Posts by Simon Grigg
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Down at a couple of the malls here, both the licensed Apple Stores and a couple of private vendors have, so I'm told, a few 16GB iPads that are both touchable and purchasable.
I'm not even close to being in the market but I'd love to be able to go and, y'know, play but sadly we have a wee, but increasingly scary civil disturbance underway and the malls have been shut for 4 days, so...
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How many people would Hussein's regime have killed since 2003 if he was still in power?
^^ Kyle.
And far more have died during the post 2003 American occupation, than the already awful numbers usually given for deaths under the Saddam regime.
Really James, you always seem to go back to the vile premise that the deaths of Iraqis under US care are somehow morally superior than those in the years before, under Saddam. The distinction is obscene.
I understood the Lancet survey covered all mortaility.
it did but it also broke down the percentage caused by direct US military action.
James, the number of dead speak for themselves. You simply don't get those sorts of numbers without ongoing action where civilians are targeted and retired American generals, in some numbers (including Jack Keane, one of the architects of the surge and retired but de-facto active) in 2006, were very vocal about the tactics used by their military which involved a callous and deliberate policy of disregard for Iraqi civilian life.
The real winner in all this is Iran. Not yet, despite your rose tinted vista, the Iraqi people who are still getting blown apart in some numbers, or who live in the millions offshore, or who's neighbourhoods were bloodily cleansed in 2005-07. We've just stopped hearing about the it all as the media has turned away. You can be optimistic, but you have to be realistic too, and Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in the world. It wasn't in 2002.
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It is further estimated that there has been a minimum of 92,489 Iraqi civilian deaths up to June 2009.
The Lancet surveys, despite the millions spent by the right to try and demolish their methodology and just about everything else, stands untouched as research into violent deaths in Iraq. It's horrific numbers (and the percentage caused by direct US military action) were further backed by the OBR research from 2007.
The UK government quietly accepted the second Lancet survey's numbers as accurate at least a couple of year back.
The number of incidents where soldiers or airmen have screwed up have been few in proportion. In order to show any kind of pattern of behavior or systemic issues in the US military, there would need to be thousands of such incidents and nothing like that has come out
Really James? I know you're in the US and this sort of stuff simply doesn't come out, but guess what..there have been, over the past 7 years, maybe not thousands but very certainly hundreds of these sorts of incidents reported.
To quote a soldier on the ground in Iraq:
90% of what occurs in that video has been commonplace in Iraq for the last 7 years, and the 10% that differs is entirely based on the fact that two of the gentlemen killed were journalists.
If attacks and terror rained against civilians were as rare as you'd have us believe, the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead, before the outbreak of civil war in 2006 and the huge Sunni vs. Shi'ite slaughter would've have been much lower, but the best empirical evidence we have is that the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands already at that point and that at least half were a direct result of US military action.
And there is buckets of paper and data out there now that underlines that a policy of callous disregard for Iraqi civilian life was part and parcel of the way the US military did business in Iraq at least up to the arrive of Petraeus in 2007.
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At least Saddam was an Iraqi.
A Sunni first, an Iraqi second I'd say.
The old two wrongs make a right trick.
Nope but it goes both ways. Saddam's horrors don't justify Bush's, as the Americans and an expat vistor who strolls into this forum every now and then would argue, and neither do Bush's give Saddam a get out of jail. He was an evil murderous bastard regardless of his bloodline, and, yes, who armed and supported him.
Y'know Christiaan, most folks here would agree with large parts of what you've got to say, and if you go back through the archives most of your arguments have been forcefully and rather well made over the past years. I'm not really sure what you've got to gain by leaping into a forum and then sniping at people.
Just sayin'
Certainly after all the allegations tof torture and massacres and illegal invasions, we have done nowhere near enough to distance ourselves from that global sense that New Zealand is just another the US war machine's regular Yes Men.
Just be thankful we weren't under the thoughtful guidance of Simon Power et al back then:
without reservation we will support our close allies, Australia, the United States and Britain, when and wheresoever our commitment is called for
Power never gets a pass for that one.
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Cmon, how can it count if you violently removed the previous government and installed your own puppets - same as Afghanistan. Free elections my arse.
Agreed, but lets not forget that Saddam too, as part of an Iraqi tradition, very violently removed the one he replaced some years back.
Legit governance of any sort is not something most Iraqis have had the chance to ever experience, but the current lot of thugs, gangsters, petty warlords and power hungry religious beacons are about as close as they've come.
The last chapter of the paperback edition of Rick's The Gamble, added in mid 2009, is about as depressing as it gets and unfolding as he predicted pretty much right now.
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FWIW, we rather conspicuously refused to join the Alliance of the Willing, or whatever the hell Bush liked to call it
Not quite true, we just made a point of underplaying our involvement.
A list of those in the so-called coalition. Our involvement was small and was not at the pointed end but we were there as a part of GWB's Grand FUBAR of The Willing nevertheless
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My point - the point of this post - is that there are distinctions between a) a deliberate strategy of terrorising the occupied population, b) a general lack of discipline or competence, c) individual sociopaths going mental, and d) geniune mistakes; and also, that attrocities committed by individuals don't automatically equal systematic war crimes, nor the reverse.
Investigation into the cover-up at Haditha:
A military investigation has found that senior Marine Corps commanders in Iraq showed a routine disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians that contributed to a ''willful'' failure to investigate the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqis by marines in 2005, lawyers involved in the case said.
''All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics,'' General Bargewell wrote in his report, according to two people who have read it. ''Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get the job done no matter what it takes.''
Three years back the US held over 40,000 Iraqis in cells, almost all eventually released without charge. They were often arrested because they were males of military age. That often seemed to be their only crime. Doors were kicked in, villages ransacked, shoot first policies enacted.
Thomas Ricks, in both his pretty definitive works on US military policy in Iraq and underlines and documents over and over again an official culture that accepted and indeed encouraged terror and indiscriminate attacks against a huge range of Iraqi targets.
Only the arrival of Petraeus at the top and the dumping of Rumsfeld put a brake on it.
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For me, the true horror is that the American people just don't want to know.
It's not only that they don't want to know, it's that even when someone actually does care, those responsible as often as not get a walk. There is a huge reluctant to confront this when the military and their so called service is placed on such a national pedestal.
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Automated high-speed trading software multiplied the effect
Indeed but I think we'd be surprised how instantly wired the exchanges were in the later part of 1980s. I had the misfortune of dating (I've never used that word before in relation to myself, but can't find it in myself to put more more of a positive spin on the relationship) someone who was involved in the industry at the time and saw the banks of internationally connected devices (via Reuters IIRC) which allowed for online trading long before most of us had any idea what that word meant more than a phone call.
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Or perhaps: