2004 was not just before, the invasion was early in 2003, I already acknowledged what you are saying here (which makes your so called “gotcha” even more amusing), you are actually pretending that was a point. What I am saying is that what I see is that indeed Iraqis did not approve of the invasion just before or when the invasion happened or today, in 2004 they indeed had more hope but since the same crew that mishandled the intelligence continued to mishandle it, Iraqis are not amused finding now that torture, violence, incompetency, corruption and oil profits going to others are the rule now; well, justified discontent is bound to grow under those conditions.
I’[ve already showed this to be bullshit. They’d already folded. They were no longer rich, strong nor determined to stay. Mostly because of a change of heart of the youth and intelligensia, but that’s not important. What’s important is that you keep repeating this little canard, when I’ve already shown it to be bullshit.
Granted, the subject is sensitive and provokes emotions; all the more reasons to keep a cool head.
The question is, why Saddam removal has less support then Apartheid removal? Why make more fuss about horrors of present Iraq situation, then it was made about horrors of South Africa through the 1990-s?
The picture emerges that it is due to a combination of reasons, uniting people that do not always agree with each other. Main reasons appear to be: rejection of any invasion, distrust of Bush, mortification of prolonged fighting against determined foe; in short, hardly anything new.
I admit, when I end a verb with -ed, I strognly imply that it is in past tense.
If you were a white, with all the attendant privileges, probably not.
If you were a black, subject to discrimination, restrictions on movement and arbitrary arrest, then I’d say so, wouldn’t you?
People may kvetch about rising crime rates, anarchy, etc but one should remember the chilling predictions of mass bloodshed, war between the races and general armageddon that supposedly lay in the future for South Afrtica.
Everybody knew that the Nationalists would never relinquish their power and privileges voluntarily.
Everybody was wrong.
Everybody said that it would be a miracle if there were a peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa.
The miracle happened.
Of course there are problems in the country, Of which country could that not be said with equal truth?
Iraqi people, that is all of them. THINK, that was present tense, not past.
:rolleyes:
And I acknowledged that already. It is amusing you think that makes a point.
And still there was nothing wrong with what I am trying to point, here you are just doing argumentum ad nauseam. wich is indeed a form of Chewbacca defence.
As the discussion shows, your cite proved NOTHING, it has statements that go both in favor and against what you are saying, using that as a defense and bringing it to this debate was silly.
Because he was already contained by sanctions and had enforced military no fly zones. The intelligence of other nations, even if they admitted to possible possession of WMD, concluded he did not have enough or he was a shadow of what he was before, not an immediate threat.
:rolleyes:
Many moderates, the majority of the world and even members of the left, myself included, approved the invasion of Afghanistan. (you know, where the Taliban was protecting Al qeada?)
Before 9/11 the administration was saying Saddam had virtually no power to attack, that suspiciously changed after 9/11, as soon I noticed the evidence of a Saddam-Al qaeda connection was shaky and the expose by Powell in the UN was found to have holes then the distrust was JUSTIFIED.
And that is by incompetently ignoring that there are like 3 different factions composing the insurgency.
What it is new is that you are still looking for reasons to equate Saddam’s removal with Apartheid removal when evidence is here already showing you don’t have any reason to do so. Bush already succeeded by falsely equating Afghanistan with Iraq, there is no need to keep digging yourself into a hole NI.
Your talking about apolitical street crime NOT ethnic slaughter. The two are not comparable. There HAS been an increase in apolitical non-ethnic murder, rape, kidnapping etc. in Iraq (possibly even worse than in SA), but it has gone almost unnoticed next huge upsurge to the sectarian violence. It is the sectarian violence that is the reason people are pessimistic about the future of Iraq (and why people were pessimistic about SA in the last days of aparteid).
And, as I pointed out on several occasions, in South Africa the intertribal violence died down after free elections and the end of the white-only regime (By your own figure from 5000 deaths a year before the elections, to 1000 deaths year afterwards). By 1996 (three years after the fall of the aparteid regime) the violence had died away completely, in 2006 three years after the invasion and deposing of the Saddam regime, the violence is reaching new levels of brutality (30 decapitated bodies found just today).
This report states that insurgency actions account for only 9% of all the killings of civilian population, while “predominantly criminal killings” account for 36%. Which means that for every life taken by insurgents, criminals kill four people. Thus out of control criminals are much bigger problem for Iraq pacification then insurgency is.
There was a concrete atrocity (sacred mosque bombing) that provoked recent clashes. Most likely it was a work of Al Qaida. You were lucky to do without it in SA.
Firstly… I meant “noticed” as in commented on in the press (I’m sure the victims of said crimes “noticed” them). I have NEVER seen crime issue discussed in the television news, or anything more than mentioned in most print articles.
Secondly those number are over a year old, I imagine the percentage killed in sectarian violence has increased siginificantly since then.
Thirdly look at the numbers you are quoting they are all post fixed by “as defined by Iraq’s Health Ministry”. So any death that NOT attributed to a an “offical” terrorist attack will be marked as “predominatly criminal”.
While that assumtion may, or may not, have been valid a year ago. It is CERTAINLY not valid now.
No that was a “straw the broke the camels back”. The tensions and the sectarian violence were there long before the mosque attack.
You forget just as Al Qiada are trying there best to stir up sectarian civil war, there were elements in the security forces doing there doing exactly the same thing in South Africa.
Besides which This is where the SA/Iraq analogy breaks down… the Al Qiada angle is the BIGGEST most most outstanding reason why the invasion of Iraq was such incredibly, mind-numbingly, BAD idea. Anyone with half a brain would have realized they were going to take advantage of it just as they have. Forgetting all the moral and regional implications of the invasion, look at this from OBL’s point of view. On the “con” side for OBL and his buddies, we have given Al Qiada the biggest recruiting scheme, training base, and general morale bost possible. On the “con” side ? AT BEST one apostate regime had been replaced with another apostate regime(at WORST we might end up replacing a Socialist secular dictatorship with a theocracy).
I remember hearing that. Just like I remeber doomsday prognoses about future of new South Africa. As aldiboronti said:
Please, none of those trite platitudes again.
I declare, try talking about positive things in Iraq and critics will demand all sorts of statistical minutae, but the same critics will freely spout completely unqualified and absolutely unsubstatiated statements about Iraq as “Al Qiada the biggest recruiting scheme, training base, and general morale boost”.
With all due respect, where is your statistics about Al Qaida recruitement rates, where are “training bases” witnesses, where are your cites about Al Qaida “morale boost”? Nobody has any! For all I see, they are a bunch of killers disposing of a small army of suicidal maniacs. Is that what you call “the morale boost”? Manic depressives driven to suicide?
Enough already! I am sick and tired listening to such inconsequential loony talk like we made Zarqawi a star of international jihad or somesuch… What’s the upshot of this? That we couldn’t touch Saddam because of Al Qaida? Are we establishing a connection here?
This is simply wrong. Whatever imperfection of present Iraqi politicians are, they are nowhere close to Saddam. Iraqi people lead dangerous lives, but they are immeasurably more free then before the invasion. And Saddam was not just “Socialist secular dictator”; he was a typical Fascist.
The bolding there was mine because I concluded that a long time ago what this reporter also points out here. One of the current biggest lies of the administration is to say that Osama would win if we leave Iraq, I don’t think Al qeida is liked in Iraq, they are being used right now, but the reality is that in other circumstances (like the USA not being there) they hate each other.
What you don’t beleive me… just look at the numbers… Typically there is well over one suicide bombing per day on average (as well as dozens of of other attacks) some months this average is as high as 4 per day. Unlike other attacks these suicide attacks are predominantly carried out by Foreign Jihaddists. If all these were actually just terrorists who would, if the US had not attacked Iraq, have be attacking the US elsewhere. Where were they in 2002 ? Show me one place in the world were even CLOSE to this number of attacks were happening in 2002 ? Let alone which the number have attacks has FALLEN as the local Jihaddists have sauntered over to Iraq for there shot at the great satan.
Thats all you need to do to prove your side of the argument. If the Iraq war has not been the biggest Al Qiada recruitment fair in history, then show me this country that which was beset by hundreds suicide bombings a year in 2002, but which has been magically free of them since the iraq war began. Remeber the actual bomber is just the “ordinance”, more dangerous are the people who
And thats just considering suicide bombings, although all the evidence shows most of the thousand of conventional insurgent attacks (IEDs, ambushes, massacres) are from Iraqis, if only a fraction of the are from Al Qiada they represent the biggest guerillla offesive in the organisations history. Again where were they carrying out these attacks in 2002 ?
On the other side of the coin, although the evidence suggests most of the sucide attackers are non-Iraqi, there are now a reasonable number of IRAQI suicide bombers (the female bomber in Jordan being a case in point). That is an undeniable acheivement of the invasion. Previous to the invasion there was NONE, not a SINGLE iraqi suicide bomber in the whole history of Iraq. Now they happen regularly.
Facists are typically secular. Neither Hitler or Mossulini had much time for the church, unless it was completely controlled by the policitical establishment, as (just a like saddam and islam) they saw it as potential rival source of authority.
Does OBL care about that ? Even if things turn out ok, and by some miracle a secular stable democracy emerges it is no worse for him than a brutal seculat dictatorship, they are both godless apostates. If anything its advantage, opposition to the Saddam regime, whether genuinely democratic or islamist, was effectively suicide, but as the Moslem Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezzbolla have shown recently there is easy for islamists to take prosper in a democracy.
And one more thing… The CIA’s own think tank, the NIC. said the following about Iraq:
The al-Qa’ida membership that was distinguished by having trained in Afghanistan will gradually dissipate, to be replaced in part by the dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in Iraq. We expect that by 2020 al-Qa’ida will have been superceded by similarly inspired but more diffuse Islamic extremist groups, all of which will oppose the spread of many aspects of globalization into traditional Islamic societies.
**Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are “professionalized” and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself. **
Foreign jihadists—individuals ready to fight anywhere they believe Muslim lands are under attack by what they see as “infidel invaders”—enjoy a growing sense of support from Muslims who are not necessarily supporters of terrorism.