What Has Gone Right In Iraq

[Typhoon1244]

If the media is not reporting on it, then it must not be happening!

A good point. Let me remind you, however, that the President hasn't spent much time talking about al Qaeda and bin Laden either!

 

[bart]

Typhoon, you said:

but there are larger threats we needed to be addressing

Aside from our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, what are they?

And more importantly, how would you divert the military forces currently deployed to more effective use?

I don't see anywhere they could be put to better use, but I am open to ideas.

 

[ferris]

We were lied to!!!!!

This is what I love about pure partisan politics in an age that records your every word.

http://flashbunny.org/content/misled.html -- Follow the link, if you're not a total partisan (or a republican I'll admit) you'll get a kick out of it)

Some of you are funny, on both sides. I voted for Clinton & Gore, but I will NEVER be partisan enough to lay this at the feet of republicans, while I adjust the halo around my head! (And for full disclosure I'll probably vote for bush this time - I think that he has done a good enough job, and that the job still needs finishing ... Plus, I really don't trust Kerry - although I'm sure he wouldn't do toooo bad of a job. My main problem is I only believe half of what 'W says, but I don't believe a single thing that comes out of Kerry's mouth). I guess I was a hawkish Dem in the 90's, and that has me supporting the only people who are hawkish on foreign policy. I would love to vote the economy, jobs, yada yada yada, but I don't think the pres really has that much control over that stuff.

 

[100LL... Again!]

So because I haven't been at the computer since the last jerk posted I'm avoiding responding? Simmer down there, junior - some of have lives to live other than trying to educate the fools populating this board. (A noble, but futile goal)

I did not serve in the military. I sure wish I would have since I feel that there is where the few remaining patriots are, and I would feel that I was in good company. There are a lot of things I would be willing to fight for, and if were young enough, the war in Iraq would be a place I would be glad to go.

Also:
You F-ing morons keep chanting your mantra about Bush wanting to 'settle the score' with saddam to avenge his dad.

This position betrays intellectual deficiencies so deep as to be beyond reason. Live in your fairy-tale world.

As far as international approval: Screw them. They only love America when we are getting kicked. They hate us because we are the remaining superpower, as they feel (rightly so) impotent.

This cannot be helped. I, for one, am not willing to sell our security down the drain just so france can feel that they are strategically relevant.

They can just learn to live with a strong USA. Jealousy is ugly. Perhaps they should take an example from us instead of trying to bring us down to their level.

 

[surplus1]

I expected all the pros and cons, the Republican vs. Democrat rhetoric, the accolades for Bush, the cirticism of Bush, the jabs at the French, and the bashing of the "mainstream liberal media", etc. However, what I find most interesting is that so far none of you has challenged any part of the Jacoby article that opened the thread. It is as though we are expected to regard it as Gospel because he wrote it. Does he work for the FOX Network? Perhaps he does given that he appears to get full credit for the "no spin" rhetoric in his story, just as they do.

I'll make an attempt at looking at what he wrote, with a different "spin".

What has gone right in Iraq
By Jeff Jacoby, 4/1/2004

WITH ALL the news coming out of the Middle East, here is a detail you might have missed: A few weeks ago, the United Nations shut down the Ashrafi refugee camp in southwestern Iran. For years Ashrafi had been the largest facility in the world housing displaced Iraqis, tens of thousands of whom had been driven from their homes by Saddam Hussein's brutality. But with Saddam behind bars and his regime crushed, Iraqi exiles have been flocking home. By mid-February the camp had literally emptied out. Now, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports, "nothing remains of Ashrafi but rubble and a few stones."

As they say, "home is where the heart is". No doubt it's a good thing that the Shiites are "going home", but they were not driven from Iraq by Sadamm's brutality. Perhaps that's true of some but, in the main they left because he ran a secular state and would not tolerate Islamic fundamentalism.

Isn't that refugee camp located in one of the countries identified by Bush as the "axis of evil"? Are they going home to live peacefully ever after or are they going home to help establish "The Islamic Republic of Iraq" and merely move their Islamic militancy from Iran back to their homeland? Do we really believe that their return is an indication of renewed freedom or does it simply mean that one gang of thugs is going to be replaced by the other gang of thugs? Time will tell.

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Refugees surging to Iraq? That isn't what the antiwar legions told us would happen if George Bush made good on his vow to end Saddam's reign of terror. Over and over they warned that a US invasion would trigger a humanitarian cataclysm, including a flood of refugees from Iraq. This, for instance, was Martin Sheen at a Los Angeles news conference a month before the war began:

"As the dogs of war slouch towards Baghdad, we need to be reminded that as many as 2 million refugees could become a reality, as well as half a million fatalities."

Writing on the left-wing website AlterNet last March, senior editor Tai Moses expressed dread of the coming of a war that "could create more than a million refugees." The BBC, citing a "confidential" UN document, predicted that up to 500,000 Iraqis would be seriously injured during the first phase of an American attack, while 1 million would flee the country and 2 million more would be internally displaced -- all compounded by an "outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions." The Organization of the Islamic Conference foresaw the "displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees," plus "total destruction and a humanitarian tragedy whose scale cannot be predicted."

Wrong, every one of them, along with all the other doomsayers, Bush-haters, "Not In Our Name" fanatics, and sundry "peace" activists who flooded the streets and the airwaves to warn of onrushing disaster. How many have had the integrity to admit that their visions of catastrophe were wildly off the mark? Or that if they had gotten their way, the foremost killer of Muslims alive today -- Saddam -- would still be torturing children before their parents' eyes? Instead they chant, "Bush lied, people died," and seize on every setback in Iraq as proof that they were right all along.

Well, he's right again. The predictions of massive refugee movement and catastrophic deaths were wrong. How convenient to ignore why they were wrong.

Would it be reasonable to say that all of those estimates of fleeing millions and hundreds of thousands of deaths were based on belief in the Bush rhetoric that Saddam would unleash his stockipiles of WMD against the invaders? Is there any chance that most or even any of that would have happened if those bio and chemical weapons existed and were used?

Perhaps the predictions were erroneous because the information provided was a lie. Everyone appears to have been mislead completely, (including most Americans). Why was that? Could it be that they accepted as true the information provided by what used to be the world's most credible nation, i.e., the United States?

I will give credit where credit is due. The announced and promoted (by the Bush Administration) "reasons/justifications" for the "preemptive" war against "the world's most dangerous nation" (Iraq), which represented an "imminent threat" to the world's most powerful nation, will hold the record for being one of the biggest scams carried out by a civilized nation in a very long time. I wonder who will trust the "honesty" of the American government in the future?

But they were wrong all along. Operation Iraqi Freedom stands as one of the great humanitarian achievements of modern times. For all the Bush administration's mistakes and miscalculations, for all the monumental challenges that remain, Iraq is vastly better off today than it was before the war.

Is that a fact or is it merely the opinion of Mr. Jeff Jacoby? Should I regard his credibility as the equivalent of Mr. Bush's or is it better?

And the Iraqi people know it.

I've always admired the ability of some Americans to declare with certainty what the people of other nations "know" and believe. It has a familiar "ring" that reminds me much of the rhetoric from Johnson and Westmoreland about the feelings of the people of Vietnam. "The proof is in the puddin".

In a nationwide survey conducted by Britain's Oxford Research International, 56 percent of Iraqis say their lives are better now than before the war; only 19 percent say things are worse. Because of "Bush's war," Iraqis today brim with optimism. Fully 71 percent expect their lives to be even better a year from now; less than 7 percent say they'll be worse. Iraq today may just be the most upbeat, forward-looking country in the Arab world.

I always feel confident when a British institution polls the Iraqi people and tells me what they believe. It tends to remind me of what other noted British instutions were telling us back when Iraq was occupied by Great Britian and the Royal Air Force was killing thousands of Iraqi civilian "resistors" with poisonous gas.
How many of you know that Great Britian killed more Iraqi's (nearly double the number) with chemical weapons than Saddam Hussein did? Don't believe me? Then go ahead and look it up. Let us hear the words of Sir Winston Churchill when he recommended that action to the British Government.

Seems I remember yet another declaration of public opinion courtesy of the British. Aren't they the people that told us that the Palestinians would accept the Balfour declaration and become comfortable with the Zionist takeover of their lands?

With hard work and a little luck, it may soon be the best governed as well. The interim constitution approved by the Iraqi Governing Council protects freedom of speech and assembly, guarantees the right to privacy, ensures equality for women, and subordinates the military to civilian control. It is, hands down, the most progressive constitution in the Arab Middle East.

I like that one a lot. I wonder if we Americans are truly naive enough to believe that a "constitution" approved by a puppet council appointed by a military occupation force from a foreign nation actually reflects the "will of the people".

I'm not an expert on Iraq but I'm willing to bet that this touted "constitution" will be repealed and reversed just as soon as the Iraqis are free of the current military occupation. The world's greatest Democracy should be smart enough to understand that the principles of our own Constitution cannot be imposed upon others without their consent. This "interim constitution" reflects the will of America, not the will of the people of Iraq. We shall see how "progressive" it will remain if Iraq regains the right to create its own constitution.

Nearly a year after the fall of Baghdad, Iraq is hugely improved. Unemployment has been cut in half. Wages are climbing. The devastated southern marshlands are being restored. More Iraqis own cars and telephones than before Saddam was ousted. Some 2,500 schools have been rehabbed by the US-headed coalition. Spending on health care has soared thirtyfold, and millions of Iraqi children have been vaccinated. Iraqi athletes, no longer terrorized by Saddam's sadistic son Uday, are training for the summer Olympics in Greece.

That is truly impressive. Once more, we shall see how long it all lasts when the army of occupation is withdrawn (assuming, of course, that it ever is withdrawn).

Continued >>>

 

[surplus1]

Above all, Iraq's people are free. The horror and cruelty of the Saddam era are gone forever. In the 12 months since the American and British troops arrived, not one body has been added to a secret mass grave. Not one woman has been raped on government orders. Not one dissident has been mauled to death by trained killer dogs. Not one Kurdish village has been gassed.

"Iraq's people are free" -- Interesting concept. What are they free from, Saddam Hussein? I can agree with that. However, that dictator has simply been replaced by a different dictator who doesn't live there. Are the dictators comparable? No, they are not. The deposed dictator was a savage and needed to be overthrown. The new dictator is benign and far better than the old. But guess what, he's still the "dictator" de jure.

There are indeed no new secret mass graves. There was nothing secret about the ten thousand plus buried by "shock and awe." It is impressive to watch the fireworks on TV and not nearly as gruesome as uncovered skeletons in a single location. It is not our style to execute and bury the dead. The niceity of doing it with massive aerial bombardment is much more impressive. However, I respectfully submit that a corpse is still a corpse. The details of how you do the killing is of little import to the dead.

It is true that our soldiers are not raping Iraqi women on government orders. We don't do that. Instead, our own women (soldiers) are being raped by "friendly fire" (that's what the right-wing talk show called it). War is hell.

It is also true that we are not gassing Kurdish villages. That was already done a long time ago by the British and the Kurds learned their lesson. There is no need to repeat it, they are now our "friends".

But none of that changes the bottom line: In the ancient land that America liberated, life is more beautiful and hopeful than it has been in many decades.

Ahhh yes, "liberated". Somehow I can't get the felling of Palm Sunday from what we call the "liberation" of Iraq. I guess it's true that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". I have not been to Iraq since we invaded and occupied the country, but from what little I'm allowed to see I just can't sense a feeling of liberation among its people.

I remeber the scenes of Russians pulling down statues of Stalin and Lenin, but that was Russians liberating Russians. There were no American armored vehicles assisting them for the TV cameras. I remember the French civilians laying flowers in the path of American liberators, but somehow I missed the TV coverage of Iraqi citizens spreading palm fronds. Instead I see RPGs, hand grenades, automatic weapons and rodside bombs, planted by insurgents (called terrorists), maiming and killing American kids. I don't know, but I wonder how many other wars we have "won" that resulted in more of our boys being killed after the "victory" than during the battle.

Is the imprisonment of Saddam Hussein truly worth the sacrifice of one American marine, soldier, sailor or airman? Based on what you have written, I guess it is to many of you. I believe that the young people of our military who serve this country with honor and distinction that is unparralled in any other nation, deserves better. What they did in WWI, WWII, Korea, the Gulf War, the Balkans and Afghanistan was justified. The price was high as it always is when there is human conflict, but it had to be paid. What we did in Vietnam and what we are doing now in Iraqi are unworthy of the sacrifice that our nation's finest have been asked to pay.

We deserve better than we are getting from our current leadership. Better abroad and better here at home, and that is not "spin".

 

[350DRIVER]

100LL and those alike, you truly continue to crack me up so keep those posts coming. It must really make you bitter that there is so much outspoken anti-bush people that continue to speak up. You have bought into this "flawed" administration's hogwash and propaganda but fortunately the International community and world leaders will continue to be outspoken and continue the attacks on this flawed and "joke" of an administration. Bush has made more mistakes than anyone could have thought possible and ultimately these screw-ups will allow him to follow in his father's footsteps this november. Sad sad that you buy into this joke. What is even more sad is the new administration is going to have years of work to correct all these fuc$ ups that bush has been capable of doing.


Anyone want to travel to France this summer and support there tourism industry with me? Should be a fun and exciting trip.


3 5 0

 

[Typhoon1244]

So because I haven't been at the computer since the last jerk posted I'm avoiding responding?

No, I don't believe anyone said that. Don't be so paranoid!

Also: You F-ing morons keep chanting your mantra about Bush wanting to 'settle the score' with saddam to avenge his dad. This position betrays intellectual deficiencies so deep as to be beyond reason. Live in your fairy-tale world.

(1) We just call 'em like we see 'em. Sorry you don't like it. Truth hurts, huh?

(2) I see you're a graduate of the Newt G. school of politics....you can't refute the idea, so you use foul and belittling language. Well done!

 

[Dubya]

Hogwash?

350drivel....your posts contain absolutely no useful or objective views on any of this. You are a typical sore loser lib who can't stand that Bush came out of that messy election. You would have a problem with ANYTHING Bush did..right or wrong. The hate spews out of you like a fifth of Jose Cuervo after an all nighter.

I challenge you to offer something useful and objective on this....something other than...."Bush screwed up.....Bush is flawed...Bush is a joke...Bush has made more mistakes than anyone thought possible"....you are just a liberal parrot. Offer something creative and objective.

You actually care about what the Frenchies and Germans and Russians think about our foreign security matters. It is more important to you what the leader of France has to say about our nation's actions. I have serious objections to many of Bush's policies too.....but 'fer cryin in the mud....you and so many others are so full of hate and bitterness....you calling the conservatives bitter....now that is just funny....that you can't form an objective opinion on any of this.

France is a great place for you.

W

 

[Benhuntn]

Occupation?

It is not an occupation force, it is a LIBERATION FORCE!

You have read the New York Times too much.

 

[Typhoon1244]

And more importantly, how would you divert the military forces currently deployed to more effective use? I don't see anywhere they could be put to better use, but I am open to ideas.

Well, I wouldn't divert forces that are currently deployed. That's the point: it's too late.

My question is this: there is a dictator out there who is torturing his own people in horrible ways and has real nuclear technology and offensive weapons. If it is now our goal to spread Democracy throughout the world, why aren't we working to put Kim Chong-il in the same cage Saddam's in? Saddam may have been a bastard, but at least he was relatively rational. Kim's crazy! Is George waiting for the N.K.'s to kick us in the nuts before he does something?

 

[100LL... Again!]

I wish I could say your posts entertained me 350, but I find closeted anti-semitism far from humorous.

You seldom cite facts or present a cohesive argument. Just name calling and generalized opinion. You need to be weaned from the CNN/BBC teat, and move over to some solid food. There is certainly no diversity in your news sources, I am sure.

 

[jarhead]

Typhoon1244

You pose some valid questions as to why Iraq, and not North Korea. I would venture a purely speculative response to those questions.

As to why if it’s a good idea to liberate Iraq, why not N. Korea, Cuba, and other bad places?

First, even if there were a political will to spread the liberation forces, the US can not possibly do that all over the world. Not enough troops or money, let alone political will.

Second, it is widely believed that Kim does have nukes. That changes the approach a lot. We would never have dared invade the former Soviet Union…..they had nukes that would annihilate us.

And, a more cynical eye in me would also view that the lack of oil or any other thing of value to the economies of the west would preclude shedding blood for those down trodden folks in N. Korea, Cuba, and other places.

 

[Typhoon1244]

Re: Typhoon1244

...a more cynical eye in me would also view that the lack of oil or any other thing of value to the economies of the west would preclude shedding blood for those down trodden folks in N. Korea, Cuba, and other places.

I had that thought myself...as have a lot of others.

 

[Benhuntn]

Truth of the matter

The truth of the matter is that there are currently nine nations meeting with N. Korea to persuade them to dismantle their nukes. The leader is nonother than China. I understand that they are taking a lead in this because, since they are much closer than "most" other countries they are at greater risk.

The delay in taking action is in the deal they want to cut with the nations. Since they were able to dupe the previous administration into giving them money and oil, they are hoping for a much more lucrative deal this time. This is unaccepttable to the US and S. Korea. It doesn't make the media accounts since no one is dying and it would show that GWB is working to disarm this rogue nation.

 

[surplus1]

Re: Occupation?

It is not an occupation force, it is a LIBERATION FORCE!

Would you feel that way if someone invaded us and "liberated" us from the current administration?

You have read the New York Times too much.

And what do you read, sir? The Crawford, Texas Gazzette, the Cheney/Haliburton Flyer, the Rumsfeld Weekly, the Condeliza Sun, the Shawn Hannity Daily, the Rush Limbaugh Buffoon or the O'Reilly Spin Journal?

 

[Typhoon1244]

Re: Re: Occupation?

And what do you read, sir? The Crawford, Texas Gazzette, the Cheney/Haliburton Flyer, the Rumsfeld Weekly, the Condeliza Sun, the Shawn Hannity Daily, the Rush Limbaugh Buffoon or the O'Reilly Spin Journal?

ROTF, LMAO!

 

[Benhuntn]

You said it all I was wrong

ROTF LMAO!


Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorius triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt

 

[TonyC]

I just think that's awful strong language for someone who's never served a day in the military to throw around.

I don't think military service in any way qualifies or disqualifies someone to use the word coward. Their military service record, or lack thereof, is irrelevant. Wearing a uniform does not make one brave, nor does the lack of military service make one weak. The issue you raise with regard to military service is a red herring.

Lemme see... how else can I phrase this to try to convey the point?

It doesn't matter... if we disregard silly issues like this, we might have to deal with facts. Nevermind.

 

[surplus1]

Re: You said it all I was wrong

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorius triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt

"No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism."

"The Americans will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted all the alternatives."

Winston Churchill (both)