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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (70679)	10/8/2003 3:23:59 PM
From: steve kammerer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

How many people was Saddam killing of his own people before we told them to revolt after 1991. How many not counting Kurd revolt while he was at war with Iran. I honestly don't know but I would like to get through the propaganda crap that implies that he was just hauling people off at his whim. Percentagewise, is it of a similar magnitude to the number of Palestinians hauled off to prison by Israel?

To: zonder who wrote (70679)	10/10/2003 11:46:23 AM
From: runes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

And the content - credible vs reasonable vs ignorance. First let me fell a few trees - --> credible numbers vs credible sources - by definition "credible" numbers are those that come from "credible sources". Same difference. --><<Why would the number of deaths per year be an "obscure" matter?>> Gee - I guess Saddam just forgot to hire a beancounter to keep an accurate tally. Or if he did he just forgot to publish the numbers. Just like every other brutal regime. ---><<I know for a fact that the bulk of Saddam's killings (village gassings etc) were not happening in the months nor years preceding the invasion. Hence, there was no IMMEDIATE NECESSITY...>>. ...You've got some faulty logic here and you are trying to assign Fred's argument to me. I agree that there was not a justification for immediate war. But that is not why I am doing my rather gruesome calculations ---> I see you trotted out that estimate of 700k children killed by sanctions. FYI - that estimate is based on a decline in the birth rate. Infant mortality is certainly one factor but there are also other factors - less desire to have children because of decrease prosperity, decreased 20 year old male population because of the war, and quite probably a bit of governmental re-engineering of the numbers. (Remember that that number was a key part of Saddam's campaign to lift the sanctions). ...But I suppose that that number came from a "Credible" source so those details don't really matter;-) Which leaves us with a couple of forests - 1)Is it possible to come up with reasonable estimates of Saddam's attrocities given that he wasn't being very open about it and there don't appear to be any credible sources? ...It all depends on what you want to call reasonable. From you example - 11 people executed does translate into a first order (linear) approximation of 132 executions for the year. Is that good enough? It is if you want to make the point that wrongful death by execution is dwarfed by wrongful death by homicide. But it is a terrible estimate if you are ordering coffins. ...For my purposes, I don't need to differentiate between Saddam & Co. killing 2000 or 2001 people. All I needed to know is whether the coalition death toll is substantially better than Saddam, worse than Saddam, or on par with Saddam. And what my number told me is that we are on par. 2)Even if you can get a reasonable number for Saddam's attrocities, how does that justify the war? ...It doesn't nor am I trying to justify the war. And it would be rather pointless - the war has already happened, justified or not. ...The issue now is whether or not we can be "successful". And what my calculation was about was a kind of macabre success criteria. To whit - will the Iraqi's see the invasion as a good thing or a bad thing? ...Right now we have subjected the Iraqi's to much more death, brutality, and deprivation than they would have had if we had left Saddam in power. But the Iraqi's seen worse times under Saddam not to mention the fact that Saddam ran an "anuity" plan whereas we, hopefully, are going to be a one time charge. ...My guess is that, if we can wrap things up in the next year or so and leave them with a stabile government, the Iraqi's will accept that the invasion was a good thing. And while they will still probably distrust us, they probably won't hate us and may actually have some residual level of gratitude for us. ...But if we drag it on and/or if the violence escalates, we will go from unwanted to hated. And the invasion will go from a Machiavellian "end justify the means" to "Bush's folly" and possible to an unmitigated disaster ("A Vietnam for the new millenium")