Cent No. 1: I despise the media. Simply because all of the focus is on sensationalizing (and selling you the idea that the world will end because of Fallujah) a particularly nasty battle, does not mean that things are either going well or going wrong with this war. I do not have the luxury to agree or disagree with this war, but I see that many people’s thoughts about the war are directly influenced by the images they see on TV, without them doing any sort of research on their own time. That’s not to say what they’ve seen/heard isn’t the truth, it just appears to me that people take it carte blanche without considering the source.
Cent No. 2: I see this quickly becoming my generation’s Vietnam.
Nothing like a good ol’ unsubstantiated allegation to get things going at a party, I always say.
You know what? If I hear the jailers at a maximum security prison are really a bunch of sick fucks, and my solution is to blow up the prison walls, I want the world to know Blackclaw says I’m not responsible for the carnage that the prisoners wreak. They may commit the murders and the rapes, but the victims’ survivors will be, for some odd reason, pissed at me. I say that’s just wrong. And bless my heart, so does Blackclaw. Thanks, bud. You’re gonna help pay my legal bills, right?
Squink: thanks for refreshing my recollection. I’d read about that awhile back, but it’s damned hard to keep up with all this regime’s atrocities.
But I sure don’t trust this Administration to tell us the truth about anything, about this war or about anything else. And the media’s the only alternative. It’s them or the proven liars.
No, things are going wrong in this war because they lied about their reasons for going in (which even they couldn’t agree on; WMDs was the public justification they could concur on), they didn’t bother sending in enough troops to secure the known and suspected conventional and MD weapons sites in the country, and they had no plan whatsoever for what to do after the statue fell, other than try to put Chalabi in charge. They’ve gone from one temporary fix to the next for the past 18 months; this is just another bit of winging it.
66 Coalition soldiers lost their lives in Iraq last week. Why? I don’t know. But as evil as the Fallujah insurgents were, I don’t see how what we’ve done will bring us any closer to an honorable exit. The insurgents are romping and stomping in Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, and a bunch of other towns. We’re playing Insurgent Whack-A-Mole, and we have to feed soldiers, not quarters, into the machine.
I’ve seen about as much of this war on TV as I did the Vietnam war: essentially none. But I’ve read a great deal.
Why the smiley? When you give your National Security Advisor the SecState job, it’s a fair bet that your foreign policy just became “make war on anyone who disagrees with you”.
I’ll chip in for your mental health therapy cause something is obviously malfunctioning in your grey orb to reach such a conclusion. I’ve already noted that the US bears responsibility for engaging in an act that has a predictable possible outcome, such as civil war in Iraq. We’ve moved on to arguing about whether or not the US is responsible for the actions of individual lunatics. I’m still holding out on that one.
Can all those who feel our foreign policy and actions have no consequences go start another country? That way OBL can go blow the proper people up and leave the rest of us alone.
I guess my problem is with your saying that these lunatics are unpredictable. On the specifics, sure–we don’t know who they’re going to kill. But we had a very good guess that they’d unleash a campaign of violence on someone.
And that’s what I’m saying. I’m not sure how the US can be responsible for the forest (a burgeoning civil war) but not for the trees (the individual atrocities that inevitably accompany that war).
I think I have to say this in every post, because otherwise people will misinterpret me: the guilt of the murderers is undiminished.
I just don’t want to see actions limited by what some group of unsound minds might or might not do.
If it is given that invading Afghanistan was a necessity by the US, is the US then responsible for the inevitable reprisals against foreign aid workers by the Taliban?
If the US makes a wrong decision, I don’t have any problem with holding it accountable for that decision. But trying to track down the hypotheticals of alternative timelines if the US had acted differently quickly turns meaningless for me. The US invaded Iraq and now there is a mess there that the US is responsible for. I can blame the US for the overall mess but trying to make the US share the blame for a particular atrocity commited by actors beyond the control of the US seems illogical to me. One can say that the US set the environment in which the atrocity took place but one can’t say that the US made this particular atrocity happen.
I think our foreign policy should be to leave people the fuck alone, and stop involving ourselves in the ancient and ceaseless squabbles of all these people.
Well in a certain way, yes. It was pretty easy to assume before we invaded that once we did, the possibility of tragic incidents would increase. I’m not saying they should deter us btw. Anyone that is surprised that these type of beheadings and such are going on in Iraq should consider themselves a moron. Many people knew this was going to happen well before we went in.
Not illogical at all, very simple.
We had a chance to kill Zarqawi before the war. For some very stupid reasons we didn’t, and look at how many heads have been sawed off a a result. Take Al Sadr, another guy we should have killed from the get go. We let him live, and then look at the hell he raises. How many people killed in his name, how many people did he arm, and how many of our soldiers died going after him. BTW we let him go again, he’s a free man right now.
The next time Zarqawi cuts off someone’s fucking head, don’t tell me we’re not responsible ok?
One can say that the US set the environment in which the atrocity took place but one can’t say that the US made this particular atrocity happen.
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So the US is responsibile for the “production” but not the “cast”?
Wouldn’t that be nice? That’s all a lot of us out here have been asking for for some time now. Unfortunately, it’s terribly inconvenient now as we’ve created an ugly mess that needs to be fixed before it implodes on the lot of us.
I’m fairly secure in knowing nothing will be fixed in the next 4 years and thaty the spin machine will make this all out to be one huge fucking success story, and countless Americans can hail their chief for being the knight in shining armor and bringing freedom and librty to an oppressed people who surely are better off now that their country is occupied and a war rages on(with a looming internal civil war brewing).
Well in a certain way, yes. It was pretty easy to assume before we invaded that once we did, the possibility of tragic incidents would increase. I’m not saying they should deter us btw. Anyone that is surprised that these type of beheadings and such are going on in Iraq should consider themselves a moron. Many people knew this was going to happen well before we went in.
Not illogical at all, very simple.
We had a chance to kill Zarqawi before the war. For some very stupid reasons we didn’t, and look at how many heads have been sawed off a a result. Take Al Sadr, another guy we should have killed from the get go. We let him live, and then look at the hell he raises. How many people killed in his name, how many people did he arm, and how many of our soldiers died going after him. BTW we let him go again, he’s a free man right now.
The next time Zarqawi cuts off someone’s fucking head, don’t tell me we’re not responsible ok?
You say she was a Western woman, eh? Hmmmm… well now that opens my eyes a bit. Western, eh? That is certainly bad form, I must say. A *Western * woman. From the West.
Have there been any non-Western women killed? I ask just out of curiousity, not because it actually matters, or anything.
This is a transparent and ridiculous attempt at anti-american propaganda. This quote was not even contained in the link in question. Do any of you really believe that an American soldier would order someone away from the side of a woman that’s in the middle of giving birth?
I suppose that the abnormally high levels of anti-Iraq propaganda bother you equally as much? Statues toppling, young female army heroes, WMD talk, proof of Iraq plotting to destroy the U.S., the use of the word “evil” whenever President Bush talks about our opponent, Etc.
That’s a rhetorical question, right? This is a war and since it is war I’d not find any behavior by either party impossible. This is the reason war is to be avoided at any costs, and the reason our misguided attempt at settling the region should never have taken place.
While a war waged against an enemy justifiably is bad, an unjustifiable war is 10 times worse.
