Did you read the OP? Why don’t you try it again?
Read the the second of the quoted extracts in Sailor’s post, just in case you missed the part about “destroyed several buildings…” to “let the Iraqis know that the attacks on the coalition will not be tolerated.”.
This story is not about merely showing ID cards.
[sup]Bull[/sup]shit.
Tee: get a grip. Look where Alessan is located. Understand his or her slap against the US is inherently self-deprecating.
sailor: keep on singing it, brother. Mark me down as another “non-hater” who thinks this place is going rapidly down the tubes. I, however, believe America’s dark ways are administration-independent; Democrats are simply going to cast a softer light onto our new-age Imperialism.
By the way, President Bush will persist after '04. My woeful prediction.
Ok, so it’s about unplanned urban renewal? Seriously, the story didn’t give much detail about who owned the buildings that were destroyed, what was found in them, or if they were occupied by hostile forces or singing nuns at the time of their destruction.
Alessan, I can have a tad more understanding with Israel because Israel is under attack daily from the Palestinian territories. I believe if the attacks stopped tomorrow the Israeli incursions would also stop. The situation in Iraq is totally different. At no moment have the Iraqi people or the Iraqi government attacked the USA or done anything to deserve this except to want the Americans to get out of their country.
Destroying property belonging to people who may be or may not be related to people who have done wrong is not acceptable in my book but i tend to be more understanding of Israel who is in a much more desperate situation and it cannot just pack and go home because they are home. If America had stayed home all this would not be happening.
Destroying targets for no purpose other than to intimidate the Iraqi population and
is unacceptable.
What? You doubt Saddam’s prefered methods of dealing with an insurgency?
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2011/stories/20030606004402600.htm
Clarify what I said that you think is bullshit or dry up and blow away. I am not here to defend all US actions, but the harping on US forces actions here seem absurd when one looks at the history of Iraq.
Blackclaw, do you not support the idea that the invasion of Iraq was partly to put an end to this sort of human rights abuse, to stop it from happening, to protect innocent civilians from oppression, not to step in and just take over from where Saddam left off?
Should there not also be a higher standard of behaviour for Coalition troops to live up to? And I mean significantly higher than merely being ‘better than Saddam was’?
Quite so, there is a dearth of detail. But please note, as you seem to have missed it, the wording: “destroyed several buildings, including houses of individuals believed to be involved in the shooting down of a U.S. helicopter on November 7.” (Empahsis mine).
It does not say that all the houses were hotbeds of insurgency. It says such house were “included”. Now, as English is my first language, I interpret that to mean that some other houses were destroyed that were not.
Perhaps you can put an entirely innocent spin on these words. You are cordially invited to try.
To destroy the homes of the innocent in order to impress the population with the necessity of obedience is “reprisal”. It is a barbaric practice of an occupying army. It is certainly not the practice of those who fancy themselves to be “liberators”.
Blackclaw: Are you kidding me?
From your article:
Further:
So you defend your earlier bullshit post with an off-topic post about how the US actually helped Saddam ward off a rebellion or two?
But we’re helping those poor brown people. Why, I heard just this morning we liberated some woodlands and an entire group of farming villages.
elucidator: I’m old enough to have seen this rap before. How soon after he’s reelected do you think President Bush will call for the draft? My guess is mid-June, 2005, based on all indications from the SSS and its new fiscal goals.
The Tough Love Machine needs a lot of meat, after all.
Believe me, I noticed. I’m feeling no sympathy for those poor oppressed people in the Middle Eastern Hyannisport that we’re guarding. Destruction of homes is a different thing, but you will never see me object when Israel does it and I’m not inclined to here either. Being involved in the downing of a helicopter says “insurgency” to me, you know…?
As am I, old friend. I still meet hot young women, but they call me “sir”.
I think all the draft stuff we are seeing is just the SOS. They love to make contingency plans, usually the wrong plan for an unanticipated contingency. I expect in the future the global ambitions of the neo-cons will be limited to intense conversations with thier families, with whom they will be spending more time.
We dont usually make precisely the same dumb mistake right away, it takes some twenty or thirty years to gather enough ignorance and arrogance.
Does this remind me of the dark days of Viet Nam? Yes, mostly for the polarity. It breaks my heart when good people refuse to see what is plainly before thier face because they fear that recognition of the truth makes them somehow less American, who persist in believing that “My country right or wrong” is anything other than an excuse for madness and death.
I hated the grim bitterness of the 'Nam years, hated judging people I had just met, and having them judge me, on outward signs of political alignment. (In my case, you couldn’t miss the "outward signs…).
Minor case in point: the use of the phrase “hates America”, which so many of us use in acidic irony. And note how quickly it can be taken seriously.
I also note the presence of John Kerry on the political scene. He and the other founders of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War doubly served thier country, both in war and in turning our minds to peace. When they marched with us, in uniform and bemedaled, the troglodytes were stunned and gaping, they didn’t dare shout “coward” and “traitor” to a vet in a wheelchair and a Purple Heart pinned to his chest.
I loathe to see those days again, I loathe to have my son see them at all. But humbled by the memory of the sacrifice of others, we must try. The citizens of the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known are specially blessed, and specially burdened. Our words and actions have a hundred times the import of a farmer grubbing in the mud of Bangladesh…
Ah. I see I’ve gotten carried away again. Enough. You get the point.
I have, until this point, made a habit of avoiding threads concerning Iraq. What suddenly snapped my good judgment on this matter I am unsure of, but a hunt for the traitorous neurons involved is now underway.
But since I am here, I suppose I am somewhat obligated to explain my position and I figure I might as well cover a lot of the bases that are sure to come up anyway.
What the hell makes your opinion so damn important?
Master of Arts, International Relations - all round political pain in the butt
Did I support the war on Iraq?
Yes and no. Annoying answer, but the world is complicated like that. I certainly did not support the reasoning given for the invasion. At best Iraq had chemical weapons, and now it seems he didn’t even have those, which makes Iraq less threatening than say Syria and not nearly as frightening as say North Korea, which seems to be spending most of its time in a determined march toward Armageddon. (Not to say that they are actually walking towards a large hill in the Middle-East. I don’t know why I decided to clarify that. Perhaps the codeine has finally kicked in.) Nor do I support the timing of Iraqi war number 2. I’d rather we had concentrated on trying to put back together the pieces that were Afghanistan and if we needed a scary bugaboo, Iran seemed to fill the bill nicely. But that isn’t to say that I minded Saddam and his massacring thugocracy being run out of town. A quick look through his exploits adds up to a half million or more Iraqis dying by his express desire for power and wealth. I do not think we need to establish the contention that Saddam is a bastard.
What the fuck is your point?
The point is whether you supported the Iraqi war or not, here we are. What is the next step? For those of you who want an immediate withdraw of US troops allow me to paint the picture for you. Saddam is still alive and supported by those who benefited from his reign of power or who fear his return enough to passively resist the US reconstruction effort. By the time of the US invasion, food and medical distribution had become centralized under Saddam’s government. (Think the sanctions were stupid? Yeah, me too. But again, reality is the present and it can’t be undone now.) The result of this is that when the US toppled Saddam, the US became the central distributor of food and medicine to the Iraqis. The US now runs the utilities. It pays the police. It imports oil into the country so what infrastructure Iraq has can at least run somewhat. The US leaves and that falls apart. Clearly another central authority would be needed to fill that void. And there is no shortage of contenders to do just that, in fact they will kill for it. The US leaves and Saddam will make a play at returning to power. It’s what he does. The Shia will oppose him, they always have. The Sunnis, who may not have supported Saddam that strongly, will rightly be terrified by Shia militants invading their towns and will be forced to look to Saddam for protection. The civil war gains steam. The central distribution structure of food and medicine break down. The utilities go out completely. Water does not get purified. Starvation and disease spread throughout the country. Refugees flee the fighting. The instability spreads to the Kurdish held areas where Turkish troops on their border have already made them nervous. Not to mention that the Sunnis exiled them from many of their homes in the past few decades. A stream of Sunni refugees will not be a good thing. If the Shia manage to get near a victory, there are several factions of them that want a chance at being head honcho. There has already been Shia on Shia violence. Mosques have been bombed, clerics hacked and shot to death. So perhaps that will be phase II of the civil war. Saddam could take advantage of this and return or perhaps he won’t and Iraq will look like Somalia for the next few decades. I’m not quite sure what the body count would be, a few hundred thousand to a few million perhaps, but I’m a big ole’ optimist. Of course then whatever faction wins out will have to have their revenge.
My point is this. The US cannot leave Iraq right now without it resulting in the death of a lot of Iraqis. If the US is going to stay, it needs to eliminate the threat to its forces there.
Now, on to individual points…
Aro
Yes and yes. But I do not know of any nice way to fight a guerrilla war. If the US cannot leave without Iraq falling apart, it has to take steps to bring stability. I can foresee that there will be occasions in which US military forces overstep their bounds. I cannot see any way in which wars of this nature can be fought without there being tragic consequences on occasion. The essential problem remains, that the Sunnis are not real excited about democracy nor any government that might give the Shias power over them. There isn’t any way to win their hearts and minds. The best that can be hoped for is to at least remove Saddam from the equation and give Iraq a running start before the US leaves.
elucidator
The news media have a rather poor tendency to word things. I simply do not know enough about the circumstances to make any kind of judgment on it. Were the buildings destroyed during fighting? Were weapons found in them? Did the US troops not like the decor?
So let me just say this, the intentional destruction of innocent people’s homes is always counter-productive. I don’t know if that is what happened here or not.
Mr.B
I try not to use obviously bias media. This is a quote from Mr. Aburish and I do not believe that his perspective on the issue is entirely factual. The US did not provide cover for Saddam’s helicopters, however, Saddam was allowed to use them under the terms of the ceasefire. US generals claim that they did not intend them to be used to suppress a rebellion, but rather for the transportation of Iraqi POWs home and for food and medical supply to their starving troops in the field. Frankly, I think the US should have backed the Shia.
Mr. B. You are an old grump that is living in the past. We’re on to all new mistakes now.
Blackclaw: Only the top paragraph from your article is attributed to Mr. Aburish. You’re hedging on deceptive.
But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the words of Seymour Hersh mean something to you, from the same article:
I assure you, I am neither old nor grumpy. I just don’t like bullshit.
And now you’ve harshed my mellow. ahem
elucidator, my thoughts are with Weird and any other draft-aged person out there. (Though as Spavined Gelding says, we’re all on the chopping block when you get right down to it…) Hopefully you and I can do something to stop all this crap.
That’s actually quite good, you know.
And if a foreign power were to invade and occupy my beloved homeland – to liberate it from the Evildoers – I would probably have a downed helo of my own chalked onto the wall of a cave. (Because of course, I wouldn’t be so stupid as to remain at home, right?)
If the Liberators then leveled my house, and (I’ll be gracious) in the process the houses of my neighbors, do you think this new Freedom will be appreciated? Upon which endeavors will a great many of my now-homeless neighbors embark?
'Fraid not. Same old mistakes, new packaging.
And by the by, why do you spend so much time demolishing the “pull out now” position, when no one is making such a case?
As to the Shia, I think we betrayed them (and that is the word) for the sake of stability. Our detestation of tyrants is a virtue of recent vintage, retrofit as the need arose. Recent virtue, like new wine, sets the teeth on edge. When our claims of self-defense proved groundless, we discovered ourselves to be the paragons of international liberation. Our Leader is feverishly trying to cram “vast stockpiles” down the Memory Hole, while he pretends that it was really about “freeing Iraq” all along.
It is a lie. A bright, shining lie.
Well that’s what I get for being in a hurry and not reading a link all the way through. If I had known that it took Hersh seriously as a source, I would not have posted it.
Oh? Well, then, no doubt you have a cite that proves him wrong, or mendacious. You are cordially invited to present it, or go pound burdocks.
I have to disagree. I do not see any similarity in the root causes of the Iraqi war with the Vietnam war. The dynamics of the population are also much different. If the US stages a coup to install a friendly dictator, however, I’ll cede the point.
Because that’s typically the way the logic flows. US troops are barbarians. Followed by evil US oppressors out of Iraq!
What are all the anti-war protestors demanding?
I agree in the strongest terms.
Count me as another American who has big, big problems with the way the current administration has handled Iraq. My opinion has nothing to do with patriotism, loyalty, or nationality, and I don’t believe sailor’s does, either.
I feel really sorry for the poor grunt-level GIs who are trying to do something useful; I bear them no ill will. They have been placed in a situation where it is extremely unlikely that there will be an overall positive outcome without some really, really huge changes in direction. I was extremely disgusted at the manner and timing of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but now that we are there, let’s make sure all the destruction and loss of life wasn’t in vain.
And the way to create a positive outcome is NOT to bomb the crap out of people who should be supporting the same goals as you. Alienating (not to mention blowing up) the people you have ostensibly come to rescue and protect is not the way to create a lasting peace. Whatever happened to determining guilt or innocence before imposing punishment?
(Oh, and how are you doing, **elucidator, ** Sir? Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)