[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
The Pentagon has indeed had an explicit policy in place since early in the quagmire not to divulge any such numbers.
[/QUOTE]
Except, at times, the number of “terrorists” killed. They’ve found that bodycount useful, even if they count people who probably weren’t terrorists but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Doesn’t matter if its 600,000 or 100,000 or 6,000,000. It took whatever it took to oust Saddam and quell the insurgency (i.e. terrorists). And the death toll, whatever it may be, rest squarely on the head of the muslims who planned, supported, harbored, financed, and committed 9/11. Plus those who stood by and let it happen, i.e. the whole arab muslim world.
Maybe now they’ll start revise their children’s textbooks to not say that non-muslims are actually cloven-hoofed devils. Probably not until we kill a few hundred thousand more… 
[/QUOTE]
And it doesn’t really matter how many people died on 9/11, whether it was 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000; they all stood passively by and didn’t fight our Middle East policy. It is their collective guilt, the bunch of little Eichmanns. :rolleyes:
BTW, in case you failed Basic Human Morality 101, the fact that person X is a Muslim doesn’t mean he deserves death because some other Muslim committed murder, especially given that Muslim Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. You do understand the notion of responsibility, right?
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Doesn’t matter if its 600,000 or 100,000 or 6,000,000. It took whatever it took to oust Saddam and quell the insurgency (i.e. terrorists).
[/quote]
And too bad if the people we killed didn’t think it was worth the price, huh ?
And “insurgent” doesn’t mean terrorist.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
And the death toll, whatever it may be, rest squarely on the head of the muslims who planned, supported, harbored, financed, and committed 9/11. Plus those who stood by and let it happen, i.e. the whole arab muslim world.
[/quote]
Which has absolutely nothing to do with our war on Iraq, and who WANTED Saddam dead and his secular government destroyed. We’ve done the bidding of the people who attacked us.
No, the blame for Iraq is on America’s collective head.
Maybe now they’ll start revise their children’s textbooks to not say that non-muslims are actually cloven-hoofed devils. Probably not until we kill a few hundred thousand more…
[/QUOTE]
Actually, we’ve pretty much proved to them and the rest of the world that we really are monsters.
[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
BTW, in case you failed Basic Human Morality 101, the fact that person X is a Muslim doesn’t mean he deserves death because some other Muslim committed murder, especially given that Muslim Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. You do understand the notion of responsibility, right?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think it’s a moral issue to him, as he actually refers to the innocents we’ve been killing as “enemy civilians.”
This is not correct. The correct term is “indigenous shrapnel absorption units”.
[QUOTE=DMC]
I don’t think it’s a moral issue to him, as he actually refers to the innocents we’ve been killing as “enemy civilians.”
[/QUOTE]
Every time I think I’ve stumbled into the deepest pit of moral grotesqueness and indifference in GD, I find a pit that is several leagues deeper.
[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
And it doesn’t really matter how many people died on 9/11, whether it was 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000; they all stood passively by and didn’t fight our Middle East policy. It is their collective guilt, the bunch of little Eichmanns. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
Hey, give Hail Ants some credit. At least he only singled out Arab Muslims! Of course, that means it was a mistake to invade Afghanistan, seeing as how that is not an Arab country. Damn, this is a complicated subject!!
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Hey, give Hail Ants some credit. At least he only singled out Arab Muslims! Of course, that means it was a mistake to invade Afghanistan, seeing as how that is not an Arab country. Damn, this is a complicated subject!!
[/QUOTE]
True; that means hands off the Iranians, too. Guess we’d better let them have their nukes, after all.
Well, yeah, but that “arab muslims” thing is a mite confusing. Are we to off the Arabs, the Muslims, or just the Arab Muslims? Not the kind of thing where an “oopsy!” is acceptable, when you’re wiping out whole populations, you want to be as precise as possible. Respect for human life, ya know.
[QUOTE=elucidator]
The correct term is “indigenous shrapnel absorption units”.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, in military parlance they’re “soft targets”.
The Johns Hopkins study came to about the same conclusions as the Lancet one. Sam, what are the talking points to denigrate it?
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
Actually, in military parlance they’re “soft targets”.
[/QUOTE]
“Soft” meaning “easily damaged,” or “unlikely to shoot back”?
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
“Soft” meaning “easily damaged,” or “unlikely to shoot back”?
[/QUOTE]
The former, as I understand it. Normally, the latter aren’t supposed to be targets at all, soft or hard.
That’s the point. War is, and absolutely must be, an absolutely selfish act. You don’t ask soldiers to die for someone else’s country.
We didn’t do it primarily to free the Iraqis from Saddam, we did it to show the arab world that, post 9/11, what we say goes. It wasn’t enough for Saddam to say he didn’t have WMDs, he had to let us in to make sure. He refused, so we invaded his country and hanged him. Not only without France’s or Germany’s or Russia’s help, but with them all firmly against us. IOW they don’t matter. We do.
I know how glib and spurious and politically incorrect that sounds, but the world is a big bad place and sometimes you have to do unpleasant things to protect your country and citizens. I’m not about to dance on Iraqi dead’s graves, but I’m not going to pretend that you should (or even can) successfully fight a war with one eye on the big ‘Enemy Dead’ tote board.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
That’s the point. War is, and absolutely must be, an absolutely selfish act. You don’t ask soldiers to die for someone else’s country.
We didn’t do it primarily to free the Iraqis from Saddam, we did it to show the arab world that, post 9/11, what we say goes. It wasn’t enough for Saddam to say he didn’t have WMDs, he had to let us in to make sure. He refused, so we invaded his country and hanged him. Not only without France’s or Germany’s or Russia’s help, but with them all firmly against us. IOW they don’t matter. We do.
I know how glib and spurious and politically incorrect that sounds, but the world is a big bad place and sometimes you have to do unpleasant things to protect your country and citizens. I’m not about to dance on Iraqi dead’s graves, but I’m not going to pretend that you should (or even can) successfully fight a war with one eye on the big ‘Enemy Dead’ tote board.
[/QUOTE]
This represents a moral code so different from mine I’m not even sure how to respond to it. First, it seems to involve a lot of conflations and hidden inferences. For example, you argue as follows:
To be honest with you, most of the people in my country are total strangers to me. I don’t see why I have a stronger obligation to them than I do to the people of Iraq. Why then should I be willing to kill 100,000 Iraqis to save 1,000 Americans? Your reasoning can’t even be justified by the sort of primitive tribalism which it vaguely resembles.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
That’s the point. War is, and absolutely must be, an absolutely selfish act. You don’t ask soldiers to die for someone else’s country.
[/quote]
Actually, we do all the time. For allies, or to preserve the general good of the world. Against Hitler, say, who was little danger to America.
And if war was an “absolutely selfish act”, it wouldn’t be fought by armies that are composed of soldiers that cooperate.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
We didn’t do it primarily to free the Iraqis from Saddam, we did it to show the arab world that, post 9/11, what we say goes. It wasn’t enough for Saddam to say he didn’t have WMDs, he had to let us in to make sure. He refused, so we invaded his country and hanged him.
[/quote]
No, he cooperated and we attacked anyway. And even if you are right, you are saying that America is a rogue nation, and the enemy of the world. Something that should be contained or destroyed.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Not only without France’s or Germany’s or Russia’s help, but with them all firmly against us. IOW they don’t matter. We do.
[/quote]
And if they decide to, say, form an anti-American military alliance with the “Arabs” you think that we have the right to mass murder, because people like you convince the world it’s them or us ? Would they matter then ?
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
I know how glib and spurious and politically incorrect that sounds, but the world is a big bad place and sometimes you have to do unpleasant things to protect your country and citizens.
[/quote]
Except all we are doing is hurting ourselves, along with the rest of the world.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
I’m not about to dance on Iraqi dead’s graves, but I’m not going to pretend that you should (or even can) successfully fight a war with one eye on the big ‘Enemy Dead’ tote board.
[/QUOTE]
You certainly sound like you are dancing, or at least wanking on their graves to me.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
It wasn’t enough for Saddam to say he didn’t have WMDs, he had to let us in to make sure. He refused…
[/QUOTE]
No he didn’t. This revisionist argument will go nowhere. At the time of the invasion, inspections by UNMOVIC were being permitted by Saddam, and in a letter to the UN Security Council by chairman Hans Blix dated March 7, 2003 (just 13 days before the invasion), it is clear the inspections and disarmament would be completed within a few months:
The inspections were working, Saddam was in a box, but that was not what Bush wanted to hear. He wanted to invade and occupy Iraq, and the reality of the inspections would not be allowed to impede that plan.
So you would have said this about Germans during WWII?
So you’re saying US soldiers were just indiscriminately killing civilians for fun in Iraq?
Hitler was most definitely a danger to America, just not at the instant we went to war. I guess we should have waited for a German 9/11?
HUH?! You’re kidding right? I mean selfish in terms of their country, not the individual men.
No, just the enemy of uncivilized, brutal, backwards, theocratic societies. Especially when their culture finally spills over into US soil and kills thousands.
Wouldn’t happen. France, Germany and especially Russia detest and fear arab society even more than the US because they’re closer to it. If a terrorist nuke went off and started WWIII no Western power would side with them and all of Europe and to a lesser extend Russia would immediately side with the US.
I genuinely don’t want to sound like I’m happy that thousands have died, but I’m not going to even pretend that I feel even remotely guilty about it either. Everything that’s happened is the fault of the thousands of arabs who made 9/11 happen.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
No, just the enemy of uncivilized, brutal, backwards, theocratic societies. Especially when their culture finally spills over into US soil and kills thousands.
[/quote]
IRAQ DIDN’T ATTACK US ! ! They had NOTHING to do with 9-11.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
Wouldn’t happen. France, Germany and especially Russia detest and fear arab society even more than the US because they’re closer to it.
[/quote]
So ? We allied with Stalinist Russia against Hitler; there’s no reason to assume that the “Arabs” ( or rather various Arab dominated countries since “Arabs” aren’t the monolith you seem to think ) and the Europeans wouldn’t ally together in self defense against Hail Ant’s Psycho-America. And the we-have-the-right-to-mass-murder-anyone-we-please version of America you promote is very like a new Nazi Germany.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
I genuinely don’t want to sound like I’m happy that thousands have died, but I’m not going to even pretend that I feel even remotely guilty about it either. Everything that’s happened is the fault of the thousands of arabs who made 9/11 happen.
[/QUOTE]
Garbage. Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with 9-11. The people behind 9-11 were Saddam’s enemies. We did what they wanted by invading Iraq, devastating is, killing Saddam and breaking up his secularist regime.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
So you would have said this about Germans during WWII?
[/quote]
Different debate. Germans working in factories supporting the war effort might have been legitimate targets. But you are saying that the deaths of ordinary Iraqis doesn’t matter because they allowed terrorism to happen. You know what? Aside from the fact that IRAQ HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11, Iraqis tried rising up against Saddam. At least, the Shia did. The US (GHWB) promised them we’d help them. We didn’t. They got slaughtered. Do you think, in Iraq, that people could just have a protest march in Tikrit Square?
This is ignorant bullshit. Ordinary Iraqi citizens were not in a position to do anything about Al Qaeda or 9/11. Do you really think that they were? What do you propose they should have done?
Besides, your position almost defines away war crimes. If Nation A has a genuine cause to go to war against Nation B, then according to your moral standards Nation A should have no compunction whatsoever about killing any and all civilians in Nation B since (presumably) they didn’t prevent Nation B from doing whatever it did to justify Nation A in going to war. Congratulations. You share the same moral code with Osama Bin Laden. And that’s not Godwinization; that is a statement of fact.
Some people simply refuse to accept the facts that contradict their misguided zealousness. Hail Ants is a perfect example of one of them. This is what he posted back in Jan of 2004:
– highlights mine.
It was clear enough that even back then that he was completely and utterly wrong to the point of ignorance, so is there any point in trying to get him to reason now? Does anyone really think he’s going to change his mantra-like ‘arguments’?