The Opinionated Bastard

Well, i understand the ideological and conceptual advantages to describing anyone who is now firing at US troops in IRaq terrorists, but really, it does more to muddle the issues and deflect understanding of what is really going on.

Here is a point of fact. You have claimed that 90% of the Iraq population supports the US. It is also popularly argued that the “terrorists” are coming from outside iraq, or are saddam “dead enders”.

The problem with this is that say, take a neighborhood with 100 people. 90 of them love the uS occupation as liberation while 10 are resentful. These 10 support the “terrorists and dead enders” while the 90 support the US military.

How is it that the 10, who support the “terrorist deadenders in cheneys “last throes” are able to keep the US from builidng a democratic govt that the 90 support? Why was saddam able to keep al queada terrorists out of his country? remember al queada hated saddam as a western secularist.

See, reality matters, and common sense will tell you that the above is not really what is happening. What is happening is the insurgency is domestic. The Iraqi people do not support the occupation, and we are fighting them for their “liberation”…what a wacky tale indeed.

anyway, the terrorists blow up civilians, because they are engaged in factional infighting, many shia are allying themselves with the US imposed puppet govt at the expense of the sunnis. civil war.

All the terrorists have to do is show that this govt, like the diem govt in vietnam, cannot achieve stability, thus it will lack legitimacy.

this war was lost long ago, and will be more damaging to US hegemony as time goes on.

ernie

also, i think the logical correlation of your charts shows that as US troops retreat to their bases to stop being killed that iraqi deaths go up because the insurgency is kicking the US imposed govt’s ass. i also wouldnt read the “wounds” chart like a stock chart, looking for trends, resistance, and supports.

ernie

You know, I was willing to go along and call them insurgents before I saw the trends in these charts. Once their violence became pointless expressions of rage, they became terrorists in my mind. Even the Arab media has shifted their terminology, the Iraqis did long ago…

As for the US troops retreating to their bases, there are two things going on right now:

1. The Iraqis are taking more of a lead role.

2. The troops have been conducting more big operations in general then in the past and less policing.

Hence the localized bump in both wounds and casualties.

I’m not looking for “resistance” and “supports”, but I do think its appropriate to look for overall trends.

So I don’t think this war is lost yet, unless we decide it is. We have only ourselves to blame at this point if we do lose; we are conducting our selves a million times better then we did in Vietnam.

Oh, and Al Queda terrorists may be in Iran instead of Iraq, but Saddam had lots of terrorists in is government. One thing I agree with Bush on, all terrorists have to go. Otherwise its like dieting by never eating vanilla ice cream, but eating all the chocolate or strawberry you want.

just a quick comment, remember all the Bush claims about Saddams devious activities. Here is a short list i remember…ahh the absurdity of it all.

1.) remote control airplanes capable of spreading vx gas. 2.) a renewed nuke program, with aluminum tubes and yellow cake from nigeria 3.)mobile chemical and biological weapons labs. 4.)old airplanes parked to aid in training terrorists in hijacking procedures 5.)support for al queada in northern iraq. 6.) saddam in violation of Un sanctions and kept tons of weapons

Now all of these claims came out false, and many of knew that they would be. One reason is Scott Ritter was desperately trying to inform people that saddam couldnt have the WMDs that the Bush admin claimed, due to shelf life and destruction of production of facilities conjoined with UN sanctions. Next, in 1995 SAddams son in law, when he defected said that iraq had destroyed its WMDs. Now the US claimed that since Iraq had no evidence of this destruction, then they must exist.

Iraqs claims turned out to be true, and the USs came out false. Isnt this interesting, that a two bit dictator was dealing with reality while the hyper power US was in delusion, losing face to world opinion?

The problem is the RACIST assumptions and support (yes racist..i know how many ameri-whites think about the “hajis and “ragheads”) to indiscriminately kill arabs, including THOUSANDS of women and children led the US into the false war. The vengeful minded ameri-white just wanted to kill something, like usual, and conveniently picked the people of iraq. Killing is virtue to those beholden to the ideology of the national security state.

This war is false, a bad idea, and condemned to failure due to its lack of virtue and sense of reality. This decadent society, where honor is being a sycophant to power will not stand, it never has. Bad decisions made in bad faith always lead to failure, and thus we see the horribly deficient predictions made by those who support this irrational will of illegitimate and decaying power structures.

Im convinced im watching US hegemony collapse at an ever increasing rate. Those in power lack self reflection, and the people (so far) are unwilling to peer through their increasingly totalitarian existence.

ernie

Except there were a lot of known facts about Saddam helping terrorists that were true (given that Saddam put out press releases whenever he wrote a check). You’ve garbled one, it was Al Anslam, not Al Queda in northen Iraq. And he did have the programs, the Downing street memos even document that it wasn’t so much his current capability as the fact that he kept his programs running during sanctions that kept openly fraying. They were worried about 5+ years from now, not quite in 2003.

And it is weird that Saddam was telling the truth, one wonders why he didn’t fully cooperate. I think the issue is that Saddam didn’t want to admit he was still trying to develop WMD, and we didn’t want to admit we were worried about 2007, not 2002.

As for Scott Ritter, I can never figure him out. First he quits the inspectors and writes articles about how the inspections are a farce, Iraq has WMD and we’re purposely not finding them so as not to upset the French, then he’s writing the reverse. (Weird but true, Google him and you’ll see.)

From my reading of the Downing Street memos, it seems like the Administration first decided Iraq was too much of a threat to be left alone (for a lot of reasons), then tried to decide how to sell it. According to those same memos, it was the Brits who push Bush towards using the WMD argument…

Scott Ritter quit the inspectors because the inspector team was infiltrated with CIA looking for bombing targets, which Clinton Utilized in 1998. (also, it is a LIE that Saddam expelled inspectors in 1998, they were pulled out so we could bomb) Ritter is an ex -marine republican who is anti-war because he KNOWs the whole thing is a farce. He has this quaint idea that the US armed froces should be used to defend the Constitution of the US, not multinational oil interests…imagine that…what a traitor commie!

And really, truthfully, were you really scared of SAddam? I mean, did you quiver at the thoughts of Baathists falling from the skies over flagstaff? Or those tons of WMDs would start going off at Disneyland and such? I am just wondering because kuwait, and iran werent scared of saddam and they lived next door, and had been invaded by him (iran..with US help)

and you forget too easily, saddam did cooperate, remember hans blix? couldnt find any wmds so the Bush admin announced war and made the inspectors leave…hmmmm, too bad, to date we could have saved 1742 US lives.

Again, ameri-white america and their bloodlust built up into them through militarist culture just wanted to kill people. Killing people to the US is usually pretty easy, but this time things have gone wrong. Democrats and Republicans supported this, as im sure the Repubs will bring up in 2006.

As for ansar alsam…interesting…see saddam was hated by alqueada and islamic fundamentalsim at large. he was seen as a western secularist by these kookoos so why would he train them and give them weapons? Also why was he able to keep these folks from car bombing his regime? this is a question people dont like to answer because it means the saddam regime, as brutal as it was, was actually more legit than the US imposed puppet govt.

Again, the fact is, regardless of totalitarian US media claims…this insurgency is domestic…how bout this for example….during the day ali hussein smiles at the convoy of US humvees, he waves, smiles, screams “yes bush! yes bush!”, and even participates in his Iraqi national guard to patrol his neighborhood. He participates in polls saying he loves the US occupation …all because he wants the monetary reward for his family that goes along with support for the US occupation..

at night however ali hussein makes IEDs and plots with his iraqi national guard comrades to strategically plant these ieds because they know where the US convoys will be travelling….

the US lost this war long ago.

ernie

Scott Ritter wrote an article for Newseek after quitting implying that Saddam had lots of stuff, but he wasn’t allowed to look for it. I remember it, and so yes, I have been worried about Saddam since 1998. Now he may have changed his mind, but he’s never quite explained why to my mind. So that’s what confuses me about him. So I’m not saying I don’t know what he’s been saying, I’m just saying I don’t understand why he did the 180.

As for Kuwait/iran/Saudi Arabia…Actually, every single arab regime in the neighborhood of Iraq went to the administration and asked Bush to do something about Saddam. I found that out when the head of the CFR was on the Daily Show…

Did you ever read the report Hans submitted? One of the things that made me nervous about the report was that they found a lot of failed attempts to build WMD the inspectors ignored. I remember Saddam was producing camelpox, and had facilities to produce it in large quantities. In Hans’ report, he says, “well, they’re just being stupid, it will never work as a weapon, so we’ll ignore it”. That made me nervous, because it seems to me that Saddam could easily switch that stuff to smallpox…

Personally, the whole inspections thing was very well played by Saddam. Bush blew it early by not having inspectors on a plane the day after Saddam agreed to it…

I don’t think the fact that the terrorists that Saddam was helping to fund didn’t bomb him makes his government legitimate. I think that just means that terrorists don’t shit where they eat…

Sure most of the bombers are domestic, its just pointless…that’s why I call them terrorists instead of insurgents, they’re just lashing out in anger right now. I don’t see the media as portraying them as anything else, and even the DOD has been saying the percentage of foreign fighters is small.

I will say though that winning this war means changing the populaces minds, and what you’re not hearing about unless you read the milblogs is that we’ve been doing that.

you should read scott ritters “frontier justice: the bushwakcing of America” or something liek that…anyway, ritter builds his argument that WMDs in iraq were very unlikely because of shelf life and destruction of production facilities. now, i dont know about his 98 newsweek article, so i cant comment on that. he just gave a great speach on the US being at war with iran, right now…i think you can find that on www.informationclearinghouse.info…a great site by the way.

I respect your informing yoruself about foreign policy and gaining a macro perspective of world events…it is a complicated thing for sure. i think you would be well off to take some time and take an intro course in world politics or a foreign policy class at NAU. you need to read folks like machiavelli, thucydides, hobbes, morganthal and other “realists thinkers” to see where these folks really stand. also, understanding the colonial legacy and context from which we came is of great importance. this is an old story, the “age of exploration and discovery” among euro-powers is better descibed as the age of pillage and plunder, where euro-powers exported their deadly game of trying to kill each other off to the rest of the planet that knew no such savagery.

ernie

It doesn’t take ten percent of the people to make trouble. The Symbionese Liberation Army had parts of California hopping and there were never more than about a dozen of them. Only some far lefties ever asserted that the SLA proved the US government was illegitimate. In reality, you need well over 99% of the population to refrain from such stuff for things to look like what we would refer to as “normal”. What number is required for “legitimacy”? Ninety percent? Seventy percent? Or is is just above wherever we happen to be?

Wow the pretty brown, red and yellow people never killed each other. It took the white people to teache them how to do that and you’re calling whitey racist? You crack me up ernie.

where euro-powers exported their deadly game of trying to kill each other off to the rest of the planet that knew no such savagery.

I would read up on your non-Western history. The rest of the world wasn’t any better, they just didn’t have our technology (which is largely because they did not have our freedoms).

ernie,

as US troops retreat to their bases to stop being killed

You should get to know our soldiers if you think that’s what they’re doing. Try Michael Yon’s reporting.

Let’s go over your supposed “false” claims:

1.) remote control airplanes capable of spreading vx gas.

Remote controlled airplanes were found in Iraq post-invasion with capabilities in excess of those allowed in the cessation of hostilities agreement which ended Gulf War I.

Here’s a photo of one of the captured “False” drones:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/ch3_img25.jpg

2.) a renewed nuke program, with aluminum tubes and yellow cake from nigeria

Attempts by Iraq to obtain yellow cake from Niger, not Nigeria, were confirmed, even by Amb. Joseph Wilson. Aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq in violation of the above mentioned agreements, FOUND:

“The order involved aluminum tubes designated as 7075-T6, which makes it a dual–use item with both nuclear and non-nuclear uses. Aluminum alloy with a 7000-series designation is very strong and hard, difficult to weld, and subject to corrosion from moisture. Few aluminum companies have adequate extrusion equipment to produce tubes out of it. The T6 refers to a specific tempering or heat treatment. These tubes had an outer diameter of 81 millimeters and were 900 millimeters long. They had a wall thickness of 3.3 millimeters and were anodized. On the inside, the finish was not specified. As a result, on at least the first tubes manufactured, the inner surface was rough. The tubes were carefully packed in paper in standard wooden open-sided maritime boxes.

Under Security Council resolutions, Iraq was at that time banned from possessing aluminum tubing above a certain strength unless those items were imported through the UN, used for civilian or non-banned purposes, and subject to monitoring by inspectors. Since none of these conditions were met, Iraq was not allowed to import these tubes no matter what their purpose.”

3.)mobile chemical and biological weapons labs.

Colin Powell, at the UN showed diagrams of mobile chemical weapons trailers as part of his presentation to the Security Council prior to the invasion. Trailers identical in all respects to these trailers were indeed found in Iraq after the invasion. Now, the MSM claims that the trailers were for Hydrogen generation, but it was Saddam and Iraq who were under the onus to produce the trailers for inspection under the agreements. Not only did they not present the trailers, they DENIED THAT THEY EVEN EXISTED.

4.)old airplanes parked to aid in training terrorists in hijacking procedures

Uh, hello, this has been documented thoroughly. Salman Pak indeed had trains and a jet airliner which were used for terrorist training.

5.)support for al queada in northern iraq.

Again, Colin Powell specifically demanded that Iraq quit support for Al Zarkawi’s group in Northern Iraq at that same UN meeting. Again, it was up to Iraq to demonstrate compliance under the specific wording of the cessation of hostilites agreement. They refused.

6.) saddam in violation of Un sanctions and kept tons of weapons

Again, it was up to Iraq to demonstrate compliance, by any possible standards, they did not.

As a result, Saddam’s Baathists in Iraq fomented the end of the cessation of hostilities by their utter failure to comply.

Thanks for the post OB!

The January bump in non combat deaths may have been caused by this weather related helo crash:

Anyone claiming, as ernie did early in his first post, that the 10% of the Iraqi population was preventing us from establishing a Democracy in Iraq, is obviously too ignorant to bother taking seriously (especially when the blather is 5 pages long!)

How could someone possibly not know that Democratic elections were held in Iraq months ago, 60 percent of the population voted and the resulting elected Iraqi gov’t is currently writing their own constitution?

Well there is a lot of Iraq WMD components still unnaccounted for, poison liquids etc. You can check them in UN reports. Second why Iraq was building surface to surface missiles with an SA-2 (USSR surface to ar missile)engines that can only get a tiny explosive warhead?

Third when some people stop that “Al-queda hated Saddam meme”? it only downgrades any shade of credibility that writer has… Any slight knowledge of history will show that it’s irrelevant when in a life struggle war. Remember Molotov-Ribbentrop? Rmemeber Capitalist US arming Communist Staline? So US armed Bin Laden?

“…where euro-powers exported their deadly game of trying to kill each other off to the rest of the planet that knew no such savagery”

That pretty much discredits everything else you write.

There’s lies, damned lies and statistics.

The reason more Iraqis are dying is because there is a civil war going on. You might like to deny it but reading reports shows that Sunni is killing Shia and Shia, Sunni. This isnt helped by the fact that US formed militia and organisations formed by them like the WOlf Brigade are carrying out tit for tat kilings across the country.

This is a war so numbers of dead will go up and down. If you wish to state “US deaths are falling” then yes, compared to before the election they are, but then if you go back a year from there the trend is an upward one. Picking and choosing where you measure the trend from means you are merely bending stats to produce your own conclusion.

You also leave out the fact that Iraq isnt going to be a democracy but a religious theocracy run under Islamic law. Whether this is good or bad in terms of letting Iraqis run their country how they wish can be argued all day (interesting article here on ‘human rights’ - http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpirq054371243aug05,0,1871743.story?coll=ny-editorials-headlines) - but the fact is that it is NOTHING LIKE the idea the US had of how Iraq would function. THrow in its now very close tied to Iran (one of Mr Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’s’ and you realise that for all intents and purposes the neo con project in Iraq has failed.

Mr Bush will try to spin it to his advantage telling a series of lies about ‘democracy’ etc… but anyone with an open mind who is willing to spend an hour a day reading articles from the country will be hard presed to arrive at any other conclusion.

When I look at some commenters here, I just sort of assume they’re racists who hate Arabs and believe that those people should live under fascism.

The numbers tell the tale: most Iraqis clearly don’t support the facists or the terrorist “insurgents.” They don’t much like the coalition forces being there but they’re not particularly anxious to have them instantly gone, and they mostly have a positive view of the future.

So, now the fascist-lovers and the Arab-hating racists spin into a fury trying to change the subject again to why they hate Bush, rather than to the future of Iraq. Typical.

Three investigations into why the WMD estimates were wrong all reached similar conclusions. The CIA made judgements about Saddam that were wrong. The rest of the intel community concurred. Where the CIA poorly served our leadership is in portraying the evidence as rock-solid when it was paper-thin (can’t fit scissors in).

The most disgusting thing I read was how George Tenet was sitting with Colin Powell the night before the latter’s UN appearance, trying to scrub the intelligence and verify it was solid. Meanwhile within the CIA there were serious doubts about the source, “Curveball”, an Iraqi defector who made up claims about Saddam’s bio weapons. The CIA WMD section didn’t tell Tenet or Powell. They allowed our Secretary of State to go before the U.N. and present evidence they no longer had confidence in. One of the investigations found examples of people with contrary conclusions getting run out of the CIA’s WINPAC group so I guess it’s not surprising in a group which doesn’t tolerate dissent.

The Niger uranium thing was similar though the British say their conclusion was not based on the forged documents and they stand by it today. Even two years after the war the CIA had not withdrawn its estimate.

The flawed assessment of the aluminum tubes was placed on another group, not the CIA, who should have recognized they were better suited for rockets, not centrifuges.

The UAVs were another SNAFU. The manufacturer sent US maps with the flight controller software by default. When the CIA checked the manufacturers’s website, that was no longer true. So they concluded Iraq had gone out of its way to purchase the US maps. Later, when they found out the truth, again they didn’t speak up.

I don’t know how any responsible administration could lend credence to Scott Ritter’s claims. He left in 1998 furious that we weren’t taking military action. Senator Biden had to publicly rebuke him at a hearing, reminding him that the President and the Congress decide when we go to war, not him. After receiving $400,000 to make propaganda movie (turned out to be Oil For Food money), he changes his tune. Then he gets arrested a second time for soliciting a minor for sex. Ritter’s supporters say that the charges were dropped but leave out that the prosecutor who made that decision was fired for it. I think a lot of people thought Saddam had turned Ritter through blackmail. He’s since gone off the deep end predicting we couldn’t take Baghdad and that we’d invade Iran two months ago.

It is ironic that Saddam was telling the truth. It may have been the first time. He certainly suffered from lying at the end of the Gulf War. Some of his lies didn’t surface until 1995. This made it appear that he was still hiding WMD when in fact it was old lies being found out. Since he was a proven liar, most people judged him by his actions, however. He was still frustrating the inspectors - refusing overflights. He didn’t even allow inspections until 250,000 troops stood on his border. The last investigation theorized he wanted his Middle East neighbors to believe he still had WMD. His own generals thought he still had WMD so I don’t blame the CIA for getting it wrong. It would have been better if they acknowledged how flimsy their evidence was.

BTW, all three investigations concluded the Administration had not pressured the analysts at the CIA. Dr. Kay said he wished the error could have been written off to political pressure since we know how to fix that. The other investigation took great pains to seek out examples of political pressure and found nothing. Some even volunteered that the Administration’s questioning of their conclusions improved the quality of their work. The only analyst who said he’d been pressured was in regards to Cuba.

Now, if we want to take action anywhere in the world, we can’t cite our intelligence claims as justification, even if they’re correct this time. Fortunately, Iran and North Korea are boasting about their programs, not denying them.

The “Bush lied” charge is pure crap. Every claim he made about Iraq was scrubbed by the intelligence agencies first. The Congress saw the same reports and concluded the same thing. His predecessor saw the same reports and concluded the same thing. To say he lied means he somehow knew all these estimates were wrong and every other country was getting it wrong too. Two questions: First, how would he know they were wrong? Was he meeting with Tariq Aziz in a parking garage at 2AM? Second, if he knew the WMD weren’t there, why would he emphasize it in justifying the war? He knew we would occupy Iraq. If he knew the weapons didn’t exist then he knew that fact would come out during the occupation, hurting our credibility worldwide. If he even suspected the WMD didn’t exist he could just as easily have said: “We don’t know where Saddam’s WMD programs stand.” That would have been eminently defensible because it would have been true.

The non-combat fatality bump in January was due to traffic accidents. The number of traffic accidents increased because of a major US troop rotation during that month.

ernie,

Savagery was not exported. It has existed in all places and times. One need only look at the American Indians. Before the white man came Indians focused on killing each other.

The problem with imperialism was that of all the imperialist powers only the Brits tried in any meaningful way to civilize (provide for orderly transfers of power) the natives. India is a prime example of a British imperial success.

Africa is a case where British imperialism ended too soon.