Not as bad as Alexander, but this is still faulty logic. While tim314 is ceratainly correct about not ignoring the factors that lead to such events, “indirectly responsible” doesn’t mean jack shit. Was Emperor Hirohito indirectly responsible for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because he greenlighted the attack on Pearl Harbor? How much should history hold him accountable for the destruction of two of his own cities? Were the allies indirectly responsible for the Holocaust because the sanctions they levied against Germany after WWI were too harsh? Should they pay reparations to Israel for creating an environment that caused antisemitic fascism to rise to power in Germany?
Yes of course, but at least we didn’t cut their faces to pieces or chop their limbs off and dump them off a road. But then again, small matters like that you don’t care about do you?
No there maybe not something inherently smart about the troops, but they’re a damn sight better that what you’re insinuating.
Those examples you give stress ‘indirectly’ way too far. My statement implies a much more direct version of ‘indirect’. I could almost say they are responsible for those car bombs. If the invasion hadn’t happened those 100,000 or so people would not have died.
Not at all. When the police go on strike in a city, and crime skyrockets, do you not think that people blame the police? If I shut down the power supply to a hospital, and people die because the doctors can’t find their way around, do people not blame me?
The United States removed a repressive government that nonetheless prevented terrorists from working within the country. Now that the US has removed the government, those terrorists are having a field day in the country. The US is to blame.
Again, that does not diminish the blame of the civilian-killing insurgents and terrorists. But it does mean that we need to evaluate our own actions: we are not blameless in these deaths, either.
Daniel
They would of died more slowly. Anyway, remember when we had sanctions and they killed large amounts of children, did the mortality rates go down after the invasion or did they remain the same? <slight hijack>
Fruit from a poison tree, as those lawyer shows like to say. Had there been no invasion, limbless and disemboweled westerners wouldn’t turn up in the middle of Iraqi roads. B came about because of A.
While it’s true we have no reports of mutilations by American troops in Iraq, don’t think that we’re immune to it. Reports of ears being cut off and worn as trinkets were commonplace amongst soldiers in Vietnam. We dropped napalm on people, atomic bombs on Japanese cities…don’t go getting all self-righteous about how we’re such civilized warriors. It’s an ugly business and we’re quite capable of becoming animals.
Hard to find a car bomb cite but I found this in several places.
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We are civilised, because in the midst of all that nuking and cutting, we’ve done alot more good than harm, and you know it.
I think this excellent point bears repeating.
And I’m sick of people who are pro-Iraq-war using examples of things bad people do as answers to all questions. If I ask you “given the relatively succesful containment of Iraq under the UN sanctions, and given the ongoing WMD inspections, was invading Iraq when we did a good idea or a bad idea”, it’s not a meaningful answer to respond with a litany of horrible things done by Saddam and/or current Bad People In Iraq.
I’m not sure the answer to your question–but be aware that the fourteen thousand figure only includes homicides, not deaths from disease or other non-deliberate acts. As I understand it, in the last few years before Hussein left office, his brutal dictatorship killed hundreds of people every year. And that’s what we should be looking at in comparison to the thousands killed every year under the current system.
Rather, we should be looking at all homicides caused by Hussein and anyone else in Iraq, compared ot all homicides under the current system.
Daniel
So we invaded Iraq to put an end to the massacres that ended fifteen years previously? Jesus, I always knew the federal bureaucracy moved slowly, but that’s ridiculous.
Let’s not look at wars from fifteen years previous, wars egged on by the United States realpolitik: let’s look at the situation immediately previous.
After all, I wouldn’t want someone invading the US to put a stop to the carpet-bombings in Vietnam.
Daniel
My favorite is when they reply “So you think we should put Saddam back in charge?”
But how far back do we take the chain of blame? Let’s leave out for a second whether or not this war was justified, and just look at the chain of events that led up to the womans death. The terrorists killed this woman (it’s the terrorists fault) because the US invaded Iraq (no, it’s the US’s fault), because the US concluded Iraq was a threat due to faulty British Intelligence (now it’s the Brits fault the woman died) which was generated during a time MI5 was shorstaffed (It’s James Bond’s fault) due to an outbreak of salmonella caught at a local Indian restaurant (It’s the cooks fault) run by an immigrant who would never have moved to the UK had the UK not occupied India. Therefore, The East India Company must bear some of the blame for the murder and mutialtion of some poor woman in Iraq.*
Look, I’m not saying that the decision to invade Iraq didn’t create one holy mess, but too many people in this thread seem to be trying to shift the war crime blame away from those who actually committed the crimes, and onto Dubya. I do agree with your final paragraph about evaluating our actions, however.
Lobsang, my previous examples did not stretch “indirectly” too far (although the one above certainly did.) The first one was a near perfect parallel. Think about it, if Japan didn’t attack the US, the US wouldn’t have dropped two atomic bombs on 'em. There are unforseen consequences to every decision. You can blame Bush for creating a mess, but you can’t blame him each time an Iraqi kills a civilian.
*obviously, I made a good portion of that up in order to illustrate a point
I suppose it’s all about perspective. You may not find sexual assaults and non-marring torture to be small things(or “a damn sight better”), but some of us don’t. I think to minimize our torture and misdeeds while pointing out the misdeeds of a country we’ve occupied and attacked to be short-sighted, and obtusely so.
Of course, considering your position on the matter, I’m sure none of this matters to you.
Sam
Yes, this is precisely my point. I’m not trying to justify the actions of the individuals who tortured this woman, but the root cause of this event still lies in the hands of the invaders.
They are guilty, but so are we.
I can agree with you that blame doesn’t shift away from the war-criminals. But blame, IMO, isn’t like butter: we don’t have a pound of blame to distribute among the responsible, and if we give 8 ounces to the US that means there’s only 8 ounces left for the war criminals. It’s not like that. Blame is not diminished by being shared.
Look. If John and I both shoot up a grocery store and kill 10 people, do we each only get tried for five murders? Of course not: we each get tried for all the murders. John’s conviction doesn’t diminish my guilt one iota.
Similarly, to suggest that the US is partly accountable for these civilian deaths does NOT diminish the responsibility of the murderers.
Those people suggesting that the actions of the murderers are defensible–well, I’m not defending that, because I find that idea appalling. Nothing, no matter how awful, will ever give me the right to kill an innocent person and butcher their body. But we’re not locked into either blaming the murderers or blaming the people that made the murders possible.
I suspect we’re largely in agreement.
In any case, there are plenty of civilian deaths from airstrikes on that list.
Daniel
Tell that to the families who are displaced because of bombs…or whose children have been killed. It’s all a matter of which side of the gun you’re on.
I’ll buy that.
So, Roseworm, I’m interested in reducing my clearly high level of ignorance, and my lonely eyes turn to you since you have shown yourself to be such a beacon of logic and sanity on this fractious board. In your OP, you apparently contend the US is fighting in Iraq specifically to prevent further beheadings of westerners by Iraqi insurgents. Perhaps, therefore, you’d be kind enough to expand on the following:
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Show us with some statistics, from any source, that the kidnapping and beheading of westerners by Iraqi insurgents existed as a serious danger prior to the US invasion.
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Please provide us with your assessment of the relative success of this anti-beheading effort, given, as I am sure you know, that for the number of beheadings actually prevented (less than 10?) so far, more than 1000 US troops and close to 15,000 Iraqi civilians have died.
Thanks in advance,
El_Kabong