Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (116933)	10/15/2003 4:58:43 PM
From: kumar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Iraq was humiliated by a crushing defeat, and the failure to put up much of a fight. If I was an Iraqi national (which I am not), this would be a fairly offensive statement. The Iraqi government was defeated, not the Iraqi people.

To: Neocon who wrote (116933)	10/16/2003 12:29:25 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "Iraq was humiliated by a crushing defeat, and the failure to put up much of a fight." When a nation of 25 million is defeated by the combined forces of a nation of 250 million plus one of 100 million, with additional sanctions based on the actions of the entire United Nations, it's not a "humiliation" any more than it was a humiliation for Poland to get split up by Germany and Russia. You fail to see the issue from the Iraqi viewpoint, which is why you failed to realize that they would continue to shoot at us. At least when Hitler went into Poland he knew that they Poles weren't going to like it. What a morality! When Bambi's mother was shot dead by the hunter, you probably thought it was so cool that she was humiliated. Re: "Most Iraqis feel liberated, not defeated." You don't have any evidence for this. There are plenty of photographs of Iraqi civilians celebrating the destruction of US military vehicles. I have seen no photographs of Iraqi civilians celebrating the shooting of members of the Iraqi resistance. Maybe you're thinking of the recent Gallup poll: The 2003 Gallup Poll of Baghdad Gallup, September 24, 2003 gallup.com The strict, probability-based sample used by Gallup to conduct this survey projects with scientific accuracy to all adults (aged 18 and older) residing in urban areas within the governorate of Baghdad. All 1,178 interviews were conducted face-to-face, in the privacy of the respondent’s own home. Interviewing was conducted during the period of Aug. 28 through Sept. 4, 2003. The cooperation rate exceeded 97%, that is, fewer than 3% of those we contacted refused to be interviewed. Average interview length was 70 minutes. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum error attributable to sampling and other random effects is ±2.7%. gallup.com I suggest that having someone who is essentially in the position of a representative of the US, asking you face to face about what you think of the US occupation is a good way to scare the living daylights out of the average Iraqi, and a bad way to find out what they really think. Does this argument sound familiar to you? It should, because the conservatives have been arguing for months that the reason the Iraqis are not helping us eliminate the resistance is because they're too scared to. Hey, if they're scared of Saddam, they're damned sure scared of the US. Re: "It is not a big surprise ..." It sure was a big surprise to the US. And the UN was kind of surprised too, given that they pulled out the vast majority of their people after their head honcho was squished in the ruins of the UN building. Re: "... that some of the most loyal minions of Saddam continue harassing the occupation ..." What is a big surprise is that the numbers of these minions continues to increase, month to month, despite the continuing "progress". You fail to understand that years of "progress" in Palestine never kept the Palestinians from ceasing to blow up Israelis. Re: "... nor, given the penchant of militant Islamicists for terror tactics, that there should be some who engage in suicide bombing crossing the border." Today we lost 3 Americans in a bombing in the Gaza strip, so maybe some of those suicide bombers and other hotheads didn't actually cross the border into Iraq. The whole tenor of your miserable excuse for our lame foreign policy is that there is only a small pot of terrorists and it is better to fight them in Iraq. The truth is that more and more people are ganging up on us because our foreign policy in the Middle East is manifestly unjust. The neocons complain about Reagan's wise move to pull the US out of Lebanon, saying that it gave the Arab terrorists the impression that the US could be driven easily away. Well what do you think now that the shoe is on the other foot? The terrorists (whose ranks have been inflated by Bush's policies) just made Bush pull us out of the Gaza strip, another glorious f'ing victory in the war on terror. Re: "This is not at all like the situation of widespread resistance we experienced in the countryside of Vietnam, where the weekly average of casualties was much higher." (a) This is only the first 5 months of the war, wait around a few years and see what develops. (b) We had 5x as many troops in Vietnam. Increasing the troops in Iraq would similarly increase the casualties. (c) Our troops in Iraq are higher in quality than the draftees in Vietnam. If we have to increase our troops size up to the Vietnam level, we'll have to lower the quality, just like Vietnam. Re: "As for the bankrupt foreign policy of Israel, that is ludicrous: Israel has merely coped with a greater or lesser degree of Arab intransigence from the beginning." Israel's problem is that they keep a large minority of their citizens in a permanent status of 2nd class citizenship due to their state being a religious rather than secular state. That is what has created the problems they have not only with the Arabs, but with most of the rest of the world. -- Carl