Is this an honest look at the Iraq war?

Don, Don, Don. Why subject yourself to this racist horseshit?

The interesting part of it to me was how the writer laid out the Bush strategy--if you think that racism contributes to the overall Iraqi strategy then fine. I'm not really sure if the whole thing was a validation of strategy or an advocate of the Bush strategy as much as it was an accurate assessment of how the Bush team sees the Iraqi conflict.

hmm. No. Should I be? What are you trying to say?

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks

That can't be a good ratio.

wikileaks docs pretty much confirm my suspicions about how this war was conducted

even so it is kind of amazing to note how rapidly the casualty counts in traditional warfare have dropped over the last half-century. no one ever seems to acknowledge this.

I mean in the first half of the 20th century you had conflicts where 100,000 people were killed in a SINGLE DAY. and this was just considered par for the course, the natural effects of warfare, etc.

Those were also actual WARS about something that wasn't a verb.

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on his abdomen".

...

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.

The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.

Perhaps killing mostly civilians is not the best way to fight terrorism?

Those were also actual WARS about something that wasn't a verb.

what was the first world war about?

Archduke Ferdinand and the Lusitania

eh this wasn't a war "about a verb" it was a straight imperial invasion, with an underlying rationale closer in character to a European conflict during the Middle Ages than anything else (ie, crazed despot with personal vendetta combined with a court/cabinet with delusions of world conquering grandeur)

oil isn't a verb amirite

srsly, h8 bush, but 'crazed despot'?

it's strange how often someone will crack out with some hoary old line about how people who fought in wwi died for your freedom or whatever pish and can't for the life of them explain why or how. when i'm feeling antagonistic i tell them how one of my ancestors, glasgow born, took the king's shilling during wwi and went AWOL to ireland and joined the RA. he's no hero, but the way he went to war seems a lot less tragic. unlike many of his enemies he didn't have to thrash around in benelux crap while his pals expired around him in egregious numbers and unspeakable ways before he roamed about the glens with an old pea shooter.

I mean imho all war is BS. But the first World War was about all of Europe going apeshit over each other and invading each other's territories. This is about us blowing all our money on war contractors and telling everyone we need to cut back on welfare programs.

an honest look at wwi

srsly, h8 bush, but 'crazed despot'?

I think he is straight up bonkers, a man with deep-seated issues that he doesn't understand, who operated with no checks on his power and pursued disastrous policies that are both completely irrational and also deeply, deeply personal.

pfft. pretty sure it was about the governing party in the US finding the opportunity, post-9/11, to do what they had long wanted to do: take down saddam, who had been contained for a decade by a painful sanctions regime. im sure there are 'arguments on both sides' about the sanctions but he was a very bad guy. worse than the kaiser, even.

'no checks on his power' shakey, really? amazed you're all still alive if this madman was in charge for eight years.

hate the hyperbole over how bad gwb was. he was a cunt, but not anything out of this world in terms of cuntish leaders of democratic nations, and far less of a villain on an international stage than a lot of american presidents.

'no checks on his power' shakey, really?

domestically his policies were all rubber stamped. after 9/11 he could've done any damn thing he wanted to. unfortunately what he wanted to do was invade Iraq. it wasn't until his political capital was entirely spent after the re-election that he suffered any significant legislative losses.

Incredibly, I'm with mayne on this, in part because I'm disinclined to attribute motives to a person's psychological makeup.

Eric Hobshawn's Age of Empire gives a pretty good sense of how entangling alliances on the Continent and the nature of capitalism made WWI inevitable....but not the US's entry.

*Hobsbawn

hate the hyperbole over how bad gwb was

I don't think I'm being overly hyperbolic (ok maybe a little). he completely destroyed the economy of this country for the sake of totally insane military adventures that ruined our standing in the world and killed a whole bunch of people. he's the worst president ever by any reasonable yardstick. he has no accomplishments that he can point to, and a seemingly endless stream of negatives that have done significant, deep, and long-term damage to this country and its institutions.

xp

I'm disinclined to attribute motives to a person's psychological makeup.

it's not the first thing I think of to explain people's political actions, but in Dubya's case no other explanation really makes any sense. dude is bonkers.

Let's call it the fulfillment of long-desired ambitions by a congeries of influences: theories about the expansion of executive power, the elimination of a tyrant, the flexing of US power the old-fashioned way after a decade of dormancy, etc.

*Hobsbawm

yeah I mean... the existence of a semi-organized neoconservative 'school of thought', one that 1.) strongly supported a hypothetical invasion of Iraq well before it actually happened and 2.) was directly plugged into the W-Bush administration, kinda gives the lie to "just one dude being crazy!!!"-type explanations

I don't deny that those folks were there - they obviously were - but in order to put those theories into practice they needed someone with the psychological pecadillos and weaknesses peculiar to Dubya. and then there's the issue of whether or not Cheney/Wolfowitz/Perle are all bonkers too... it was all a perfect storm of insanity and hubris and self-serving rhetoric

and opportunity

Cheney grounds his defense of the unitary executive on deep misunderstandings of the Constitution and The Federalist (Charlie Savage's Takeover is THE book to read on the subject), but the defenses aren't batshit.

shakey do u honestly think that the same trumped-up wmd evidence couldn't have been used to convince, say, john mccain that he needed to invade? or that he wouldn't have done it?

well McCain's crazy in his own way.

that's an interesting question though.

I would venture probably not, McCain wouldn't rate the "expert" opinions of all those non-military-serving guys very highly. Powell's another matter, but Powell was obviously forced into doing what he did.

like I doubt McCain would have tolerated the presence of Wolfowitz/Perle/etc. and he hated Rumsfeld

think the most famous explanation of ww1 is ajp taylor's: 'railway timetables'

it's a big test case because it was SO massively destructive and SO pointless and SO undermotivated

he completely destroyed the economy of this country for the sake of totally insane military adventures that ruined our standing in the world and killed a whole bunch of people.

ok i mean this is hyperbolic -- not only that but the military adventures, which were hardly as insane as, you know, vietnam, were not the cause of the economic meltdown. i probably shd value 'the world's' opinion more, and i don't mean this as a vindication of bush, but who are you upset about upsetting?

not only that but the military adventures, which were hardly as insane as, you know, vietnam, were not the cause of the economic meltdown.

cutting taxes while running up huge debt to fund the wars and simultaneously relaxing regulations and encouraging the public to invest their money in a housing market that was poised for collapse - all these things are inter-related and while, yes, you can't say that the Iraq War = global economic meltdown, all of these things are tied together and are undeniable sources of our current predicament. The debt, the markets collapsing upon realizing the massive waste/fraud involved, the destruction of so much wealth inhibiting investment, hiring, and consumer markets' buying power, a lot of this can directly be laid at Dubya's feet. It was on his watch, and it was the result of policies he aggressively and foolishly promoted. he is THE WORST. I cannot think of any President in recent memory whose policies have had a more uniformly damaging effect on the country. It's like every fucking decision he made was a terrible one. (and I haven't even gotten into the whole violating due process/Gitmo/torture stuff...)

i probably shd value 'the world's' opinion more, and i don't mean this as a vindication of bush, but who are you upset about upsetting?

invading Iraq basically sacrificed any moral high ground we could have taken in the ideological struggle against Muslim extremists - Dubya basically validated all of the worst fears of the Muslim populations of the world, and I have no doubt his actions swelled the coffers and the ranks of terrorist organizations. other world powers that didn't approve of our Iraq adventure mostly just shook their heads at us, probably laughed at how badly we were overplaying our hand.

shakey is right about bush being a hubristic fool, though i'm inclined to argue that invading iraq was more political than psychological -- it was a convenient way to shore up his post-9/11 popularity (which was fading fast in 2002 in the wake of the enron scandal, recession, etc.) and distracted the public/opposition long enough for him to accomplish plenty of things he probably couldn't have in the absence of a war -- massive tax cuts, cheney's expansion of executive privilege, etc. that said, no one should doubt that he came into office itching for a brawl with saddam -- according to paul o'neill, he had tentative plans drawn up for what a post-invasion iraq might look like only days into his first term.

it was a convenient way to shore up his post-9/11 popularity (which was fading fast in 2002 in the wake of the enron scandal, recession, etc.)

Was it?

Perhaps killing mostly civilians is not the best way to fight terrorism?

For anyone who doesn't read the article, ^^^this^^^ is bullshit and "most" of those 109000 were killed by the enemy.

66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.

No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.

Yeah so implying that we're killing mostly civilians is bullshit.

Maybe the word "mostly" is inaccurate, but the amount of civilian "collateral damage" presumably from US action is still appalling. Also, I don't think the US can be completely exonerated from responsibility for ANY civilian deaths, because this whole clusterfuck is on us to a large degree.