We will respond overwhelmingly to the violence in IraqFollow

Which is roughly 1/10th the numbers of similar injuries/deaths from car accidents in the US during a similar time period.

Look Smash. We all know that soldier's lives are in danger in Iraq. What do you hope to gain here? Do you think that if you keep repeating them over and over that the numbers will become worse suddenly? Or are you hoping that the US will suddenly decide that Iraq isn't worth it and leave, condemning 10s of thousands of Iraqi's to die in the resulting civil war and convincing yet more people in that region that the US is a nation of half measures who leave at the first sign of difficulty?

You are aware that most of the Iraqi's are angry at the US right now, not because of the occupation, but because we've been unable to protect them from the recent violence that has been erupting in Iraq. They want/expect us to protect them until a government has been established. Heck. That's our responsibility to those people at this time. The fact that some extreme factions in Iraq desperately want us to leave so they can take control is apparently lost to you. You seem to be oblivious to the fact that those factions are attacking Iraqi's to make them angry at us, and us to make the folks at home decide that the cost for Iraq is "too high".

You are, typically, falling for it. You may as well have "Puppet of terrorists" stamped on your forehead Smash. But hey. Keep the updates coming...

Yeah. But they're still political decisions. Heck. Economically motivated political decisions. I'll even go one further. If you want to be "ultra paranoid", it's the same oil companies that are behind Iraq that are behind the decades of advertisement brainwashing that convinces US citizens to drive vehicles around instead of using mass transit or some other safer and more efficient means of travel, resulting in thousands of deaths of average US citizens each year.

Heh. I happen to be ok with that. In fact, *most* people are ok with that. We accept it. We're happy with the freedom of driving a car and accept the risk of death or injury that involves.

Odd that we accept that risk and death toll so we can more easily travel to the market, but we somehow think that risk and death toll should not be something that our *military* should endure at all. Am I the only one who thinks that's the most backwards way to think ever? So it's ok for thousands of civilians to die each year, but it's not ok for 600 soldiers to die in a year while engaging in a military operation?


It's always about cost. No matter how much some people will desperately try to make it seem like something else.




Only if you keep a running tally. When you compare deaths over time, our military occupation of Iraq will likely never exceed our death rate from any of the top 10 killers in the US each year. It's probably not really even in the ballpark.


Maybe it's more dramatic to think of death via warfare as opposed to any other method. However, death is death. Only those with an agenda try to paint it otherwise. It's like the folks who'll point at the "horrible statistics of children killed by guns in the home each year", while ignoring that guns are about number 100 on the list of things most likely to kill a child in the home. Last I checked, swimming pools were the number one killer, followed closely by household cleaning products. But it's just not as sexy to have an agenda to outlaw those, right?

Its just that the president of the US (and his minions)doesn't go on air numerous times a day to tell his country:

"Support fast, endangering and drunk driving!"
or
"Support eating and smoking stuff that causes cancer over time!"
or
"Support parents not watching their children properly while swimming"


But he does so in telling his country (and the world)
"Support the war in Iraq!"

Got it by now?

*sigh* are you just stubborn or really that stupid?

Simply Driving a car !does not lead to death.

But driving to fast, drunken, under medicamention/drugs, tired, crossing read lights, overlooking stop-signs leads to death eventually!

And the same applies to being a soldier. You don't get killed just for being a soldier (especially if Reserve or NG) you only get killed if either someone neglects the safety rules (like in the car example) or if you get sent into a combat zone.

Are you really want to look like a complete moron for the sake of your president who gives a f()ck about you personally?

Question for all you war haters.

Let's say hypothetically that Bush gave the order for every American to be out of Iraq by 12:00 midnight on Sunday the 11th GMT.

Who would take leadership/control of the Iraqi government?


Would the people in Iraq be:
1. Better off in 6 months than they were under Saddam?
2. About as well off in 6 months as they were under Saddam?
3. Worse off in 6 months than they were under Saddam?

If you were made president of the U.S.A. for one week starting right this minute, what would you do? It's easy to flame those in authority, it's an entirely different thing to be the one behind the wheel making the decisions.

1) Legalize Marijuana.
2) Make a law that states amendments to bills MUST pertain to those bills.
3) Make a law that states we CANNOT go to war against a country unless it has directly attacked us.
4) Legalize Prostitution.
5) Legalize Abortion.
6) Legalize Homosexual Marriages.
7) Give everyone here some random, meaningless Ambassadorship and/or Secretary position.
8) Appoint Twizted Secretary of Homegrown Security (yes, I spelled that right)
9) Declare war on France for no reason other than they think Jerry Lewis is a genius (obviously before #3 passed)
finally,
10) Build a 25 foot concrete barrier around all borders and immigrants can only gain entrance if they can recite ver batem (sp?) some randomly picked chapter of War and Peace.





Sorry...was that hijacking?

gah...Hukt on fonix, ya know?

Edited, Mon Apr 5 12:30:44 2004 by psychojester

If I had only 1 week to be president of the US I would be even more arrogant than Patrician not to admit that one damn single week wouldn't be enough for me to learn everything about the country, history, people and problems of the US needed to do the job.

So.. let's just say I take your car and wrap it around a tree. I come back to you and tell you it'll cost you $15,000 to fix the car. You complain. I say "Hey, if you can come up with a better way of fixing it than paying fifteen grand, pipe up. And don't give me any of that 'You shouldn't have crashed it' crap either. That won't wash! So come up with a better idea on how to fix it or else shut the hell up, smile and shell out $15k. Otherwise you're just a big baby."

Yeah... okay.

Hehe. That's a pretty poor analogy though. It's not "my car", or "your car", it's "our car". You voted in your representives to Congress, who in turn voted to go to war with Iraq.

You're basically arguing that the entire system of a representative government shouldn't apply if those representatives happen to take an action that you personally don't agree with. If your family owns one car, and agree that everyone will chip in an equal share to pay for the car, and you all vote and say: "Jophiel will drive the car", and then you crash the car, isn't that now a **** poor time for the some other member of the family to suddenly decide he shouldn't have to pay for his share of the repairs because he didn't crash the car?


I still see that as whining after the fact because something didn't work out the way you wanted. I also don't see what's going on in Iraq as a "crash". More like an expected cost. When you use the military, you expect that there will be deaths. There's just no way around it. Sure. That's kind of a harsh way to look at it, but there were many naysayer's who were predicting thousands of US soldier deaths just in the initial toppling of the Iraqi regime. Even with the deaths we've had since that time, we're way ahead of what many people were predicting. 610 deaths is absolutely tiny for taking a nation the size of Iraq and holding it for as long as we have. Doubly so when you consider the tactics being used against us.


Like it or not, our leaders, both in the White House and in the Congress, whom we elected, have chosen this course of action. We have an obligation to at least wait and see if it works before condemning it. Heck. Let's at least wait until late summer, after the new government is in place and we actually have a sense of how things are settling in Iraq before making judgements. Constantly tallying figures of dead at this stage is pointless. It's kinda like reading off mileage figures in your car while on a trip. Yes. I'm aware that's a horrible way to look at lost lives, but that's the unfortunate reality of the use of military. We will not know if it was "worth it" until well after the fact. Heck. We will probably never know for sure if it was worth it, since we'll never know what Iraq would have done if we'd just allowed the UN sanctions to end without taking any action.


But it's easy to second guess a decision when you have the luxury of contrasting what happened to the most rosy view of what might have happened instead. Sure. Iraq may have never restarted building WMD. Maybe they would have never worked on building a nuclear bomb. Maybe they would have never ever allowed any of that stuff to be sold/stolen or otherwise end up in the hands of some group of people (terrorists or otherwise) who'd use them against US citizens. Sure. Maybe none of that would have happened. And if we could perfectly read that alternate timeline, then we could with no doubt say that the lives being spent in Iraq are being wasted. But we can't see that future. We can't say that all of those possible bad things wouldn't have happened. If we'd done nothing, and even *one* of those things had happened, wouldn't there still be people in the US second guessing the decision and blaming our government for not taking action?


It's pointless to argue "might have beens". We took action based on the probabilities of the situation. The probablity was that Iraq would resume their WMD programs once sanctions were lifted. The probability was that at some point in the future some of those weapons would make their way into the hands of some group who would use them against us. The assessment of those probabilities was that we would lose fewer lives in the long run removing Saddam from rule of Iraq then allowing that other probabilities to happen. Yes. It's lives lost either way. Sure. There's a slim chance that no US lives would have been lost at all if we'd done nothing. But the decision was made. We have to accept that and move forward. If we'd waited for Iraq to do those things, and then try to stop them after they'd produced some number of untracable weapons, the toll of US lives would very likely have been many times higher. Sure. That was a tough choice to make, but that's the decision that was made. Second guessing it may be a fun mental excersize, but without any way to know for sure what the other road would have brought us, it's a mostly pointless one.

That's fantasitic. Meaningless, but fantastic. It'd be a great comparision if we had 800 million troops in Iraq, but we don't.

Try making the argument that it's more dangerous to drive a car than to be in the military in Iraq right now, see how that goes.




They get worse every day. Every day more die, more are maimed, and more lives ruined. What I gain here is reminding armchair heros like you that people die because the politicians you support put them in harms way for no valid reason.



Nah, I'd prefer we stay and kill the 10s of thousands ourselves. Then at least the ragheads will know we mean buisness, right?

I'm hoping that at some point, idiotic idealogues like you will say "Gee, I guess the war was a mistake after all. It probably wasn't worth the 5,000 kids losing arms or legs to remove Saddam from power.


*********

Where did you get that sentiment? The RNC website? It's about the only place I think that would have the balls to try that argument.

Do you know what's behind the violence in Falluja?

Let me tell you a story. I have a cousin who's a LT in the Army. He's in civil affairs. He just returned from Iraq a couple of weeks ago. His name's Kevin. I saw him at a welcome home party up in boston.

This is him:

http://www.eagletribune.com/news/stories/20040318/FP_002.htm

Lest I be accused of creating him for argument sake.

Now, we're a very military family. I'm named after a former headmaster at Anapolis. I served in the USAF and the DIA, my father in the USAF, most of my relatives have done at least a 5 year hitch in one of the services.

At any rate, I went to this party to welcome Kevin back. He's allways been a staunch Republican, as most Military officers are. I was ready to hold my tounge and be gracious as it was his day and not the time for a political debate.

But he surprised me. He came over to me at one point during the party and looked at me, shaking his head. I raised an eyebrow at him and asked him what was up.

"We shouldn't be there, Timmy. I don't know how it's going to end up over there, but they don't want us there and I really don't understand why we ARE there."

He went on to tell me of the six men he knew who had died while he was there. He told me that even in Kirkuk, sone of the least hostile places for an American to be, there was constant hatred and resentment.

Then he told me about Falluja. When the US first occupied Falluja, they set up operations in a school. A muslim school, which upset most of the population. A crowd gathered around the school, and in Arabic the crowd began shouting for the US troops to leave because it was a holy building.

The US troops had no one who could speak Arabic with them. They didn't know what the crowd was shouting. They felt threatened. There were rocks thrown. The troops fired into the crowd and killed eighteen Iraqis.

The intresting thing about this event is that simmilar things happen ALL THE TIME in Iraq. There isn't a day that goes by when US troops don't kill innocent Iraqi civilians because of confusion or misunderstanding. Such is the maddness of war. At any rate, if you see the people in Falluja cheering as the bodies of American's are dragged through the streets and you want to call them evil, or terrorist, or savages or whatever peice of propaganda meets your fancy, remember their dead.

Remember we slaughtered women and children who didn't want US troops in a Muslim school and we didn't have anyone who could speak Arabic.

Kevin told me He'll likely vote Democratic for the first time in his life. He's not alone. This will very likely be the first election where the Military doesn't vote overwhelmingly Republican.

The Commander in Cheif began his term in office with enormus respect, but he's lost all of it. Now most of these men just want to know why their freinds had to die and loose arms and legs.


They want us gone. They've wanted us gone since day one. Anything else is ******** propaganda. EVERY SINGLE IMPARTIAL SOURCE says the same thing. They do not want us there.



Yes, they're all terrorists. The constant resistance in every occupied area of Iraq is all caused by a tiny minority of terrorists who want us to leave so they can take controll.

Wake the fu'ck up. The Iraqi's want us gone en masse.



The cost is "too high". Clearly. No factions have to make the Iraqis angry at us. Dropping fire from the sky on them and shooting their wives and children in the face will do that all by itself.

Are you really this braindead that you BELIVE that it's a CONSPIRACY by evil terrorists to convince the Iraqi people not to WANT to be occuppied by us??







Yeah. I'm falling for it all right. I've been saying it since day one. You've been saying the people would welcome us as liberators and be thrilled to death to be occupied. IN fact, you've claimed more than once that there's no other possible thing for them to feel.

One of us is certainly the puppet of some overly simplistic propaganda machine's spewings, but unfortunately it's not me. I'm not the one who's saying the deaths and maimings of nearly 10,000 Americans isn't too a high a price to pay for removing Saddam from power. I'm not the one desperately trying to minimize the loss of life in Iraq by comparing it to car accident deaths.

I'm stating the facts and making the same case I was making a year ago. I don't have to manipulate facts to make my case, because the facts bear it out.

How many have to die before the cost is too high?

1,000?

10,000?

100,000?

Why don't you just give me a number that would satisfy you as too many dead Americans since you're certain that it hasn't been acheived yet.

Just how cheap are the lives of these people to you?



Edited, Mon Apr 5 19:04:18 2004 by Smasharoo

Let me put it this way:
I hope it doesn't happen but if you kill someone in a car accident I pray you will defend yourself in court without the help of a laywer.....then we'd be rid of you for a long time :-)


Edited, Mon Apr 5 21:24:09 2004 by Leiany

Hmmm... Ok. Death rates and statistics are actually pretty interesting.

In 1998, the US had an all time low death rate of 470 per 100,000 people. A rate of 1 in 212 per year *average*.

The estimates I found place 138,000 Military personel and presumably some amount of non-military (which I couldn't get numbers on, if you can find them that would be great). Looking just at the military personell, we've got 600 killed out of 138,000 in one year. That's a rate of 1 in 230. Um... Lower then the national average death rate.

Granted, the rate of death for the presumed age range of US military personnel in Iraq is lower then the national average (it goes up really fast past age 40), I'd place it at 2-3 times higher.


So sure. It's dangerous in Iraq. No doubt about it. But we're not losing soldiers at a rate that is statistically alarming given the relative number deployed. You'll almost get 600 people to die in a year just from normal daily life and accidents and such if you tracked a population that large. In fact, 148 of those 600 are from non combat deaths. So roughly a third of the deaths in Iraq during the occupation phase have been due to nothing more then normal accidents (about what the statistics say).


Another interesting side note. About 100,000 people die each year in car accidents (half of which involve alchohol). Out of a population just a bit under 300,000,000 (not 800 million Smash), that's 1 in 3000 people who die in cars alone. Cars are the number 5 (or was it 6?) killer in the US.


I'm not belittling the deaths going on in Iraq. I am merely suggesting that sitting around counting bodies is not the most productive use of one's time. The stats suggest that for an average person in the age range between 18 and 35, you are at worse about 3 times more likely to die if you have been in Iraq for the past year then you would if you were living normally in the US. How dangerous is living in the US folks? Multiply your chance of dying on any given day by 3. Alarming? Probably not.


I think you'd need to make a more convincing argument that we're not getting anything in return for those deaths. You can argue about uprisings in this area or that, or incidents like the one you linked to earlier. However, there is a government in Iraq that is being put in place. It is one that most Iraqi's believe will work. You can always find the extremist point of view in any situation if you look for it. That's all I'm saying. It's really easy to simply point to 610 dead, and some articles written decrying the operation in Iraq, and quotes from Iraqis saying they don't like the US there, but that's a pretty skewed view of the whole picture.

There are just as many articles saying that things are progressing (ok. Maybe not "just as many", but then it's always better news to make it look like things are going badly). There are also quotes from Iraqis who are looking forward to the process with hope. We can't just look at one point of view and ignore the rest.

And legally we have a responsibility to deal with the situation now. We're the "occupying force". By international law, we *can't* just abandon Iraq now. So keeping a body count is just counterproductive. Especially when that count is still relatively low.


What? Low?! Want me to pull some links to articles and debates going on before the Iraqi war started? I don't think I could find the thread, but I'm positive that you Smash predicted somewhere in the 2-3k range of dead US personnel in the first year. Look. I'm sorry that reality hasn't met your expectations, but I think relative to that we're doing pretty well. I find it amusing that even though the death toll has been lower then predicted folks are making a point of counting each body and making that much bigger of a deal about it. I guess when you've got less dead people, you have to make sure we hear about each one that much more...

To be honest, I personally think we just need to get the f*ck out of everywhere. People there are tired of our sh*t and people here are tired of our sh*t.

I think it's the biggest goddamned joke that we consider ourselves a superpower. No, we're just super-arrogant. WTF makes us a superpower? We have a lot of rich people? We have big, nasty, nuclear weapons?

How about the fact that we're seen as a joke to pretty much the rest of the world? How about the fact that educationally we're behind virtually everyone?

Know what that means to me? We got big guns, but not the brains (much less the common sense) to use them.

How can we ***** and moan about other people being dictators and treating their people poorly when we can even stop ourselves from doing the same thing? What makes it any better for us to go into some foreign country and tell them them, "Hey! We don't like what you are doing. Eventhough the rest of the world is telling us to shut the f*ck up, we're gonna force you to do what we say!"

Where the f*ck do we get off forcing our oppinions, beliefs and way of life on these countries? Let them f*cking deal with it! It's their goddamned problem, not ours! Instead of worrying about starving kids in Somalia, how about the starving kids in our own goddamned back yards? Instead of worrying about the way Hussein ran his government, why not worry about getting Bush out of office (who, IMHO, is far worse that Hussein and Castro combined). Instead of catering to the homless in Where-the-f*ck-ever-stan, try doing something about the homeless AT HOME!

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for getting even for the whole 9-11 thing, but there has to be a line somewhere. I mean, c'mon. "Okay, you killed three thousand of our people. We're gonna kill three million of your people AND take over your government. Nevermind the fact that our own government is so f*cked up...We're still gonna tell you how to run yours." C'mon, that's a pretty f*cked up way of thinking.