Toronto Escorts

The Truth On Iraq: It's Devastated

Mcluhan

New member
A few words of preamble on this thread. I'm posting this thread not because of some flighty frivolous desire to bash Pax American, rather this is about Iraq and the real situation there.

The War In Iraq has been a concern of mine since about one month after 9/11 when I realised what was about to happen in Iraq. Even from there I could see January 2005 as clearly as a wide-eyed deer in my headlights. Since that time I have passively studied the situation as it developed day by day, investigating from the armchair...watching it all unfold with a critical eye.

More than half the threads here melt down quickly into dems bashing reps, yanks bashing canucks and visa versa, and while it can be fun or boring, most of the arrow slinging has been said and said again. We all know who we are. I think Bush is an idiot. Others think he is a pillar of the community. These two view points will never change until hell freezes. We are stuck with each other. We are also stuck with a war. But so is Iraq, stuck.

My stake in the ground driven here is: if humanity is to form an educated opinion, they must not be kept in ignorance of the facts. This thread is about that concept.

Regardless of what side we take, the war in Iraq has occured. The War 'IS".

The Iraq War is a mess. It is tragic. It is unjustifiable. It appears unresolvable. That my friends is the world perspective, the opinion of the vast majority, note that was 'World View' . For those 59,000,000 million Americans that voted for Bush's war, they are disconnected from the global reality. They are blind to the facts, and worse they seem to care not. They have only God on their side. The rest of the world is indisagreement.

There are two Iraq realities, the one we see on CNN, and the other Iraq, the one that 'is'. The American, and the Canadian press do not report reality in Iraq because they do not even see it, never mind the issues that they mostly keep silent on.. Below is a journalist's take on Iraq's reality He was there. He saw. He wrote.

This reporter's version of realility that follows is factual because he, like Scott Taylor, was indeed there. He risked his life in order to give you this perspective. I think we owe it to him and to ourselves to at least read it. Here my friends is one man's reality.. Iraq's reality.

Weary of the overall failure of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi people and US soldiers, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to report on the war himself.

His dispatches were quickly recognized as an important media resource and he is now writing for the Inter Press Service, The NewStandard and many other outlets. His reports have also been published with The Nation, The Sunday Herald and Islam Online, to name just a few. Dahr's dispatches and hard news stories have been translated into Polish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese and Arabic. On the radio, Dahr is a special correspondent for Flashpoints and reports for the BBC, Democracy Now!, and numerous other stations around the globe.

Dahr has spent a total of 6 months in occupied Iraq, and has now returned to continue reporting on the occupation. One of only a few independent reporters in Iraq, Dahr uses the DahrJamailIraq.com website and mailing list to disseminate his dispatches.


Iraq: The Devastation
by Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt
January 8, 2005


Measure Iraq any way you want and it adds up to disaster: Less electricity is now being delivered than in the Saddam Hussein years; infant malnourishment has, according to a Norwegian study, doubled in the same time period ("It's on the level of some African countries," says the deputy director of the institute that conducted the study); attacks on the country's oil infrastructure are now so severe that no oil whatsoever is leaving the country heading north; there are far more insurgents and sympathizers (over 200,000 and growing) than American troops in the country, according to a recent estimate by Iraq's national intelligence chief; new plans with a distinctly Vietnam-ish ring to them are being developed to place sizeable numbers of American "advisers" with newly trained Iraqi military units that are under siege and crumbling (to "bolster the Iraqi will to fight") – and that just scratches the surface of this moment.
continued...
 
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Mcluhan

New member
Sadiq Zoman is fairly typical of what I've seen. Taken from his home in Kirkuk in July, 2003, he was held in a military detention facility near Tikrit before being dropped off comatose at the Salahadin General Hospital by U.S. forces one month later. While the medical report accompanying him, signed by Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, stated that Mr. Zoman was comatose due to a heart attack brought on by heat stroke, it failed to mention that his head had been bludgeoned, or to note the electrical burn marks that scorched his penis and the bottoms of his feet, or the bruises and whip-like marks up and down his body.
I visited his wife Hashmiya and eight daughters in a nearly empty home in Baghdad. Its belongings had largely been sold on the black market to keep them all afloat. A fan twirled slowly over the bed as Zoman stared blankly at the ceiling. A small back-up generator hummed outside, as this neighborhood, like most of Baghdad, averaged only six hours of electricity per day.
Her daughter Rheem, who is in college, voiced the sentiments of the entire family when she said, "I hate the Americans for doing this. When they took my father they took my life. I pray for revenge on the Americans for destroying my father, my country, and my life."

{snip]

At that moment, a convoy of Humvees full of soldiers, guns pointing out the small windows, rumbled through the front gate of the penal complex, kicking up a huge dust cloud that quickly engulfed everyone. The parent of another prisoner, Mrs. Samir, waving away the clouds of dust said, "We hope the whole world can see the position we are in now!" and then added plaintively, "Why are they doing this to us?"
Last summer I interviewed a kind, 55 year-old woman who used to work as an English teacher. She had been detained for four months in as many prisons…in Samarra, Tikrit, Baghdad and, of course, at Abu Ghraib. She was never, she told me, allowed to sleep through a night. She was interrogated many times each day, not given enough food or water, or access to a lawyer or to her family. She was verbally and psychologically abused.
But that, she assured me, wasn't the worst part. Not by far. Her 70 year-old husband was also detained and he was beaten. After seven months of beatings and interrogations, he died in U.S. military custody in prison.
She was crying as she spoke of him. "I miss my husband," she sobbed and stood up, speaking not to us but to the room, "I miss him so much." She shook her hands as if to fling water off them…then she held her chest and cried some more.
"Why are they doing this to us?" she asked. She simply couldn't understand, she said, what was happening because two of her sons were also detained, and her family had been completely shattered. "We didn't do anything wrong," she whimpered.
With the interview over, we were walking towards our car to leave when all of us realized that it was 10 pm, already too late at night to be out in dangerous Baghdad. So she asked us instead if we wouldn't please stay for dinner, all the while thanking me for listening to her horrendous story, for my time, for writing about it. I found myself speechless.
"No, thank you, we must get home now," said Abu Talat. By this time, we were all crying.
In the car, as we drove quickly along a Baghdad highway directly into a full moon, Abu Talat and I were silent. Finally, he asked, "Can you say any words? Do you have any words?"
I had none. None at all.
 

Mcluhan

New member
Broken Infrastructure
Everything in Iraq is set against the backdrop of shattered infrastructure and a nearly complete lack of reconstruction. What the Americans turn out to be best at is, once again, promises -- and propaganda. During the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority ruled Iraq from Baghdad's Green Zone, their handouts often read like this one released on May 21, 2004: "The Coalition Provisional Authority has recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi children in Ramadi, Kerbala, and Hilla. Iraqi women from Hilla sewed the soccer balls, which are emblazoned with the phrase ‘All of Us Participate in a New Iraq.'"
And yet when it came to the basics of that New Iraq, unemployment was at 50% and increasing, better areas of Baghdad averaged 6 hours of electricity per day, and security was nowhere to be found. Even as far back as January, 2004, before the security situation had brought most reconstruction projects to the nearly complete standstill of the present moment, and 9 months after the war in Iraq had officially ended, the situation already verged on the catastrophic. For instance, lack of potable water was the norm throughout most of central and southern Iraq.
I was then working on a report that attempted to document exactly what reconstruction had occurred in the water sector -- a sector for which Bechtel was largely responsible. That giant corporation had been awarded a no-bid contract of $680 million behind closed doors on April 17, 2003, which in September was raised to $1.03 billion; then Bechtel won an additional contract worth $1.8 billion to extend its program through December 2005.
At the time, when travel for Western reporters was a lot easier, I stopped in several villages en route south from Baghdad through what the Americans now call "the triangle of death" to Hilla, Najaf, and Diwaniyah to check on people's drinking-water situation. Near Hilla, an old man with a weathered face showed me his water pump, sitting lifeless with an empty container nearby -- as there was no electricity. What water his village did have was loaded with salt which was leaching into the water supply because Bechtel had not honored its contractual obligations to rehabilitate a nearby water treatment center. Another nearby village didn't have the salt problem, but nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones, cramps, and even cases of cholera were on the rise. This too would be a steady trend for the villages I visited.
The rest of that trip involved a frenetic tour of villages, each without drinkable water, near or inside the city limits of Hilla, Najaf, and Diwaniya. Hilla, close to ancient Babylon, has a water treatment plant and distribution center managed by Chief Engineer Salmam Hassan Kadel. Mr. Kadel informed me that most of the villages in his jurisdiction had no potable water, nor did he have the piping needed to repair their broken-down water systems, nor had he had any contact with Bechtel or its subcontractors.
He spoke of large numbers of people coming down with the usual list of diseases. "Bechtel," he told me, "is spending all of their money without any studies. Bechtel is painting buildings, but this doesn't give clean water to the people who have died from drinking contaminated water. We ask of them that instead of painting buildings, they give us one water pump and we'll use it to give water service to more people. We have had no change since the Americans came here. We know Bechtel is wasting money, but we can't prove it."
At another small village between Hilla and Najaf, 1,500 people were drinking water from a dirty stream which trickled slowly by their homes. Everyone had dysentery; many had kidney stones; a startling number, cholera. One villager, holding a sick child, told me, "It was much better before the invasion. We had twenty-four hours of running water then. Now we are drinking this garbage because it is all we have."
The next morning found me at a village on the outskirts of Najaf, which fell under the responsibility of Najaf's water center. A large hole had been dug in the ground where the villagers tapped into already existing pipes to siphon off water. The dirty hole filled in the night, when water was collected. That morning, children were standing idly around the hole as women collected the residue of dirty water which sat at its bottom. Everyone, it seemed, was suffering from some water-born illness and several children, the villagers informed me, had been killed attempting to cross a busy highway to a nearby factory where clean water was actually available.
 

Mcluhan

New member
In June, six months later, I visited Chuwader Hospital, which then treated an average of 3,000 patients a day in Sadr City, the enormous Baghdad slum. Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the head manager there, promptly began describing the struggles his hospital was facing under the occupation. "We are short of every medicine," he said and pointed out how rarely this had occurred before the invasion. "It is forbidden, but sometimes we have to reuse IV's, even the needles. We have no choice."
And then, of course, he -- like the other doctors I spoke with – brought up their horrendous water problem, the unavailability of unpolluted water anywhere in the area. "Of course, we have typhoid, cholera, kidney stones," he said matter-of-factly, "but we now even have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E…and it has become common in our area."
Driving out of the sewage filled, garbage strewn streets of Sadr City we passed a wall with "Vietnam Street" spray painted on it. Just underneath was the sentence -- obviously aimed at the American liberators -- "We will make your graves in this place."
Today, in terms of collapsing infrastructure, other areas of Baghdad are beginning to suffer the way Sadr City did then, and still largely does. While reconstruction projects slated for Sadr City have received increased funding, most of the time there is little sign of any work being done, as is the case in most of Baghdad.
While an ongoing fuel crisis finds people waiting up to two days to fill their tanks at gas stations, all of the city is running on generators the majority of the time, and many less favored areas like Sadr City have only four hours of electricity a day.

Broken Cities
The heavy-handed tactics of the occupation forces have become a commonplace of Iraqi life. I've interviewed people who regularly sleep in their clothes because home raids are the norm. Many times when military patrols are attacked by resistance fighters in the cities of Iraq, soldiers simply open fire randomly on anything that moves. More commonly, heavy civilian casualties occur from air raids by occupation forces. These horrible circumstances have led to over 100,000 Iraqi civilian casualties in the less than two year-old occupation.
Then there is Fallujah, a city three-quarters of which has by now been bombed or shelled into rubble, a city in whose ruins fighting continues even while most of its residents have yet to be allowed to return to their homes (many of which no longer exist). The atrocities committed there in the last month or so are, in many ways, similar to those observed during the failed U.S. Marine siege of the city last April, though on a far grander scale. This time, in addition, reports from families inside the city, along with photographic evidence, point toward the U.S. military's use of chemical and phosphorous weapons as well as cluster bombs there. The few residents allowed to return in the final week of 2004 were handed military-produced leaflets instructing them not to eat any food from inside the city, nor to drink the water.


Last May, at the General Hospital of Fallujah, doctors spoke to me of the sorts of atrocities that occurred during the first month-long siege of the city. Dr. Abdul Jabbar, an orthopedic surgeon, said that it was difficult to keep track of the number of people they treated, as well as the number of dead, due to the lack of documentation. This was caused primarily by the fact that the main hospital, located on the opposite side of the Euphrates River from the city, was sealed off by the Marines for the majority of April, just as it would again be in November, 2004.
He estimated that at least 700 people were killed in Fallujah during that April. "I worked at five of the centers [community health clinics] myself, and if we collect the numbers from these places, then this is the number," he said. "And you must keep in mind that many people were buried before reaching our centers."
When the wind blew in from the nearby Julan quarter of the city, the putrid stench of decaying bodies (a smell evidently once again typical of the city) only confirmed his statement. Even then, Dr. Jabbar was insisting that American planes had dropped cluster bombs on the city. "Many people were injured and killed by cluster bombs. Of course they used cluster bombs. We heard them as well as treated people who had been hit by them!"
Dr. Rashid, another orthopedic surgeon, said, "Not less than sixty percent of the dead were women and children. You can go see the graves for yourself." I had already visited the Martyr Cemetery and had indeed observed the numerous tiny graves that had clearly been dug for children. He agreed with Dr. Jabbar about the use of cluster bombs, and added, "I saw the cluster bombs with my own eyes. We don't need any evidence. Most of these bombs fell on those we then treated."
 

Mcluhan

New member
Speaking of the medical crisis that his hospital had to deal with, he pointed out that during the first 10 days of fighting the U.S. military did not allow any evacuations from Fallujah to Baghdad at all. He said, "Even transferring patients in the city was impossible. You can see our ambulances outside. Their snipers also shot into the main doors of one of our centers." Several ambulances were indeed in the hospital's parking lot, two of them with bullet holes in their windshields.
Both doctors said they had not been contacted by the U.S. military, nor had any aid been delivered to them by the military. Dr. Rashid summed the situation up this way: "They send only bombs, not medicine."
As I walked to our car at one point amid what was already the desolation of Fallujah, a man tugged on my arm and yelled, "The Americans are cowboys! This is their history! Look at what they did to the Indians! Vietnam! Afghanistan! And now Iraq! This does not surprise us."
And that, of course, was before the total siege of the city began in November, 2004. The April campaign in Fallujah, which resulted in a rise in resistance proved -- like so much else in those early months of 2004 -- to be but a harbinger of things to come on a far larger scale. While the goal of the most recent siege was to squelch the resistance and bring greater security for elections scheduled for January 30, the result as in April has been anything but security.
In the wake of the destruction of Fallujah fighting has simply spread elsewhere and intensified. Families are now fleeing Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, because of a warning of another upcoming air campaign against resistance fighters. At least one car bomb per day is now the norm in the capital city. Clashes erupt with deadly regularity throughout Baghdad as well as in cities like Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba and Balad.
The intensification is two-sided. With each ratchet upwards in violence, the tactics by the American military only grow more heavy-handed and, as they do, the Iraqi resistance just continues to grow in size and effectiveness. Any kind of "siege" of Mosul will only add to this dynamic.
Despite a media blackout in the aftermath of the recent assault on Fallujah, stories of dogs eating bodies in the streets of the city and of destroyed mosques have spread across Iraq like wildfire; and reports like these only underscore what most people in Iraq now believe -- that the liberators have become no more than brutal imperialist occupiers of their country. And then the resistance grows yet stronger.
Yet among Iraqis the growing resistance was predicted long ago. One telling moment for me came last June amid daily suicide car bombings in Baghdad. While footage of cars with broken glass and bullet holes in their frames flashed across a television screen, my translator Hamid, an older man who had already grown weary of the violence, said softly, "It has begun. These are only the start, and they will not stop. Even after June 30." That, of course, was the date of the long-promised handover of "sovereignty" to a new Iraqi government, after which, American officials fervently predicted, violence in the country would begin to subside. The same pattern of prediction and of a contrarian reality can now be seen in relation to the upcoming elections.
Three weeks ago, a friend of mine who is a sheikh from Baquba visited me in Baghdad and we had lunch with Abdulla, an older professor who is a friend of his. As we were eating, Abdulla expressed a sentiment now widely heard. "The mujahideen," he said, "are fighting for their country against the Americans. This resistance is acceptable to us."
The Bush administration has recently increased its troops in Iraq from 138,000 to 150,000 -- in order, officials said, to provide greater security for the upcoming elections. Such troop increases also occurred in Vietnam. Back then it was called escalation.
What I wonder is, will I be writing a piece next January still called, "Iraq: The Devastation," in which these last terrible months of 2004 (of which the first half of the year was but a foreshadowing) will prove in their turn but a predictive taste of horrors to come? And what then of 2006 and 2007?
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at January 7, 2005 03:26 PM
 

assoholic

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..there was a great article I have searched for to post a link but I have not been able to find. It is from the Pentagon, it discusses how the next big Strategic hurdle the US Military will have to overcome are 3'rd world slums, Miles and miles of narrow streets.
No centralized facilities to bomb, like Water facilities to bring the population to heel.
Plus unlike the Jungle you just cant carpet bomb it , unless of course you want to escalate the War a notch higher.
 

Mcluhan

New member
assoholic said:
..there was a great article I have searched for to post a link but I have not been able to find. It is from the Pentagon, it discusses how the next big Strategic hurdle the US Military will have to overcome are 3'rd world slums, Miles and miles of narrow streets.
No centralized facilities to bomb, like Water facilities to bring the population to heel.
Plus unlike the Jungle you just cant carpet bomb it , unless of course you want to escalate the War a notch higher.
This is one solution the Pentagon is mulling over..

The Salvador Option

The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq


Newsweek
Updated: 10:22 a.m. ET Jan. 9, 2005Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.


Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)


Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell

~snip
read the rest here..

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/
 

assoholic

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..DQ could fill us in, but in Nam its name was the Phoenix Program.
In other words torture and kill people you suspect of being Insurgents.
 

Ranger68

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You won't convince those who think the war was a reasonable or justifiable course of action.
"Better them than us."
 
Y

yychobbyist

Excellent post McLuhan.

You're right to an extent Ranger but I think one of the issues that this article raises is this: the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption necessarily means that the overall effects of an invasion on a state play absolutely no role whatsoever in making the decision on whether to invade or not. The U.S. did NOT invade Iraq to free Iraqis. They did NOT invade Iraq to save the lives of malnourished children. They did NOT invade Iraq to improve the lives of Iraqis. They invaded because they believed it was in their national interest.

Now, interestingly, if they did indeed invade to rid the country of terrorists and make Iraq an unsafe haven for terrorists it means they will have to rebuild Iraq, eliminate poverty, build a middle class and subdue Islam. How long do they think this will take? How much money will this take? Do they honestly think that Bechtel, Haliburton, Citibank and the corporate interests which are already in Iraq like dirty shirts are going to rebuild that country? Hell no, it's not safe for any foreigner there. It won't be safe for any foreigner there for a long time and what concerns me is that while the Americans are making it a safe place for foreigners they are doing s.f.a. to make it safer and better place for the Iraqis.

All in all this has the makings of one of the monumental fark-ups in history.
 

Mcluhan

New member
yychobbyist said:
... The U.S. did NOT invade Iraq to free Iraqis. They did NOT invade Iraq to save the lives of malnourished children. They did NOT invade Iraq to improve the lives of Iraqis. They invaded because they believed it was in their national interest.



Agreed across the board yychobbyist . This reply could unleash the dawgs of war... Oh well...here goes...

This war had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. We can call a spade a spade here, and stick that on the wall as fact. But is it really a long range 'fark up' for the economy of the US...I seriously wonder.

This destruction by the time this is finished, will be measured in the trillions, not billions.

Q:Who will rebuild Iraq?
A:The US will rebuild Iraq.
Q:Where will the money come from?
A:The oil in the ground.
Q:Who will do the work?
A: British and US contractors...

The war game played here is simple to figure.

What of the civilians? They are inconsequential...just as they were in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, and Argentina. Just as they always will be. They are not on the balance sheet anywhere as expense items.

The US did not have an 'exit strategy', because they didn't need one. They were not leaving. The unforeseen however has happened. They are losing to a national resistance. Just like Vietnam.

In lay jargon the Pentagon, is freaking out. Their soldiers are weakening, their reserves are weakening, the Nat Guard is buckling.. The boys and girls are worn out. The stress is doing them in, along with the roadside shrapnel. Iraq is now officially a hell-hole.

The Mujahideen, a real threat, grows stronger, as the US boots weaken on the ground. The civilian population is increasingly behind the Mujahideen. The 'regional' resistance support reported as 200,000 strong and growing is probably a "national resistance" and a way distorted figure. If you read between the lines, its more likely tens time higher than 'intel' reports. It a safe bet that 2,000,000 in resistance support the Mujahideen country wide. Look at the cities where the military police are in collusion with the Mujahideen. That would be all of them, except where the Kurds rule. Its Vietnam all over again, with El Salvador mixed in. The Generals in dissent have publicly said, “It’s a war we cannot win and the longer it goes, the worse it will get. “

Bush is off in space, touting a political solution, an election in a country that's blowing itself to pieces right under his nose. Meanwhile the pentagon is trying to figure out how to get away with genocide, because wiping out large chunks of population, seems about the only way to cure the problem.

As the writer of the article says, if this year is Disaster, what will next year be? And the year after that?

The US military is locked in a very deadly and potentially disastrous situation. Deadly for both sides, but more so for Iraq and its population.

There is only one direction the US will go, and we all know it. They will keep ploughing. There is only one thing that will stop them, US public opinion. And so far, its not looking all that potent. If the US public knew what was actually happening in Iraq, it would help. Meanwhile this war, and those that would continue it, are destroying the country.

Tell your friends...
 

Geminixoxo

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Bush will ultimately be seen as one of the biggest diasters teh US presidency has ever produced and the people who voted him back in the biggest idiots.
Amen to that...
 

Ranger68

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yychobbyist said:
Excellent post McLuhan.

You're right to an extent Ranger but I think one of the issues that this article raises is this: the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption necessarily means that the overall effects of an invasion on a state play absolutely no role whatsoever in making the decision on whether to invade or not. The U.S. did NOT invade Iraq to free Iraqis. They did NOT invade Iraq to save the lives of malnourished children. They did NOT invade Iraq to improve the lives of Iraqis. They invaded because they believed it was in their national interest.
I concur. The administration couldn't sell that to the American people, though, so it conconcted story after story - WMDs, terrorists, freedom for the Iraqis, etc. There are regular posters in here who buy it.

My argument has always been that the invasion is DETRIMENTAL to national security and thus the *national* interest. I think it is of interest to a small cabal of people in the administration, and does nothing but harm the country as a whole.

yychobbyist said:
Now, interestingly, if they did indeed invade to rid the country of terrorists and make Iraq an unsafe haven for terrorists it means they will have to rebuild Iraq, eliminate poverty, build a middle class and subdue Islam. How long do they think this will take? How much money will this take? Do they honestly think that Bechtel, Haliburton, Citibank and the corporate interests which are already in Iraq like dirty shirts are going to rebuild that country? Hell no, it's not safe for any foreigner there. It won't be safe for any foreigner there for a long time and what concerns me is that while the Americans are making it a safe place for foreigners they are doing s.f.a. to make it safer and better place for the Iraqis.

All in all this has the makings of one of the monumental fark-ups in history.
The US needs to get out as soon as possible, and let the chips fall where they may. There is NOTHING they can do to prevent these consequences now - they can merely prolong and exacerbate them.
 
Y

yychobbyist

Ranger68 said:
I concur. The administration couldn't sell that to the American people, though, so it conconcted story after story - WMDs, terrorists, freedom for the Iraqis, etc. There are regular posters in here who buy it.

My argument has always been that the invasion is DETRIMENTAL to national security and thus the *national* interest. I think it is of interest to a small cabal of people in the administration, and does nothing but harm the country as a whole.



The US needs to get out as soon as possible, and let the chips fall where they may. There is NOTHING they can do to prevent these consequences now - they can merely prolong and exacerbate them.
But they can't get out now - getting out now leaves a huge power vaccuum which the insurgents will fill. Prior to the war Iraq was not a haven for terrorists. It is now the primary battleground between the U.S. and terrorists (and, in response to earlier posts about why the U.S. hasn't been attacked by terrorists for a few years I think the reason why is that al-Qaeda doesn't need to attack U.S soil when it has such a target rich environment in Iraq) and if the U.S. leaves it will only get worse.
 
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The Vegetative State
Lies, lies, lies, all dirty socialist lies from dirty pinko commies.

(/opposite day)

One of the effects of the insurgency has been, I think, to prevent the ever-increasingly timid media to go and find stories like these. I'm stunned at this guy's accusation that the US is using cluster bombs - which, stupidest of the "stupid" bombs, kill indiscriminently over a large area - and I'd like to see some independent confirmation.
 

Ranger68

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yychobbyist said:
But they can't get out now - getting out now leaves a huge power vaccuum which the insurgents will fill. Prior to the war Iraq was not a haven for terrorists. It is now the primary battleground between the U.S. and terrorists (and, in response to earlier posts about why the U.S. hasn't been attacked by terrorists for a few years I think the reason why is that al-Qaeda doesn't need to attack U.S soil when it has such a target rich environment in Iraq) and if the U.S. leaves it will only get worse.
What makes you think the "insurgents" will go away if the US stays for long enough?
The US military is the dominant power in the nation right now, and *whenever* they leave there will be a power vacuum.

What they do by staying longer is create more Iraqi dissent against their occupation - *increasing* the odds that, once they leave, the rest of the country will vomit up the government they leave behind.

You're right - when the US leaves, things will get worse, for a period of time - then they will get better. The US needs to hasten this process.

You're also right that the Islamist terrorists haven't needed to go elsewhere to foster their agenda. Things will continue as before when the US leaves. That having been said, this isn't an unusual length of time for there NOT to be an attack on US soil. These attacks are exceedingly difficult to pull off and will therefore always be quite rare.
 

Mcluhan

New member
yychobbyist said:
But they can't get out now - getting out now leaves a huge power vaccuum which the insurgents will fill. Prior to the war Iraq was not a haven for terrorists. It is now the primary battleground between the U.S. and terrorists (and, in response to earlier posts about why the U.S. hasn't been attacked by terrorists for a few years I think the reason why is that al-Qaeda doesn't need to attack U.S soil when it has such a target rich environment in Iraq) and if the U.S. leaves it will only get worse.
Ranger's two primary arguments above are: invading Iraq was contra to US national security, and that defeat is inevitable.

I agree with the first one. The second one asks how far will the Pentagon be allowed to go with Rummy’s war. They are now looking at exterminating chunks of population. So the jury's out on win/lose, if they area allowed to wage(r) unabated.

I think the media could stop this war in 180 days, if they wanted to. They could simply tell the real story, like they eventually did in Vietnam (finally). Like they are now doing, with the Indian Basin devistation. How's that for shirking moral responsibility...not covering the US Tsunami in Iraq.
 

Ranger68

New member
Mar 17, 2003
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Mcluhan, no matter how far they go - but ESPECIALLY if they begin to "exterminate large chunks of population" - they will "be defeated".
 
Y

yychobbyist

I'm not arguing that going into Iraq was in the real national interests of the United States. All I was arguing was that it is entirely consistent with the Bush doctrine of pre-emption. I think one of the things the invasion has done is actually make the determination of what actually is in the U.S. national interest much more difficult - stay and you expose yourself to worldwide condemnation, you spend yourself into obvlivion, you expose your forces to unwarranted danger, you risk turning millions of Iraqis against you. Go and you leave a huge void into which God knows what will flow, you admit defeat, you expose yourself to international condemnation because the truth of what you've done to the civilian populace will come out.

Ultimately, Bush will never leave. I don't think he can politically. He'll leave the next Pres to deal with that dirty work.
 

red

you must be fk'n kid'g me
Nov 13, 2001
17,572
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the stories may be true or not- i guess the insurgents should stop killing civilians doing repair work and stop killing reporters- then maybe the story,if true, would get out
 
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