A Good Day In Iraq
Dave Price
How good do things have to be for the news media to print this headline?
The media tend to mark events from the 2003 invasion, so while the fact will probably go largely unnoticed and unremarked upon, we should keep in mind that given Saddam's incessant invasions, civil wars, and day-to-day police state brutality this might well be the most peaceful day Iraq has had in decades.
Iraq sees dramatically low death tollMore days like this, please.
BAGHDAD - The civilian death toll in Iraq fell to its lowest level in recent memory Saturday, with only four people killed or found dead nationwide, according to reports from police, morgue officials and credible witnesses.
...
Saturday's decline in deaths was in line with a sharp drop in September of both Iraqi civilian and U.S. military fatalities.
The media tend to mark events from the 2003 invasion, so while the fact will probably go largely unnoticed and unremarked upon, we should keep in mind that given Saddam's incessant invasions, civil wars, and day-to-day police state brutality this might well be the most peaceful day Iraq has had in decades.
About your other foreign policy piety for this weekend. Saddam Hussein served US interests quite well all through the eight years of the Reagan administration, and we helped arm them against Iran.
All that came to an end on January 20, 1989, when the jerk George H W Bush became president of the United States, along with his oil cartel connections, and started our original feud with Saddam and provoked the chain of incidents that led to the first Persian Gulf war in 1990-1991.
All things considered, we ought to have left well enough alone.
I don't exactly know what most Iraqis want, because I'm not an Iraqi. But they seemed to do better under a strong leadership than the mushfaced stuff that possibly works in Washington DC but not hardly in most of the rest of the world.
I want the USA to win this conflict, and gracefully get out of there without leaving chaos behind. But that doesn't mean that I buy any bullshit about how it all began.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Assuming the quantity of 4 deaths are accurate (those are the only 4 found and/or reported) and all deaths are considered the result of murder or war, that daily total falls under the (adjusted for population) level of homicide in the United States in 2006, which is 4.3.
Calculations: 301,139,947 (US Population) / 27,499,638 (Iraq Population) = 10.95
17034 (2006 homicides in the US)/ 365 = 46.67 (Murders per day)
Adjusted: 46.67/10.95 = 4.26 murders per day in the US with an equivalent population
Achmed sticks a shiv in Walid's stomach, twisting it for good measure, and Walid croaks as expected.
But why must these homocidal events always be treated as political in nature? Maybe Walid robbed Achmed. Or maybe he got caught suborning one of the women in Achmed's extended family, and had to die to protect family honor. Or maybe one of them cheated the other in some business transaction, or they argued over a game of sheshbesh.
So maybe Iraqis -- Sun'a, Shi'a, Kurd or whatever -- are no more murderous than Americans. And maybe considerably less so than some sub-populations of Americans.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
And so this long string of troubles began.
But you're right. GHW Bush made one major mistake; he ignored the historical lesson that a defeated enemy shouldn't be left in power.
We just wait until Iraq is pacified and then withdraw all financial and military support in order to encourage Iran and/or Syria to attack.
It worked in 'Nam.
You know who sold Saddam his chemical, biological, and nuclear programs? Who helped him develop them? Who trained his scientists and sold him all his equipment? Russia, France, Germany, and Great Britian. And the only people with any sense of moral responsibility were the Brits. Russia trained the murderous beginnings of his Republican Guard too. But go ahead and blame it all on GHWBush. We all know America is the source of all it's own problems.
I read assertions like this from time to time, but when I looked for evidence to support it, it became clear that US assistance in arming Iraq was comparatively small, consistent with the conclusion that the Reagan administration considered Iraq to be at best the "lesser of two evils". The USSR accounted for more than half of international arms transfers to Iraq, followed by China and France. The US accounted for perhaps 1% of arms transfers to Iraq.
Source:
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI): TIV of transfers of major conventional weapons to Iraq 1970-2004 and Register of the transfers of major conventional weapons to Iraq 1970-2004.
Handy bar chart to visualize the data here
While some people may think that Iran defeating Iraq would have been beneficial to the stability of the region, apparently the Europeans were not overly enthusiastic about the prospect of the Mullahs getting their hands on Iraq's oil revenues as well.
I eagerly await their trashing of FDR for his many years of cozying up to 'Uncle Joe' Stalin. Damn that FDR and his Lend-Lease arming of Killer Joe. If he had just let things take their natural course, Europe would be a peaceful Nazi Empire (covering, perhaps the Middle East) and the Soviet would be a smallish regime east of the Urals, consisting mostly of the non-Chinese in the area, probably down to the Himalayas.
Maybe the southern half of South America would be in the Nazi orbit, and Austrailia and the rest of the Greater Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere Shogunate would keep everything peaceful there. It'd be us and maybe Canada (and those who managed to flee the UK to come to Canada) just having ourselves a good old time. A Lefty dream come true.
With T-72 tanks, BMP armored personnel carriers, AK-47 rifles, Pecheneg machine guns, Degtyarov-Shpagin Krupnokaliberny heavy machine guns, Bazalt RPGs, MiGs, Antonovs, SCUDs, Tunguska air-defense systems, and all the other weaponry produced by American manufacturers.
In any case, I didn't like that fish-faced creep who wormed his way into national power as Reagan's VP. Matter of fact, he was about the only thing I had against W back in 2000. Republicans like me never liked 41, and that's why we dumped him in 1992.
Now about Saddam Hussein. Sure, he was a revolving sonofabitch. Sure, he ran an ugly dictatorship. Sure, he stole from the Iraqis with both hands. Sure, he murdered thousands of them.
But what the hell does that mean to me, half way around the world? Unlike Iran today, under their own pint-sized Farsi-speaking Adolf Hitler, Saddam didn't even threaten the Iraelis untile the night we began bombing the shit out of him. I thought it should take a lot more than that to compel this country get involved in a war to liberate a pack of ragheads from their own established gang boss.
I'm with Bush now, and I want the job finished. Because I don't want any more Viet Nam bugout endings to our overseas military misadventures.
But I sure as hell would not have started this fight. And if I had, I would never have dissolved the Iraqi army as Bush and Rumsfeld did in 2003, as the statues came down in Baghdad.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
2. The Iraqi army, consisting as it did of mostly conscripts, fighting in its own country, dissolved itself. Even the famous Baghdad Bob was eventually found in his house, living quietly, pleased to have excaped with whole skin. The Saddam Fedayeen never had a formal chain of command, and wouldn't have returned to barracks.
3. Imagine Hitler shut down (probably asassinated by his Generals) when he ordered the reoccupation of the Rhineland. The usual suspects would have complained about Roosevelt's aggression, if Roosevelt had ordered the Marines out of Central America, and through France to counter Hitler's violation of the Versailles treaty. After all, Hitler didn't have anything against us until Roosevelt provoked him. The savings would have been 295,000 US, 20 million Russians, half a million French. But that which didn't happen, and in some ways couldn't have happened are not in the history books.
4. Saddam had sent cyanide compounds to help out his terrorists as they tried to not only topple the WTC, but also to poison as many people as possible in the 1993 WTC bombings. Clinton's response was to classify the presence of cyanide compounds. For what that is worth, that is an attempt to use WMD against the US by terrorists. Those terrorists ran short of money and got some supplemental funding from Al Queda. We were lucky that time, and the heat of the explosive destroyed most of the cyanide.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.