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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ I think there is a massive difference in the intentions of the US Government - even negative figures such as Chaney and Rumsfeld and Bush - and that of Isis. I think Iraq 2 was negligent and wrong, and politically crazy because it opened the US up to being held responsible for the acts of Islamist sectarians... but I believe that the authors of Iraq 2 genuinely felt that the Iraqis would be better off in a democratic Iraq without Saddam - and, of course, that America would be better off, too. They are culpable for a great deal - but I don't believe that their intentions were actually evil, as IS clearly are.
You'll say I can't know Bush/Chaney et al's intentions. That is of course true. But I think I understand their belief systems pretty well because of my cultural familiarity. Now, do I cut them that bit of slack because they wear suits and speak English ? I don't think so. I think it's because, in the aftermath of Iraq 2, one side tried to avoid civilian casualties when it conducted military operations, while the other revels in them. It is because one side tries to believe in freedom even if it fails too often, whereas the other openly rapes and enslaves ; it is because one side lost thousands of young men trying to hold back the consequences of what it had stupidly unleashed, where the other burns captives alive in cages and blows up marketplaces to unleash hell.
I think you can damn the idiocy and complacency and arrogance of US actions in Iraq, Guantanamo et al while seeing - yes - context and nuance and simple objective facts that make it very, very different from IS. So I do not think is just about self being evaluated against different standards from "other".
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Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^ I think there is a massive difference in the intentions of the US Government - even negative figures such as Chaney and Rumsfeld and Bush - and that of Isis. I think Iraq 2 was negligent and wrong, and politically crazy because it opened the US up to being held responsible for the acts of Islamist sectarians... but I believe that the authors of Iraq 2 genuinely felt that the Iraqis would be better off in a democratic Iraq without Saddam - and, of course, that America would be better off, too. They are culpable for a great deal - but I don't believe that their intentions were actually evil, as IS clearly are.
You'll say I can't know Bush/Chaney et al's intentions. That is of course true. But I think I understand their belief systems pretty well because of my cultural familiarity. Now, do I cut them that bit of slack because they wear suits and speak English ? I don't think so. I think it's because, in the aftermath of Iraq 2, one side tried to avoid civilian casualties when it conducted military operations, while the other revels in them. It is because one side tries to believe in freedom even if it fails too often, whereas the other openly rapes and enslaves ; it is because one side lost thousands of young men trying to hold back the consequences of what it had stupidly unleashed, where the other burns captives alive in cages and blows up marketplaces to unleash hell.
I think you can damn the idiocy and complacency and arrogance of US actions in Iraq, Guantanamo et al while seeing - yes - context and nuance and simple objective facts that make it very, very different from IS. So I do not think is just about self being evaluated against different standards from "other". |
I think you don't know much at all about their belief systems. I think you know a lot about what the layers of PR agents and people living off Washington press releases and press conferences tell you about their belief systems. That might just be the miscomprehension which explains your inability to grasp the nettle on this. You won't like the following, but consider the inconsistencies.
First, you're overlooking the outright, overt corruption of having a feudal oil family member and the CEO of an oil infrastructure company on loan to the government as president and vice-president respectively going to war in Iraq. You wouldn't tolerate such a heinous conflict of interest for a single second in any other legal setting, but for some reason a different set of rules here applies. That says to me you're playing two sets of cards right from the outset. I mean, that scenario itself is so farcical as to be the stuff of comedy!
Then, you're overlooking the litany of lies told to the public, from clearly exaggerated threat claims, to the dismissal of sober warnings of sectarian violence and subsequent boosts to terrorism, to laughable cost estimations and crippling debt, to corrupt, anti-competitive and intransparent contract "bids", to suitcases of missing billions of dollars in cash, to the efforts to hide more Abu Ghraibs still in the courts today, to the sordid love-in with funder-in-chief of extremism, Saudi Arabia. And think about it; if that's what we know, imagine what the bastards covered up!
That's a giant truckload of outright corruption and abomination right there. To top it all off, you reduce the flippant act of playing with matches in a known historical and contemporary tinderbox to mere "idiocy" and "arrogance" rather than criminal negligence.
People get far more upset at infinitely less consequential crimes which kill individuals! In no other legal context would you or anyone be so accommodating. Not corporate, not criminal, not any legal context. And yet, here we are, without a soul standing trial! Never a more horrific disregard for human life have we witnessed in modern times, and never a more disgraceful contempt for justice and goodness have we have we tracked in real-time than that war.
You may dislike me referring to it, but I know this bastard child inside out because I tracked it from the day it was conceived. And it is far too big an event which took place over far too many years with ongoing ramifications to be dismissed as anomaly, especially coming as does off the history of US involvement in Indochina and then Latin America that we were all too young to parse at the time in a much more ignorant and intransparent world.
We just don't get to keep two sets of books like that—one for the free kick of events which make us feel all warm and marvelous about the group we belong to, and another for the orgy of corruption, lies, death and ongoing destruction that contradict it so baldly. The objective is to find a way of accommodating the facts and the harsh realities which enables us to move forward productively at the same time.
I fully concede I am bitter for having fought the f%^$^%ng good fight over that disgusting war for nothing but grief and ostracism from people who now get to brush it off like it never happened. I tell you, half of me regrets devoting the time to it I did given it still unfolded like the predictable soap opera of violence and chaos it was always going to be, but since I spent the freaking time on it I get to keep using it as a case study!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^ i get bored saying it but it has to be said again... How many of the dead in iraq were killed by Us bombs and how many by Islamist sectarians ? This is really playing Al Qaeda and Is's game... They kill people and blame the West, and to buy into their relativism is really a kind of fellow-travelling.
The sectarianism was unleashed by the Iraq War, which was a dumb idea, but it was there already as a result of the unreconciled sectarian and tribal hatreds and resentments of the Arab world It exploded in Syria without Western intervention, amd it would probably have exploded in Iraq after the Arab Spring. You can read books about it (there are many - Bernard Lewis's the Crisis of Islam is a good one) or simply see it in the news. |
There's no question that the Iraqi invasion in 2003 was grossly incompetent and dangerous as history now tells us with the way Iraq is in the present day but I totally agree that it's very naive to think that the majority of civilian deaths in Iraq between 2003-2011 were caused by US forces rather than by Sunni terrorist groups in the area who carried out suicide bombings during the Iraq war and have continued their thirst for violence since the last withdrawals of US troops in late 2011. One big misconception that I see time and time again is people saying terrorist groups didn't exist before Saddam was removed from leadership but that's completely contradicted and proven to be false.
Groups like Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (now known as ISIS these days and founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) and another Sunni jihadist group in Iraq called Ansar al-Islam existed before 2003. The former being established in 1999 and the latter being founded in 2001 so this perception of no terrorist groups existing before the Iraqi invasion is false. However it is to be acknowledged that these groups were not rampant before the invasion occurred in March 2003 so they thrived on the conditions that were created after the invasion.
Sectarianism has existed for many decades in Iraq so this idea it's only a new phenomena is wrong as well to an extent but it's been rampant since the days of when Zarqawi declared war on Iraqi Shias in 2005. It was existed during the Iraqi government and Kurdish wars of the 1960s and 1970s and the very fact that Saddam and the Baathist Party used to target Iraqi Shiites in the South of Iraq and Iraqi Kurds in the Northern part of Iraq backs this very point up. The figures vary substantially but some claim that the amount of victims under Saddam's brutal regime was hundreds of thousands of civilians and even some go as far saying that a million Iraqis were killed under his leadership tenure that spanned 24 years. Since the disintegration of the Baathist Party as we knew it many former members of the party have gone rogue and embraced ISIS even though the Baathist Party was largely secular in contrast to ISIS who want Sharia Law and Sunni Islamism (Wahhabism) to be the dominant system to govern the people of the areas it currently controls over Syria and Iraq.
I'm not entirely sure of what the data is in relation to the Iraqi War death count as there's so many different statistics posting different numbers but I'm still hardly convinced by the idea that the US caused a huge amount of deaths in Iraq in comparison to the Sunni Jihadist groups. On suicide terrorist attacks alone on top of all the other acts that Sunni jihadist groups committed in that time, approximately 12,000 civilians were killed between 2003-2010 allegedly.
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Don't they get in trouble for killing? |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Jezza wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | ^ i get bored saying it but it has to be said again... How many of the dead in iraq were killed by Us bombs and how many by Islamist sectarians ? This is really playing Al Qaeda and Is's game... They kill people and blame the West, and to buy into their relativism is really a kind of fellow-travelling.
The sectarianism was unleashed by the Iraq War, which was a dumb idea, but it was there already as a result of the unreconciled sectarian and tribal hatreds and resentments of the Arab world It exploded in Syria without Western intervention, amd it would probably have exploded in Iraq after the Arab Spring. You can read books about it (there are many - Bernard Lewis's the Crisis of Islam is a good one) or simply see it in the news. |
There's no question that the Iraqi invasion in 2003 was grossly incompetent and dangerous as history now tells us with the way Iraq is in the present day but I totally agree that it's very naive to think that the majority of civilian deaths in Iraq between 2003-2011 were caused by US forces rather than by Sunni terrorist groups in the area who carried out suicide bombings during the Iraq war and have continued their thirst for violence since the last withdrawals of US troops in late 2011. One big misconception that I see time and time again is people saying terrorist groups didn't exist before Saddam was removed from leadership but that's completely contradicted and proven to be false.
Groups like Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (now known as ISIS these days and founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) and another Sunni jihadist group in Iraq called Ansar al-Islam existed before 2003. The former being established in 1999 and the latter being founded in 2001 so this perception of no terrorist groups existing before the Iraqi invasion is false. However it is to be acknowledged that these groups were not rampant before the invasion occurred in March 2003 so they thrived on the conditions that were created after the invasion.
Sectarianism has existed for many decades in Iraq so this idea it's only a new phenomena is wrong as well to an extent but it's been rampant since the days of when Zarqawi declared war on Iraqi Shias in 2005. It was existed during the Iraqi government and Kurdish wars of the 1960s and 1970s and the very fact that Saddam and the Baathist Party used to target Iraqi Shiites in the South of Iraq and Iraqi Kurds in the Northern part of Iraq backs this very point up. The figures vary substantially but some claim that the amount of victims under Saddam's brutal regime was hundreds of thousands of civilians and even some go as far saying that a million Iraqis were killed under his leadership tenure that spanned 24 years. Since the disintegration of the Baathist Party as we knew it many former members of the party have gone rogue and embraced ISIS even though the Baathist Party was largely secular in contrast to ISIS who want Sharia Law and Sunni Islamism (Wahhabism) to be the dominant system to govern the people of the areas it currently controls over Syria and Iraq.
I'm not entirely sure of what the data is in relation to the Iraqi War death count as there's so many different statistics posting different numbers but I'm still hardly convinced by the idea that the US caused a huge amount of deaths in Iraq in comparison to the Sunni Jihadist groups. On suicide terrorist attacks alone on top of all the other acts that Sunni jihadist groups committed in that time, approximately 12,000 civilians were killed between 2003-2010 allegedly. |
So the deranged idiot who spent 3T dollars lighting matches in the gunpowder factory is either all to blame or not at all to blame? Is it too hard for you to imagine multiple blame? There is plenty of suffering to go around; just blame them for a quarter of the 150-600k dead and 2-4M refugees if you'd like. But you don't get to use magic tricks to make the effects of invasions vanish from before our eyes. A shocking and irresponsible argument on your part.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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You might like to deal with these points, Jezza, if you can bear to hear nasty but accurate things said about "us":
| pietillidie wrote: | [First, you're overlooking the outright, overt corruption of having a feudal oil family member and the CEO of an oil infrastructure company on loan to the government as president and vice-president respectively going to war in Iraq. You wouldn't tolerate such a heinous conflict of interest for a single second in any other legal setting, but for some reason a different set of rules here applies. That says to me you're playing two sets of cards right from the outset. I mean, that scenario itself is so farcical as to be the stuff of comedy!
Then, you're overlooking the litany of lies told to the public, from clearly exaggerated threat claims, to the dismissal of sober warnings of sectarian violence and subsequent boosts to terrorism, to laughable cost estimations and crippling debt, to corrupt, anti-competitive and intransparent contract "bids", to suitcases of missing billions of dollars in cash, to the efforts to hide more Abu Ghraibs still in the courts today, to the sordid love-in with funder-in-chief of extremism, Saudi Arabia. And think about it; if that's what we know, imagine what the bastards covered up!
That's a giant truckload of outright corruption and abomination right there. To top it all off, you reduce the flippant act of playing with matches in a known historical and contemporary tinderbox to mere "idiocy" and "arrogance" rather than criminal negligence.
People get far more upset at infinitely less consequential crimes which kill individuals! In no other legal context would you or anyone be so accommodating. Not corporate, not criminal, not any legal context. And yet, here we are, without a soul standing trial! Never a more horrific disregard for human life have we witnessed in modern times, and never a more disgraceful contempt for justice and goodness have we have we tracked in real-time than that war. |
Multiple bad guys can and do often exist, even if not in Hollywood.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ Good argument. I hate defending the US Republicans in any respect. Much of the party is a deeply nasty piece of work. But "outright, overt corruption" is not having a family connection to the oil business ; “Outright overt corruption” would involve showing that your family company benefited from the decision. I've not heard that case being made, though maybe it can be made. In any event, we’ll never really know their private thoughts. Like most of us, they were probably mingled strands of opportunism, idealism, self-interest, instinct, and delusion.
If you prefer to call it “criminal negligence” that’s fine, though you’d need to point to the relevant statute for it to be more than rhetoric. It may be that Nuremberg provides the basis via “conspiracy to wage aggressive war”, though even that is not about negligence per se ; and the UN resolutions arguably provided a legal cover.
In my eyes, relationship with the Saudis is just realpolitik. They’re the world’s swing oil producer, and they’re a US governmental ally in a region that is full of governments that actively promote terrorism against the US. I don’t like it, but then I’d even try to stay friends with the seriously-dangerous Putin if he’d let me. I did vomit when the Uk flew offical flags at half-mast over the death of King Abdullah, though.
Certainly the US and its allies bear some responsibility for the chaos in Iraq– but only a portion. If you rob a bank, you are not substantially responsible if the police recklessly shoot a passer-by in that process – and you are even less responsible if you made a fair attempt to stop them doing so. And you are even less responsible if the cop shot the passer-by just to make your act look worse in court. I don’t think you can blame the US for the violence of the Islamists, especially given the events in Syria, where there was no Western involvement at all.
Surprised you were ostracised over opposing the Iraq War. Being anti-Iraq-war was pretty much the default position of most people I knew.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| May I ask where you got eyes relationship with the Saudis is realpolitik? |
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