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

To: Neocon who wrote (117057)	10/17/2003 8:47:25 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "Yeah, it is terribly likely that millions of Iraqis didn't care that the regime brought down on them misery and persecution, and supported Hussein anyway. Where do you get this stuff?" It's obvious from the simple facts on the ground. Almost all Iraqis have guns. Guns kill people. If the Iraqis really hated Saddam that much, someone would have offed him just like American citizens who hate their president assassinate them. This is not something I had to "get", it's simple obvious facts of human nature. Guns don't kill people, people kill people, therefore the Iraqis, who had lots of guns, didn't want to kill Saddam with anywhere near the unanimity that the war party claimed. Saddam regularly appeared in public in Baghdad. Saddam supposedly was deeply hated by many millions of people with guns. Surely one of them would have sacrificed himself to kill Saddam, but no dice. Re: "So you think that it worth there [sic] while to become targets of the resistance, which you portray as ubiquitous and growing, for a few extra bucks, even as businesses are opening and the economic situation is improving?" (1) If you don't have any money at all, a "few extra bucks" is a lot of money. (2) Just because they're joined the new Iraqi police and we're paying them doesn't mean that they're fighting on our side. (3) Sure business is growing in Iraq, but it is still dirt poor, and I haven't heard you crowing about exactly how low the unemployment rates are now, so I would bet that they're still stratospheric. But none of this matters. The simple fact is that Nazi Germany fought us like tigers whether their economy was good or bad. They only quit when we bombed the living daylights out of them for years resulting in our killing about a thousand times as many Germans as we've killed Iraqis. What you refuse to admit is that the Palestinians attacked the Israelis with terrorist attacks whether the Palestinian economy was good, bad, or indifferent. This is a simple historical fact. The intifada did not start during bad (relative to their history) economic times for Palestine. In fact, the intifada has destroyed the Palestinian economy, but still they fight on. Since the Palestinian economy had no effect on the will of the Palestinian people to fight, why should the Iraqi economy have an effect on the will of the Iraqi people to fight? Terrorists would attack us in Iraq no matter how wealthy the country gets. It's already been widely noted that the Saudi terrorists were fairly well off middle class folk, and Osama himself is very wealthy. Wealth doesn't prevent people from being "madder than hell". Re: "You said that the populace was not merely hostile, but afraid, and therefore we could not trust what they might say to a camera or pollster." Yeah, even the guys who shoot at us, if asked by a functionary of our government, will say sweet and loving things. For you to expect that the enemy will tell us the truth is ridiculous. Are you ignoring the point that I made about the Iraqis being so poor that they send their children out to beg? This is in direct contradiction to the Administration claims that things in Iraq are rosy. Re: "I doubt the Administration is very surprised, either." The administration has already gone through the first string (Garner), second string (Bremer), and is now setting up the their third string leadership (Rice) as far as the pacification of Iraq. They told our troops that they would be going home in July, then October, and then they postponed it to 2004. They originally planned to have US troop levels down to around 30,000 by the end of the year, now they predict that troop levels will remain at high levels through 2004. There are sources that now say that the Administration planned on sending the military in to clean up 5 other countries, but all those plans have been nixed due to the fact that there are no troops left. Administration plans called for many billions of dollars in income from the sale of Iraqi oil, they failed to take into acount the fact that substantial portions of the Iraqi population would see this as theft and become "mad as hell", and sabotage equipment. Yeah, sure, you "doubt the Administration is very surprised", LOL. Nah, what you're doing is whistling past the graveyard of Bush's reelection chances. -- Carl

To: Neocon who wrote (117057)	10/23/2003 1:18:05 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "You said that the populace was not merely hostile, but afraid, and therefore we could not trust what they might say to a camera or pollster. I am offering evidence that they are not particularly afraid of us." Actually, I never considered the possibility that Iraqis would talk to cameras. But as far as pollsters, correct, I said that they would likely not tell the truth, but instead would give the "safe" answer. This is normal human nature, especially noted in the more violent parts of the world. Now an article at the NY Times agrees with me: Baffled Occupiers, or the Missed Understandings NY Times, October 22, 2003 ... Pollsters working in the Middle East give interviewers special training to overcome respondents' tendency to guess the "right" answer instead of express their true feelings. That tendency is especially acute in Iraq after decades under Saddam Hussein, when a wrong reply could mean death. ... nytimes.com Translation: Our polling data from Baghdad is worthless (at least in terms of absolute values, maybe the relative trends would be useful), as the Iraqis don't tell the truth when asked simple questions by strangers. Here's another quote from the same link: ... In public, the Americans have so far been the relentlessly chipper counterpoint to the chorus of complaining Iraqis. In private, though, you hear complaints like the one from a G.I. wearily minding a checkpoint one night in Baghdad looking for black-market gasoline, guns and explosives. Asked how things were going, he shrugged disgustedly and said, "If you really want to know, I'm sick of being in a country where lying is the national pastime." ... nytimes.com -- Carl