Hard News: Meanwhile in Iraq ...
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Yeah, logisticly they could do it no problem but they know darn well what would happen if they pulled out. Absolute civil war. Massive civillian deaths (much worse than now). And that would (will) be on their heads.
I'm with what Ben said on this. I keep finding parallels in Iraq with Vietnam. What America is looking for now is "Peace with honor". They want to get it to a state where they can get out, take a photo, say things are OK, and then what happens over the next 10, 20, 50 years, not their problem, as it was OK when they left.
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Of course there is positive news in Iraq, but that's not the point. The Left, generally, have always been hell-bent on proving the neo-cons incorrect in invading Iraq. That's just the way it is. Look at the positives from the ousting of Saddam's regime and you get 'squirrel's watersking' type lame jokes or attacks. History is still unfolding in Iraq. I still reserve my judgement on whether the intervention there was good.
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Has an Iraqi squirrel learned to waterski?
If it did you would here about it first from
the winners of this contractU.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.
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History is still unfolding in Iraq. I still reserve my judgement on whether the intervention there was good.
Yes, in a thousand years, who will care?
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I still reserve my judgement on whether the intervention there was good.
That's not really a great position. If one has any faith in human nature left then one would expect Iraq to become a better place after some period of time. But there has been high price paid.
The judgement rests on the counter factual of how things would have evolved in Iraq had the invasion not occured.
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And the eventual outcome will be an Iranian backed Government enforcing Sharia Law (and cancelling all those sweetheart Oil Contracts the US put in place before leaving).
This is probably a best-case scenario. Although Iran's leadership is crap, the populace aren't - after all, only 1% can be bothered to attend Friday Prayers.
A Persian guy I work with spent a couple of months in Iran earlier this year. Ordinary Iranians, in private (for obvious reasons), reject Islamofacism, so I'm optimistic that positive social change is inevitable, albeit fraught with obstacles.
One day they might even give the Black Ferns a run for their money.
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The Left, generally, have always been hell-bent on proving the neo-cons incorrect in invading Iraq.
Somehow I think pointing out that, over a million Iraqi have died...millions are on the run...and the place is dysfuntional to an ungovernable degree , is worth an effort.If only to find out what the 'neo-cons' feel would be correct about the invasion and occupation.
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you get 'squirrel's watersking' type lame jokes
Look, if you seriously think the jury is still out on the disastrous nature of this conflict, I'm hardly going to bother with anything *other* than a lame joke at the expense of Pollyanna newsmakers, am I?
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History is still unfolding in Iraq. I still reserve my judgement on whether the intervention there was good.
So what's your take on the French Revolution? Too early to tell?
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The judgement rests on the counter factual of how things would have evolved in Iraq had the invasion not occured.
I think we can safely assume women would, in general, have been in a considerably better position than they are now, given the old repressive regime was considerably less mysogynistic than the current one.
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I think we can safely assume women would, in general, have been in a considerably better position than they are now, given the old repressive regime was considerably less mysogynistic than the current one.
Yes, depressingly. But Andrew Smith was talking about the long term. The current conflict of Sunnis and Shiites battling for control was going to happen eventually. Just how that would have played out had the invasion not occcured is a bit difficult to know.
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Here's an interesting analogy. Iraq is to the US as coke is to a high income junkie. A foolish choice. An ongoing burden. A source of delusions. A squanderer of friends. A source of bad company. But the cost of giving up is some serious pain, and a resolution to change one's ways.
Does the US have it in them? Can they even admit they have a war problem?
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Will US history books ever acknowledge this monumental (on every level) cock up??
Probably with the same general deafening silence that is shown by most US publications in letting Americans know about their invasion and genocidal subjugation of the Phillipines between 1899-1902.
The blueprint of the American way of counter-insurgency is all there. During the US suppression of the Filipion rebellion some 250,000-500,000 civilians were killed, the US engaged in scorched earth tactics, built concentration camps and practiced widespread torture and engaged in numerous war crimes including the infamous "Kill everyone over age ten" order given by General Jacob H. Smith.
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You want good news on Iraq? It is there to be had if you look around.
How about Al Qaeda has had its ass handed to it in Iraq and Bin Laden admitted as much in his recent tape. How is that for good news? That is huge. The big bad Islamic super dude has gotten a good ole butt whipping in Iraq from the weak cowardly infidel USA and other Iraqis, his fellow Sunni Muslims to boot. How do you put a positive spin on that if you are Al Qaeda’s PR guy? Not good for recruitment or morale or fundraising, not good at all.http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/articles/20071027.aspx
Iraqi casualties down more than 75% from 3500 in Nov 06 to 804 in Sep 07.
US casualties down from 126 in May 07 to 36 in Sept 07 despite more troops on the ground and an increased operational tempo.As Muslims around the world have woken up to how many of their fellow Muslims Al Qaeda has killed in Iraq, support for Al Qaeda has dropped significantly over the last few years.
All of the above can only be described (rationally) as good news. More proof of the reality of the changes in Iraq is the fact that the political conversation on Iraq in the US has changed radically.
Rather than the problems in Basra, the biggest immediate problem is up in Kurdistan with the PKK and Turkey. If Turkey invades to beat up on the PKK, which they have good reason to do, and might do after the Turkish Prime Minister, Erdogan visits with Bush in the next few weeks, that will really be a problem.
There is still a long way to go in Iraq and many things that could go wrong, but it seems to me that rather than “dead end neocons” being blind to reality in Iraq, it is dead end lefties that are refusing to acknowledge that things have taken a turn for the better that are suffering from cranial rectal inversion.
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Actually apart from the same depressing "manifest destiny" compulsion to excessive genocidal violence that the US has displayed in all its colonial wars to me the most strikingly similar comparison with Vietnam is the massive deficit spending being used to fund the whole Iraq adventure. Vietnam damaged America financially until the Clinton boom; It looks like another financially incompetent Republican nincompoop with links and parallels to Nixon is doomed to repeat the same economic mistake.
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Tell me James, given that Al Qaeda was no friend to Saddam do you think the good ol' US of A could have "handed Al Qaeda its ass" without a million or so Iraqi civilians as collateral damage if they hadn't invaded Iraq?
Conflating the so called "war on terror" with Iraq might help you win an argument in a downtown bar in Mobile, Alabama but it doesn't cut much ice anywhere else in the Western World.
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Somehow I think pointing out that, over a million Iraqi have died...
Iraq Body Count has 76k to 83k dead since 2003 due to military or paramilitary activity.
millions are on the run...
No doubt about that. Most of those are Sunnis. Their leaders made a very bad decisions in 2004 to join with Al Qaeda and launch an insurgency. Bad decisions can often have bad consequences, especially when your Al Qaeda buddies try to cause a civil war by killing Shias, and the Shia after showing a lot of restraint, react in a predictable manner.
Still the Sunni who remain have made better choices recently so maybe over time many of the Sunni Iraqis who fled will be able to return.
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I am genuinely terrified by the prospect of an American attack on Iran. The deja vu may actually overpower me. Mind you, I feel much the same way about Peter Jackson filming Tintin - why oh why?!
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Tom,
Have you been paying attention to what has been going on in Iraq, or do you get your news on Iraq solely from Mother Jones?
Read the link I posted.
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The other aspect no one pays much attention to is what would be the situation in the Middle East if Saddam was still in power today.
The sanctions would be off, Saddam would be cranking up his nuke programs just as fast as he could, just like the other set of nutters next door in Iran.
So most likely we would have Iraq and Iran, both run by crackpots, in a nuclear arms race, with much of the world's oil within a very short distance. Nice, really nice.
So the choices were either really bad, or really, really bad. No good options to be had. Glad I don't have to make those kind of decisions.
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James, cherry picking some not-quite-so-shit statistics again, huh?
Here's a question for your good news? How many casualties were there in Iraq in Sept 01 and 02? Civilian, terrorist, Iraq military and American breakdown would be good. That might put it in perspective.
Also, how big was Al Quaeda in Iraq then? Just curious whether that's improved under the American Military Dictatorship, or only since last year.
Dropping support for Al Quaeda would be good news if it wasn't like 'declining market share for IBM', which obviously doesn't necessarily mean that the whole IT industry is going sour, just that it's a competitive business.
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James,
Have you been paying attention to what has been going on in Iraq, or do you get your news on Iraq solely from Fox?
The Al Qaeda war in Iraq is unlikely to have exploded into what it did without the massive destabilisation caused by the US invasion. Saddam was an evil, ruthless bastard, but Al Qaeda was very much a threat to his secular tyranny which I doubt he would have tolerated.
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Iraqi casualties down more than 75% from 3500 in Nov 06 to 804 in Sep 07.
Are the dead being counted now? Who is doing the counting?
US casualties down from 126 in May 07 to 36 in Sept 07 despite more troops on the ground and an increased operational tempo.
According to the Iraq Casualties Site, these are the yearly numbers of death of US military personnel in Iraq:
Year US Deaths
2003 486
2004 849
2005 846
2006 822
2007 839And on it goes...
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The other aspect no one pays much attention to is what would be the situation in the Middle East if Saddam was still in power today.
That's because no one actually knows. But you've got your story, the old WMDs eh? They're still there man, just gotta look harder.
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Probably with the same general deafening silence that is shown by most US publications in letting Americans know about their invasion and genocidal subjugation of the Phillipines between 1899-1902.
I would like to note that American historians are, in general, rather a well-informed bunch, and spend quite a lot of time analysing precisely these sorts of vexed questions. When I was in a history PhD programme (in Texas, no less!), there was no pulling of punches when it came to noting US genocidal subjugations of all stripes.
The real problem, of course, is that no one in the USA takes a blind bit of notice of professional historians. :)
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