This story is incredibly important. It’s on the front page of my local newspaper, anybody else? Are they burying this news in any parts of the country? It seems like the Democrats ought to be able to make hay with this!
For those of you who don’t like clicking links blindly, the headline is “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.”
:smack:
Gah. I just realized I linked to page 2 instead of 1. So here’s a fixed link. It is to the NY Times, so you may have to register but it is free.
GeeDub says its just a comma on the pages of history. No biggee.
Whoa, nice dodge of the point there.
Well, Washington D.C. for one place. The report was completed last April, yet our President (AKA Operation Ripper’s Daddy) kept it under wraps and continued to feed us happy horseshit fot months.
No doubt Bush’ll call for another investigation into the leakge of classified information on ‘national security’ grounds.
Bring it.
D’oh! I didn’t realize that. I thought we were doing pretty well that it was on the front page of the Washington Post.
Comma comma down doobie do down down…
I was just perusing this link. I am trying to figure out something and maybe you all can help. http://icasualties.org/oif/
Ok, it lists 19910 wounded. Then, down below, it lists 11,902 wounded-RTD (I infer that means returned to duty) and 9230 wounded. Is that last number wounded and not returned to duty? If so, the total wounded would be 21, 132 right? What am I missing here?
BTW- The number of wounded is pretty powerful too.
Also, another linked article stated that over 100k soldiers sought out VA treatment. Is this for things like PTSD since only about 20k were physically wounded? Are other numbers captured by the GAO and DOJ when calculating services to returning war veterans that would skew this data? Such as, marking every call, or request for job return services, or some other form of assistance rather than treating physical and mental wounds amongst veterans?
Because, if we have lost over 3k and 100k are wounded (mentally or physically) so much as to require professional services, this war is very costly to the American People.
Please note, I am not overlooking Iraqi deaths, just focusing on this part of the discussion.
Finally, as a slight hijack, with 20k wounded and 3k dead, it seems that Battlefield Medicine has been very effective. Does anyone know how this stacks up to previous wars? I mean, saving more than 4/5 war related casualties is an amazing feat. I reckon there are a lot of untold stories about the amazing logistical abilities and hard work of the Battlefield Doctor’s, Nurses and Medics.
Rationalization. If I was putting my neck on the line, thousands of miles away from home, I’m gonna need a good reason and might have to make one up.
And it is an observation on revenge. The victim is casual.
Really I suppose it is a better insight into contemporary USA. Race and all that.
But is that the true statistic ? I read a while back that one way the Bush Admin kept down the death toll was by defining “death” as “dying right on the battlefield”, and counting people who died at or on the way to the hospitals as “wounded”.
I remember the allegation but can find no cite.
However
There’s dead and there’s ‘dead’.
Being blown to bloody pieces is such a quick and painless process only USA-Haters like you would call it “death” anyway. You’ll be calling waterboarding ‘torture’ next.
Do you have a link for this, because I don’t seem to find anything about it? Are you saying that there are more than 3,000 deaths directly related to afghanistan and Iraq?
I disagree. If Japan were allowed to expand without limit, eventually it is inevitable that they WOULD threaten the US more directly. Even if you ignore the fact that Pearl Harbor was a direct military attack, I don’t see how you can claim that Japan wasn’t a threat to US security and US interests. Sure Japan wasn’t going to invade California in 1943, but what about in 1963? Not to mention that the US was allied at least loosely with people such as Australia. Not to mention that Japan directly invaded US possessions such as the Phillippines.
Much as it seems harsh to cold-bloodedly compare body counts, I don’t think it’s that simple. Invading Afghanistan post 9-11 was pretty darn justified, and I’m glad we did it, even given the body count. But what if 5,000 US soldiers had died. 50,000? 500,000? Eventually, that number would be large enough that, had we had perfect information ahead of time, I think the correct decision would have been NOT to invade Afghanistan, both because of the purely human cost of dead young Americans, and because of the extent to which that many soldiers dying would weaken our future national security.
Similarly, if someone could come up with some magical plan where we would be able to successfuly invade North Korea and depose Kim Jong-Il with a total casualty count of 20 American soldiers and 100 North Koreans, absolutely positively guaranteed, well, it might be worth it.
Body count DOES matter, brutal though it is to think about it that way.
Check this out: US Wounded by Week
Beyond time period, it’s subdivided by the severity of the wound:
RTD = Returned to Duty in 72 hours. 11,092
Wounded = ? No follow-up. 9,230. How many of these soldiers are now dead, disabled or otherwise devoid of any hope of a productive future? Sorry, I don’t have an answer for you.
Its just a number and it will get bigger. Killed and wounded together are approaching 25 000. The idea that the number dead reached the amt dead in towers is nothing. I just wonder how big a price in lives they are willing to pay.Or is it nothing to them but a cost of doing business.
Yeah, thats the same cite I was talking about earlier. There seems to be a missing 1k (approx) wounded somewhere in one of the statistics. Has anyone ever tracked this down?
IMHO, it is extremely concerning. Not because 1k more deaths would make anything better or worse, but the notion of using creative statistics when talking about the lives of brave men and women who have only exercised the orders of their commanders is so Orwellian that it thoroughly concerns me.
It is not a secret on these boards that I disagree with Mr. Bush’s policies and ethics. But, I have never begrudged the soldiers. The soldier is not responsible for the decisions to go to war. In many ways, the soldier is not responsible for many negative occurrences.
We train young men and women to kill enemies and destroy property, but then place them in police actions that require them to make split second decisions that mean life or death. Furthermore, rituals of brutalization and dehumanizing the enemy help assuage the internal restraints on killing (or, for lack of a better way of putting it, open up the killing nature of humans and remove the restraints society placed on them). In then end, private so-and-so reaps the negativity, gets in trouble when things go wrong and has a world of armchair quarterbacks questioning every decision. However, the leaders are never held accountable for creating the environment.
I hate to Godwinize (and I am not comparing this situation, government etc… to Nazi’s) but the following analogy is apt IMHO. Who is more to blame for the atrocities the Nazi’s committed, the death camp guard or Hitler and his other leaders? If leaders create the environment that results in criminal acts, then they must take responsibility for that situation.
For example, a non-godwinized example comes from this story. Imagine a prison where a certain group of corrections officers have become corrupted (slightly). They harbor negative attitudes towards the inmate population and low level leaders foster a climate of retaliation and violence. The low level managers are removed, but the corrections officers are isolated by management.
In other words, they are constantly under investigation, no one trusts them and no one reaches out to them. They form a bond, call themselves the “cowboys” and use internal insulative practices to increase the level of mistreatment of the inmate population. Until a different person stepped in, Management’s response was to use covert methods to try and bust them, but they failed because keeping a secret in prison is extremely difficult. Thus the CO’s become more isolated, cynical and the negative behavior increases.
In reality, although the officers are wrong, management created the environment and their actions failed to prevent the escalation of the situation. They are to blame for the overall environment and the individual CO becomes nothing more than a pawn in a power game. There is a happy end to the story, but this hijack has gone on long enough.
Simply put, if the leaders create the environment, they are more responsible. Leadership is NOT looking good in the public eye. It is taking responsibility for the overall operation of the area they lead, it is acknowledging the good and bad, it is evaluating all decisions to ensure they are effective prior to implementation, it is being completely honest with all stake-holders, it is giving CLEAR direction to others so that all know you are the one who is to blame if things go wrong and it is a willingness to step down, without being told to, when you fail to accomplish your objectives. How many leaders do you see, on either political side, in our government today?
Furthermore, if they use “fuzzy math” to reduce the impact of their decisions and minimize the impact on public support then Godwinizing is not too far off. Each step one takes makes it easier and easier to take the next. Furthermore, as individuals become more disenfranchised (even leaders) they will take more and more steps to ensure their Machiavellian sense of leadership is realized.
When we have a president who holds to his opinion, despite dissension, is willing to use misleading facts to further an agenda AND then public opinion moves against them, how much more isolated do you think they will be? And, how much more will they be willing to do to continue on their path? In many ways, they become like the CO’s in the previous example. Insulating, protective, fearful, stubborn and malicious.
This is why, if anyone knows about these alleged statistical phantoms, I would really appreciate it if you could shed some light on it. If no one has looked into it real hard, then we need, as a society to call for it immediately.
I will end my hijack now… I guess this just really bothered me.