NYC - 2,752 dead, many more injured (can’t find a solid number) - 9/11/2001
Bali - 202 dead, 209 wounded - Oct 12, 2002
Post-invasion:
Madrid - 191 dead, over 1700 wounded - March 11, 2004
London - 56 dead, 700 wounded - July 5, 2005
War toll:
Iraq - civilian deaths between 30,000 and 100,000, depending on whose numbers you trust.
US Military dead 2637 and climbing, 19,000+ wounded
200+ dead from other military forces (British, Italian, Ukranian, etc)
So, while I’d agree that individual attacks prior to our invasion were separately more severe, that the related death toll since our invasion is much higher.
Now, now. Don’t go putting words in my mouth. I did not say that Bush is a lying scumbag who can’t be trusted. It’s true and I’ll say it now, but I didn’t say it then.
I don’t think the quotes I gave require much of a stretch at all to imply a Saddam-9/11 connection.
I explained how it related to what Cheney said. If you don’t care to rebut that, all you’re doing is calling an argument a strawman because you can’t answer it.
That’s an excellent new debating technique. I’m looking forward to using it myself in the future.
But just because I’m a patient guy, I’ll reiterate the connection: as Cheney said, “As President Bush has said, the hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.” That only makes sense if Iraq generated no new radicals (presumably radicals = terrorists), for any persons radicalized by our invasion and occupation of Iraq weren’t radicalized before Iraq was an issue, but are now, in direct contradiction to what Cheney said.
So Cheney (and Bush as well, according to Cheney) implicitly adopts the “Lump of Terrorists” fallacy, the fallacy that there is an essentially fixed set of terrorists: we can kill or capture them, but other than that, nothing we do increases or reduces their numbers to a significant degree.
Not hardly; you overestimate your significance. First of all, I’m not making it up; I’m giving a name to a repeatedly observed phenomenon. And second, it’s got little to do with you. The ‘Lump of Terrorists’ fallacy is practiced by wingnuts from Bush and Cheney on down.
Yeah, saying “What [Bush, Cheney, etc.] do is use “9/11” or “terrorists” with “Saddam” or “Iraq” in the same breath” is the same as claiming Iraq was involved in 9/11.
To The Great Apologist himself, Shodan, please explain how the following comments made by your Imbecil In Charge just YESTERDAY, cannot be taken as an implication that Iraq was indeed involved with 9/11:
Go ahead, make my day. Your excuses are getting sillier by the minute.
Technically, as true as Clinton’s claim not to have had sex with Monica. If one defines sex as a reproductive act, then fellatio is not sex and he was being truthful. Bush never drew a line from 9/11 to Saddam, he just drew a lot of dots close together. Repeatedly invoking 9/11 and mentioning Saddam in the next breath was no attempt to mislead us, no siree.
Only a dyed-in-the-wool Bush Apologist[sup]TM[/sup] could overlook the difference between “involved with 9/11” (what RedFury said) and “ordered that attack” (what Bush said). But that is inconvenient to your politics, so you will not respond to this post either.
No, you are just making shit up because that’s all you can think to do. Of course, it is hardly the first time.
Oh, and Shibboleth, did you include the attacks on the Achille Laurel, the USS Cole, the embassies, and the 300,000 people Saddam killed pre-invasion? Might affect the figures a bit.
Actually, all it takes is someone who is [list=A][li]fluent in English, and [*]less stupidly partisan than you.[/list]Hardly a rare combination, at least apart from the SDMB.[/li]
Like I said, nothing is going to make any difference. If Bush says “black”, all you clowns will claim that he said “white” and nothing can be done about it.
Shodan, I don’t think I’ll ever view the Monty Python sketch where the knight gets all his limbs hacked off one by one, all the while insisting it was only a flesh wound, without thinking of you. I’ve got to hand it to you, your faith in your leader is absolute.
Got new for you: much of what people retain while listening to politicos/pundits are simply the catchphrases.
Note how Dubya starts with a full head of steam:
[quote=The Deceider] ‘War came to our shores’!!!
and goes right into THE CLICHE:
Now then, how can you possibly argue that he is NOT implying a connection between the two events? Remember, this whole interview was ABOUT IRAQ.
Point being, yeah sure, he later goes on disclaimer mode, but to Joe Sixpack – who’s already flipped channels to the WWF – what remains is the original soundbyte: “9/11…war came to us…fuck them Iriqueeees!”
If a kind mod happens bye (and we’ve got planty of them) please fix coding in above post. Oh, and in the first as in the second that’s supposed to read: The Decider.
Wherever did they get such an idea? Certainly not from The Leader, whose record of candor and truthiness is purity itself. Why, our fighting heroes are sacred to the patriots who infest the Halls of Power, they would never permit our heroes to act under false pretenses!
What do “the terrorists” have to do with Iraq? Oh that’s right, you’re trying to conflate Iraq with the GWoT.
Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt on that, then. Your Administration expected that we’d be greeted as liberators. Obviously, you folks did not expect that, once we’d defeated Saddam’s armies, anyone would “fight hard” against us there. And when they started to do so, they were just a bunch of “dead enders” who would be dealt with in short order. And then the level of violence in Iraq was on the same level as that of our big cities. And so forth.
IOW, by Blair’s standard, you were not prepared to succeed when you and Bush took us into Iraq.
The War on Terror isn’t much of a test of national will at all. Pretty much everyone recognizes that we need to fight that war; pretty much everyone supports it.
Many of us wish you’d get around to doing some of the obvious stuff involved in prosecuting that war. There’s a long list of stuff that was on what everyone’s to-do list for America right after 9/11 that hasn’t been started at all. Seems your office had some correspondence with the chemical industry lobby, and the idea of imposing security requirements on chemical plants was quietly dropped.
Which is why it would have been good to plan and act for the long term, rather than doing things, like invading Iraq, ignoring homeland security, and alienating the Muslim world, that work to our long-term detriment.
The first step in learning the intentions of such an enemy is to have good human intelligence. The path to good humint in the war against ‘Islamofascists’, as the wingers call them, is to minimize the numbers of Muslims sympathetic to the terrorists, so that other Muslims who overhear clues about the terrorists’ intent are much more likely to relay that information to those who would pass it to us. This entails attacking the terrorists themselves in a way that doesn’t alienate the Muslim world at large.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, which didn’t have anything to do with terrorism until after we’d been there awhile, got plenty of Muslims mad at us, without any GWoT benefits at all.
Cooperating with Israel’s attacks on Lebanon entire under the guise of fighting Hezbollah may have had something to do with the generic “the terrorists” although Shi’ite Hezbollah and Sunni al-Qaeda have little to do with each other. But be that as it may, bombing Lebanon’s infrastructure from north to south and in between struck the Muslim world as a totally disproportionate response to a group that exists primarily in southern Lebanon, and was incapable of attacking Israel from anywhere but southern Lebanon.
Not to mention, our willingness to casually steamroll over the closest thing to a true democracy in the Arab Middle East pretty much put paid on the idea that our goal is to bring democracy to the region.
So we have alienated the Muslim world. This adds to the ranks of our enemies, and greatly increases the ranks of those who sympathize with them more than with us, and are unlikely to pass along information having to do with terrorists.
So if we want to find out what the terrorists are doing before they do it, we’re going about it completely ass-backwards.
You have reason to believe a communication is related to al-Qaeda? Good. Get a FISA warrant. You don’t even need to do this ahead of time - you can get the warrant up to three days after the wiretap.
The fact is, we don’t know what you’re doing; there are no checks operating here. There is no way for the public to be sure that you are telling us the truth, even now, about the limits of this program.
We have only your word for any of this.
Dream on, fascist pig.
They were talking about the CIA being allowed to talk to the FBI, not about spying wholesale on millions of conversations and emails.
And we were spending it on the sort of big-bang programs you and your friends love and lobby for - new bombers! new jet fighters! new battleships! new tanks! new troop carriers! All the stuff that makes companies like Lockheed Martin drool with anticipation, but doesn’t do a thing against such a foe.
This is actually true - whaddaya know.
I doubt it - they’ve known for years that ‘sophisticated’ communications media are the most vulnerable to intercept.
We’ve done a really good job of finding out about their attacks before they happen, evidently.
But wouldn’t most of the intel we gather about al-Qaeda be equally likely to tip us off to both domestic and foreign attacks? Seems to me that if there have been that many attacks abroad, it’s a combination of distance and dumb luck that’s protected us for five years.
Or maybe they don’t want to attack us again unless they can do something that will rival 9/11, so there hasn’t been anything to test our defenses yet.
“OK, you’ve covered your ass.”
Our ships, our fighter and bomber missions, have diddly-squat to do with fighting an enemy that doesn’t operate openly. Sheez.
I love this sentence. It’s a much more effective way of saying, “we’re winning the war, but you still need to be as scared as ever.”
But you know what? A good defense damned sure should be part of the plan. Just because they can circumvent some of our possible defenses, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make it harder for them to smuggle, say, a dirty bomb into the country.
“Letting down our guard” is about defense. We have no guard up: 95% of imported containers unscreened, no chemical plant or chemical transport security, no air cargo screening, you name it.
Apparently we’re not serious about this fight.
We have tortured people to death; we have held persons randomly captured for years without an opportunity to prove their innocence; we have shot numerous civilians approaching movable checkpoints; we have dropped bombs on the people we supposedly came to rescue; we have hired private armies, sent them to Iraq, and put them beyond the reach of both Iraqi and U.S. law; and who knows what-all else.
Funny definition of justice, honor, and moral courage.
So who have we liberated? Who have we given the opportunity to decide their own destiny? How have we furthered peace in the Middle East?
Sure looks a lot more like a conflagration than it did four years ago.
I’m trying to think of a one of those principles you haven’t repeatedly violated, and I’m coming up empty.
You’re right, I shouldn’t have said “it’s a stretch”. Don’t get me wrong on this, I do think that is one possible explanation-- I just don’t think it’s the only one, nor the most likely. But that’s kind of a quibble, because I would say that Bush’s attempt to tie Saddam to al Qaeda was as much of a lie as an attempt to tie Saddam to 9/11 would have been. This is one area where I have no problem saying “Bush lied”. I guess we just disgree over the exact nature of the lie.
Here’s an unedited transcript of the exchange in Bush’s press conference last week that’s so pertinent to this discussion.
So Bush is absolutely right: he didn’t just say that Saddam ordered the attacks of 9/11. But he certainly does tie the two concepts together…and got called on it to his face. The press corps is finally growing a pair.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Actually, all it takes is someone who is [list=A][li]fluent in English, and less stupidly partisan than you.[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
Ouch! The old ***You’re a Poopy-Head, So I Don’t Have to Address Your Argument ** * gambit. And the judges say:
