the American troops accomplished. It is a convenient source to compare losses and gains.
The accomplishments are impressive. At this rate, continuing military action will wipe out the resistance and destroy the enemies’ stored weapons over time, especially since they don’t have a good source of replacement armaments.
From watching and reading the news, I was familiar with the American deaths and injuries. I was less aware of the accomplishments. Some of them may be news to you as well.