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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yojim who wrote (57903)	4/16/2003 7:05:20 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

"I would like to hear a defense for this particular action that shames me as a proud American. Does the unnecessary bombing of civilians qualify as a war crime?? " There is absolutely no credible evidence from any credible source that Coalition forces intentionally targeted or otherwise unnecessarily killed any civilians. None whatsoever. Accidental or otherwise unintentional civilian deaths caused by Coalition forces? Sure there were. This is war! And this when Saddam tried his level best to assure massive civilian casualties! Name one war of liberation that had Zero civilian casualties. Name one war of liberation that had proportionally less civilian casualties. Did any civilian deaths it bother me? Absolutely! War is Hell! People die in every, even innocent civilians. This war resulted in a shockingly small number of lives lost, including innocent civilians. Did the incessant rape, torture & slaughter of millions of innocent Iraqi citizens under the Butcher of Baghdad bother you? It bothered me! And the more I learn about this horrific & relentless oppression of women & children makes my blood boil! Coalition forces did their absolute best to limit civilian casualties. Saddam did his absolute best to insure there would be massive civilian casualties. Still, the number was historically low by any measure during wartime. Coalition forces had good intelligence that Saddam, one or both of his brutal sons & a large number of senior Iraqi leaders were gathered at that site you are so upset about. A successful bombing there would likely bring a swifter end to the war, thus saving countless lives, both military & civilian. The Butcher of Baghdad is responsible, on average, for the slaughter of more than 1,000 Muslims per week, every week he was in power, perhaps as many as 2 million Arabs/Muslims slaughtered...... The few innocent Iraqi's killed in that Mansour district (AKA Saddam City) bombing pales in comparison. And that bombing was in a wealthy neighborhood where Saddam's cronies lived lives of luxury at the expense of the millions of oppressed Iraqi's. Still I grieve for the loss for any innocent civilian. You seem only concerned for innocent civilians accidently killed by Coalition forces. In any event, if that bombing shortened the war by just one day, chances are that even more lives were saved than were lost in that bombing. Considering how quickly Iraq crumbled after that bombing & senior military officers suddenly went silent, perhaps it shortened the war by many, many days & untold hundreds of lives spared. The best numbers available for civilian casualties for this whole war is from the Iraqi government & likely massively exaggerated. Others keeping track have serious credibility problems as well. Still, the numbers they offer are incredibly low for a war of liberation.......... "A Web Site (www.iraqbodycount.com) run by academics and peace activists puts Iraq's civilian casualties at between 1,402 and 1,817, based on incidents reported by at least two media sources, though its methodology has been questioned. The last Iraqi estimate issued on April 3, just two weeks into the war and well before Saddam's rule crumbled <one week later>, was 1,254 civilians killed and 5,112 wounded. " reuters.com "But far worse is a group that claims to be keeping an accurate running count of Iraqi civilian deaths but is, in fact, doing no such thing. The group is called the Iraq Body Count Project <See their claims above>, and its main figure is Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women's studies at the University of New Hampshire. You may remember Herold from his similar project during the Afghanistan campaign. There, he produced a figure of almost 3,800 civilian casualties, and his methodology was immediately criticized by many for taking reports from unreliable media sources at face value and for double- counting some incidents. An independent analysis by the Los Angeles Times found 1,200 or fewer civilian casualties..... ....So how many civilians have actually died in Iraq? The simple answer is that it's far too early to come up with anything resembling an accurate count. But it is striking that, as of this writing, the Iraq Body Count Project's maximum stands at less than 1,800. And if there's one thing we can say for sure about the Iraq Body Count Project, it's that the maximum is undoubtedly a true max: Given the group's methodological biases, the chances of the actual number of civilian deaths being higher than its maximum figure seem very, very small. By comparison, the best estimate of civilian deaths in the first Gulf War--where the military task was significantly less demanding and the number of people liberated significantly smaller--was between 2,000 and 3,000." weeklystandard.com "Iraqi authorities said last week that over 1,250 civilians have been killed in the war and more than 5,000 injured" rferl.org