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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (59543)	1/27/2005 10:18:28 AM
From: ild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

What if It Was All a Big Mistake? by Rep. Ron Paul antiwar.com

To: TobagoJack who wrote (59543)	1/27/2005 3:40:09 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

<According to Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, the United States has killed or captured around 15,000 Iraqis as part of the counterinsurgency effort. The insurgency is still going strong. That raises an interesting question: Just how large is the insurgency if taking out 15,000 people doesn't cause it to pause? Obviously, not all of those 15,000 casualties or captures were active insurgents. Some were supporters who intermittently aided the guerrillas. An unknown number of others were not involved in the guerrilla movement at all. Counterinsurgency is not a surgical procedure to say the least.> Jay, I'm an old enough geezer to remember the infamous body counts in Vietnam. It was absurd the way the USA used to report another umpteen Vietcong killed. Newspapers and tv and government officials and the public duly reported, nodded and accepted the great progress being made. I thought that there couldn't possibly be so many. They didn't run around with a flag on their head saying "Vietcong" and if there were as many as claimed, then basically the population of Vietnam were Vietcong. The truth about the body counts of Vietcong was made clear when Lt Calley and co murdered 100s of people trying to live their lives at My Lai. His body counts were just a little bit too extreme to be acceptable. His punishment wasn't much considering he was performing the same job as enthusiastic young Nazis in the extermination industry currently being "remembered" to make sure it "never happens again". I'm sure that trigger-happy USA soldiers in Iraq are not conducting detailed courts of law with evidence, lawyers for the prosection and defence, and due contemplation by a jury before they let rip with a fusillade of ammunition in the general direction of anything which might be threatening in the slightest way. Friendly fire incidents are proof of the innocent-party nature of trigger-happiness. Tillman would have been included in the body-count but for the unfortunate fact that he was wearing the wrong uniform. Iraqi males can more conveniently be rated "terrorists" no matter what. But on the other hand, there must be easily 15,000 Islamic Jihadis in the area, with Kamikaze attacks constantly, so the fly-paper theory is working and maybe a good proportion of the 15,000 actually were people having a go at the COW. Mqurice