I figured—understood. In fact, I was planning on more or less finishing that thought in the same way you did, pointing out that Hussein had a long, long history of violence spread out over time, such that it was his style of ruling (like oh so many dictators). One can only hope that the violence in Iraq now is similar to the 1991 spike you mentioned; to wit: an unstable time where those who would use violence as a means of control over-excercise this tactic. Here’s to hoping.
Re: IraqBodyCount: Do you know a place to get a better number? I do realize how they arrive at their count and that it is, by virtue of their methods, going to be a low count. It’s just seems the most legit I’ve found. Sorry for the lengthy hijack with this whole Saddam vs. Current Situation thing, but I learned a thing or two and, hell, read that little red banner up there.
You are mistaking my position on this. I am only saying that I don’t think we have enough information (by a long shot) to determine the answer either way. You may very well be right, Diogenes. I’m not ruling out that possibility. I’m only saying that there are other interpreations that explain equally as well the few facts we do have.
I read Iraqpundit, then I read Cole. I’m missing any hint of a suggestion that Cole’s citing Bloomberg for that assertion; rather, he just seems to be saying that it’s so.
Cole’s clearly drawing on a larger pool of reading about the region in making the remark in question. If Iraqpundit were able to show that that wasn’t true, or that Cole was relying on weak evidence while ignoring stronger evidence, that would be one thing. But what we have here is a dishonest post - Iraqpundit claims that Cole claimed a particular cite as support when Cole apparently did no such thing. And jumps on it with both feet, as if there was zero doubt that Cole had committed this error, which is the mark of a dishonest debater.
By the way, I thought you said Iraqpundit was an Iraqi. Seems he’s an Iraqi exile. Can we say that’s a pretty significant difference?
Again, I must ask you: cite?
How often do things like this happen in ‘any second world or third world state’? Stuff like this, as I pointed out, happens in Iraq all the time.
Ron Zeigler? Is that you??
Seriously, I can’t make head or tail of what you’re saying here.
You can ‘believe’ whatever you want to, and you can use whatever terminology you want to. But there’s a shitload of violence out there, and Iraq doesn’t have any continuity of institutions: nobody’s trusted (or even expected, in all likelihood) to be the bulwark against the violence. The police and bureaucrats and so forth that we expected to keep showing up at their jobs while we deposed Saddam, didn’t, and their offices were all looted to rubble. And then of course we disbanded the military.
I agree, but they have elections and stuff like that. Just having elections doesn’t make a country a democracy.
Saddam was removed from the levers of government. So was Iraq democratic under Saddam? Of course not. The question is, will Sharia be just another law, or will it be that with which all laws must harmonize, effectively beyond repeal by normal legislative action? If you think it’s going to be just another law, I must ask for a hit of whatever you’re smoking.
‘too soon.’ Exactly.
IF they’re willing to set aside force as a means of conflict resolution, and work things out through government only. But Basra of late clearly says they’re not yet willing to do so.
I suppose that could change, and we can all hope. But hope is not a plan, and I don’t see a plan.
Ryan_Liam: "Coles assertion that Sunni Iraqis just ‘love’ their now dead leader/terrorist "
Juan Cole: “There is increasing and alarming evidence that the Zarqawi organization is putting down deep grass roots among Sunni Arab Iraqis themselves.”
Of course, there is evidence that some Sunnis were in fact fans of Zarqawi:
Obviously I don’t know if Cole is right about the Zarqawi organization putting down roots among Sunni Arabs. But the WaPo’s reporting says that your ridicule of the notion that Sunnis liked Zarqawi is baseless.
Condi Rice’s assistant in charge of Iraqi affairs was interviewed on the PBS News Hour yesteraday, and he stated that we believe that to be the case. It was a good interview. I’ve not been impressed with many of the folks in the Bush administration, but this guy seems like an exception.
I wish I could share your hope. But it certainly looks as if, in Iraq, 2006 is more violent than 2005, which was more violent than 2004, which was more violent than 2003. I just don’t see any sign that anybody’s getting any traction on slowing down the disintegration of this country. The violence in the south is really bad news. For the past few years, Basra has been a miserably hard-ass Shi’ite religious state, but at least there’s been no fighting.
No problem about the hijack - I started it, really. I think it’s germane to the thread topic just in terms of what we mean by ‘better’ and ‘worse’ with respect to Iraq, whether we’re talking about different times post-Saddam, or whether we’re comparing pre- and post-Saddam.
One number that is somewhat helpful - and I don’t know if it’s yet available for all time periods; according to this piece last year the counts were supposedly secret - is the count of dead at the Baghdad morgue, which I found for last month, and for January through May 2006, in this CNN article. As I mentioned earlier, only those dead by violence wind up in the morgue, and not even all of those: according to this ABC piece, the count excludes victims of suicide bombings and other suicide attacks - no autopsy necessary :(. The counts for May and for January through May are 1398 and 6025, respectively. So that’s 40 a day for Jan-May, and 45 a day in May alone.
And this number is just for Baghdad, of course. But how many Iraqis have been killed in post-Saddam Iraq? Nobody knows. All we have is different pieces of the picture. Still, it seems to be more than enough to say Iraqbodycount’s number (again, not in any way meant as criticism) is well below the actual total. Half again as many? Double? Heck if I know.
Thought I’d add that today’s WaPo has an article, Zarqawi’s Hideout Was Secret Till Last Minute, that pretty much demolishes all that bushwa some posters put forth about Zarqawi’s killing having been part of a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation.
What - no troops in the area at all? No Iraqi troops surrounding the house? No joint U.S.-Iraqi military operation? Not even a combined U.S. air-and-ground operation, but just one lone U.S. plane with a bomb!
Then the Iraqis show up, not because they’re part of a combined operation, but because there are such things as local police stations.
Yeah, I’m rubbing it in. But we’ve been through all this before, this effort to pretend that our efforts to build an army in a client state are going far better than they actually are. I was in my late teens when Nixon’s “Vietnamization” was going on. And even if I wasn’t old and stuff like that, it’s hard to overlook the repeated episodes of this Administration’s having claimed that the Iraqi security forces are of certain numbers and competence, only to find out that they aren’t.
One of these days, the Iraqi security forces may actually turn out to be worth something. Or maybe not; maybe all the competent units will be sectarian outfits that are effective only in fighting their side of the civil war. But in the meantime, it stands to reason that they should be believed to be not particularly useful to our stated aims until hard evidence proves otherwise.
Hows does this prove your point about the Iraq forces one way or the other? How does the relative strength of the South Vietnam’s military matter to how the Iraqi army is or isn’t coming along? Are they linked in some mysterious way (other than in your head)? You are drawing correlations that are in your mind alone. If you want to present some evidence that Iraqs military is <insert whatever the hell you are trying to get at here>, then do so…don’t attempt to make some kind of connection between Iraq and South Vietnam as if its a slam dunk meaningful comparison.
BTW, who was making this point that it was a joint Iraq/US endevor? Why is it ‘Bushwa’…did they make it up out of whole clothe or were there early (unconfirmed) reports of an Iraqi military presence at the scene? And why is it invalid unless the Iraqi military was right there on the scene surrounding the house? Obviously the Iraqi military was involved…as well as some unknown Iraq informer. Who developed this intelligence? The US or the Iraqi’s…or both?
At minimum they were involved after the fact…because I’ve seen photos of their military at the scene. That seems to indicate that they weren’t cut completely out of the loop. But you do realize, I’m sure, that the Iraqi military is mainly a ground force atm, that its the US that has the majority of the air power…and that such intelligence needs to be acted on extremely rapidly if you actually want to get the guy. This is no indication, one way or the other, the current state of the Iraqi military…they simply don’t have this capability (i.e. for timely and percision air strikes on a house sized target). Note all the OTHER times we failed to get him (or any other high profile target that moves around a lot and is paranoid as hell).
It says Iraqi troops weren’t there; no ground troops were involved in the operation. Assorted claims had been made in this thread (and I’m not gonna go back and figure out which ones were made by Rune and which by Ryan_Liam and which by Shodan) that Zarqawi was killed in a combined U.S.-Iraqi operation, and even that Iraqi troops had the house surrounded when the bombs fell. Instead, the total operation apparently consisted of one airplane and no ground troops.
Corrrelation?
Vietnam: repeated claims that the ARVN was making progress towards being able to fight the war without our assistance. Claims all proved to be wrong.
Iraq: repeated claims that the Iraqi security forces were making progress towards being able to fight the surgency on their own. Claims so far all proved to be wrong.
See above. Does it matter?
Because it’s false.
They weren’t able to produce cites.
???
Look, could you at least read the stuff I quoted? They didn’t have time to mount a ground operation. Wouldn’t that directly imply there was no ground operation??
And if there was no ground operation, then unless the Iraqis were involved in the air operation, it wasn’t a joint Iraqi-U.S. operation. And they weren’t. QED.
Dunno where you get that.
Or that either.
At the link, it says:
So Iraqi intelligence wasn’t involved in the breakthrough that gave us Rahman, who led us to Zarqawi, and U.S. Special Ops were the ones who kept trach of Rahman.
While it’s possible that Iraqi intelligence, such as it is, was involved in surveillance of Rahman, Task force 77 is described as “top secret,” and that likely precludes Iraqi involvement at this point.
Finding out about something after it’s a done deal isn’t being ‘in the loop.’ That’s universally true.
Exactly what I was saying. You cannot use this incident to say something positive about the Iraqi military. Glad we agree on that.
We didn’t ‘fail’ to get him on three pre-war occasions; the White House denied permission to attempt to do this sort of number on him.
Everything Powell said in front of the UN was untrue. We had Blix ,Ritter and a mass of inspectors going everywhere the US government told them. The reports were clear and obvious.No weapons of mass destruction. The gas they talked about has a 2 yr shelf liife.Another known. There was no nuclear program .Known.He was a threat to his people but not on the level we are.As long as you have troops from a country a few thousand mikes away occupying your country,you will have combat. Want it to stop .Pull out.We are there for the long haul and for OUR interests.,as corporate and republicans define them.
