Hi frankw1900; Re: "... there is about a 10% -20% chance you may killed ..."
I'd say that that kind of percentage is way, way, too high, even for an Iraqi in the military. Quick little wars just don't kill that many people.
But the weird thing is that humans are kind of crazy about their preferences for how they get killed. People don't care that 50,000 of us are killed in traffic each year, but they go nuts over the possibility of a few dozen people maybe getting cancer "someday" due to a minor nuclear power plant accident like Three Mile Island. And look how much of a deal has been made over the 3,000 killed at the WTC, not to mention the many more who are murdered, mostly by friends, here in the US every year.
What it boils down to is that humans are comfortable being killed by their cars, their friends, and by the usual things, but they go ape nuts when the possibility arises of their being killed by foreign humans. And most importantly, humans get used to dying a particular way, and they don't mind it so much. But they put up a lot of resistance to any new ways of dying, even if it would result in fewer deaths overall.
But the problem is worse than that.
Why should the Iraqis trust the US to replace Saddam with something better? From the Iraqi point of view, the Americans supported the brutal Shah, now supports the nasty Saudis, and the Zionist Israelis. Hell, the US used to support Saddam himself.
Maybe Iraqis would be willing to accept the deal you're talking about, but not from the US.
The Afghanistanis were different. The US had a long history of supplying food and military aid to the Afghans, so there was an expectation that the US would help again. I don't think we have that level of trust among the Iraqis.
-- Carl |
