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

To: Sam who wrote (138643)	7/2/2004 2:51:13 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

On Thursday, the former senior occupation official estimated that the number of insurgents had stayed constant at 4,000 to 5,000, suggesting that as soon as they are killed or captured, they have been replaced. Hi Sam. This is yet another example of propaganda in action. We don't know who these "insurgents" are, we don't know where they are, we don't know what their command structure is and we're getting poor intelligence or no intelligence on them, and yet we can estimate that there are 4-5,000 of them? Of them? Is that an estimate of the number of people pulling the triggers? Does it include those who hide, feed, shelter, and provide information to them? Does it include almost all of the population of Fallujah? Does it include the 98% of the country that sees us as occupiers? Does it include the people who dance in the street in joy when our young men and women are lying dead in the streets? Anyone can pick a number. Anyone who's trying to paint a rosy picture of an ugly reality can pick a low number of insurgents. It amazes me that so many hawks will swallow that number. I've said from the beginning that as soon as Rumsfeld stated that "we're not getting good intelligence in Iraq," the writing was on the wall. That's a euphemism for saying that the Iraqi people are supporting the other side. It was true then and it's true now.