Iraq War Logs - 400,000 document leak

^^ "That perhaps having the same attitude towards collateral damage as Hitler and Stalin is not an entirely optimal state of affairs?

I'm not sure that the conduct of the two sides involved in World War II's Eastern Front is something we want to emulate."

So what about all the civilian casualties inflicted upon German cities by the USAAF and RAF in their intensive bombing campaigns? And that's far from the only times that civilians were killed en masse by the Western Allies.

Sorry, but the attitude towards collateral damage wasn't that much better on the Western Front.

Well one possible justification I've heard is that they wanted to prove superiority so that they wouldn't get a repeat of what happened in Germany after WW 1.

edited 24th Oct '10 10:52:15 AM by storyyeller

People die in wars?

Tactful.

edited 24th Oct '10 11:14:36 AM by DonZabu

Great, now we'll have all the wingnuts screaming "BUSH WAS RIGHT!" for the next 6 months...

—R.J.

Well, so long as nobody gives a toss about the civilian deaths, I don't suppose the torture matters, either?

War is complicated. to be terribly cliche and melodramatic, it creates an atmosphere where even good men lose track of their moral compass sometimes.

Edit: take what I say with a grain of salt, I may be off the mark considerably, not having been in the military or a war.

edited 24th Oct '10 11:56:04 AM by Lanceleoghauni

It suggests that what he had were remnants from before the first Gulf War, most of his original stock having been destroyed at that time.

Exactly. Can anybody find age estimates for these weapons?

No age estimates available they are going by the various states of decay of assorted weaponry and the locations it was buried in.

I already covered that, pagad. Tom stated that civilian casualties were especially high on the Eastern front, so that's what I decided to address.

Err... I just got caught by two things reading the discussion.

a) The Lancet Journal was talking about deaths caused by war. The Iraq Documents from Wikileaks are talking about deaths caused directly by combat situations. Those numbers aren't the same thing. So you can calm down Major Tom :)

b) The WM Ds were from the first gulf war when we knew they had chemical weapons because we gave it to them! So that does not constitute as the same WMD rationale that Bush was talking about.

With that done with, I think the torture thing from the documents may or may not cause a stir. We already have a broiling war crimes investigation happening in Canada which the tory government is attempting to stonewall (typically by getting rid of the commissioner of the inquiry or just blocking witnesses from speaking or in fact labelling some people as taliban-lovers). Do Americans get as outraged by torture if it's their troops outsourcing it to the Iraqis.

espectable military forces

Not that individual soldiers aren't respectable persons, but militaries as a whole?

That said... I'm in despair. The War On Terror has brought me to despair. And people like Major Tom just keep digging me deeper. His personality might be good for a heavy assault branch or special forces, but an officer with such a mentality could screw up so many things... Those dirty towel-heads are defiling our precious bodily fluids... I hope people like him are minoritary within the US Military: such short-sightedness is downright dangerous. For everyone.

The war on terror didn't do much besides making us check behind every shadow, every bush, for some suspected trouble. Life was nice and sedate before that - not to invalidate the need for security precautions, but what have we really accomplished in nine years?

^ Let's name a few off the top of my head. 40 million people (Iraq and Afghanistan) no longer live in oppressive regimes that either kill you for being a certain ethnic group or treat women exactly like property and oppressing them beyond even that, we've turned the average time between Al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets and civilians from roughly every 18 months to greater than 8 years and counting, it resulted in Libya giving up on their WMD ambitions and normalized their relations with the US (in the immediate aftermath of Saddam getting his ass kicked in 2003!), and also got rid of a hell of a lot of insurgents, headhackers, and terrorists.

Do we still have a ways to go? Yep. Have we accomplished nothing? Hell no.

What we've accomplished was building a sand castle. The ocean will wash it away as though it was never there.

^ Story of the world's history in a nutshell. Build the best Mary Suetopia in the world and it gets washed away in the blink of an eye due to a war or some other factor.

Is that suppose to justify why we went to iraq?

Actually, something very disturbing has occurred since the second invasion of Iraq (and yes, this is on-topic).

When Saddam Hussein came into power, he forcefully removed the religious authorities who held power before him. He did this with the belief that political power can best be consolidated and monopolized by removing the various Islamic factions that decentralized the Iraqi government. Hussein was well-known in the Middle East for despising theocratic regimes specifically because of their tendency to create an atmosphere of squabbling and excessive - unconstitutional - use of Sharia.

During Hussein's reign, Iraq had a relatively secular government, and many men and women were free to practice Islam in moderation. In fact, many women including my two cousins and my step-sister were able to get college degrees and become teachers and physicians. This also marked a time when many women were actually more educated and better trained than men in professions of an equal level.

The irony of the invasion of Iraqi is that the removal of Hussein led to the re-installation of the very same Islamic fundamentalists that he rounded up and kept at bay for so many years. When they returned to power, women were required by law to wear the veil, all-girl schools were either destroyed or placed under probation, and many women lost their licenses to teach and practice medicine. And in case you're wondering how this is on-topic, also consider the fact that there has been a sharp rise in the number of sexual assaults and murders based on anti-female hate crimes that continues to this day.

Unfortunately, when the United States removed Saddam Hussein from his leadership role, tyrannical as it was, they also created a massive power vacuum that left the remaining civil servants at the mercy of emergent hardline clerics looking to reconstruct the pre-Hussein Islamic state of the mid-to-late Cold War.

I'm not going to turn this into a wall of text to cite my sources, but if you really don't believe me, I can call my cousin and have her send us pictures of the cuts and bruises she received from her male colleagues after Iraq was "liberated". This is also neglecting issues regarding infrastructure such as loss of remote irrigation systems, contaminated municipal water supplies, faulty electricity centers, and a corrupt national guard that is starting to resemble anti-progressive Islamic extremists more and more with each passing year.

By no means am I arguing that times were better when Saddam Hussein reigned, but it would be an understatement to say that the United States inadvertently made the Iraqi people exchange one mess for another one.

edited 26th Oct '10 4:51:08 PM by Aprilla

^ I've heard some older people hwo live there actually miss the times when Saddam was in charge - they knew who they were dealing with, basically. Can't say I totally agree with them, but you bring up an interesting viewpoint, and I can see where they would get that view.

That's why Bush Sr. didn't go into Iraq — he was smart enough to know that it'd make things worse.

—R.J.

^In the words of his Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney, invading Iraq would have been a 'quagmire'.

I always wondered why we didn't persecute the conflict all the way to the removal of Saddam, at the time. Also, why after we pretty much trashed their ar force, why we allowed them to fly unarmed helicoptors. They used the helicoptors to snipe leaders of a disgruntled military who was trying to stage a coup immediately after the war. Which failed, though.

But we would have had back then, what we have now.

I hate "bad vs. bad" choices. Is there a trope for that?

^ EDIT: Yeah, I saw that and laughed. The irony.

edited 26th Oct '10 5:37:04 PM by pvtnum11

I guess either Gray and Gray Morality or Nice Job Breaking It Hero.

^ First one sounds about right. I'd like to take a third option on that, but I can't see one.

Sadistic Choice is probably the one you want.

Saddam was like Tito's evil clone.