Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqis Were Killed in the War. One Was My Brother
thefp.com
thefp.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/vault/s...
We are easily programmed meat machines.
He most likely used data from a survey in 2007 [1], hence i'll question the integrity of the article
Already mentions millions in 2008 [2]
> More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003
And 2.4 millions in 2016 [3]
> But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20090422225308/https://surveys.a...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-deaths-survey-idUSL3...
[3] - https://www.salon.com/2018/03/19/the-staggering-death-toll-i...
I disagree.
This is a bold statement for someone who left Iraq fourteen years ago and never went back. Probably the current regime is better than Saddam. Is it so much better it was worth two trillion dollars and half a million lives? Is it so much better the rise of and fight against ISIS was worth it? I would like to hear the perspective of someone who lives there.
You don't need to be "someone living there" to answer this question. Just imagine half a million people in your state got killed by some foreign invader, and try to answer for yourself would it be wort it.
Was the US Civil War "worth it"? I suspect the current answer is yes. Was the Iraq thing as pertinent or powerful as the civil war? I lean toward no, but I don't have detailed information.
Half a million people were not killed by a foreign invader. They were killed as a result of a foreign invader destroying the existing power structure. The number actually killed by coalition troops is a small fraction of the total.
Should the world have let Saddam initiate an Iraq-Iran War II? Was he bluffing? We don't know -he's dead. Maybe countries, like siblings, need to duke it out sometimes.
Many years ago there were people calling for Bush (and maybe Obama) to be arrested by the ICC. Bush and Obama are rehabilitated and now there is a more immediate foe who is now to be arrested and rendered to the ICC. Still, we could benefit from examining and have a congressional inquiry into the matter with consequences so that future presidents think twice before committing to war so easily. Then again, the Congress has abrogated its responsibility to declare war, and allows presidents lots of latitude to engage the military in "not war near wars" which are wars in all but name. If they really meant it, they would take that responsibility back.
It's more about degrees of good vs degrees of bad. There is no clear-cut good guy and we have to live with that. There are people who are bothered by the duality.
I'm fairly sure that most of the leftists who complained about Bush back then have not rehabilitated him, they've just added more people to the front of the list.
they did after he trash talked Trump
apparently saying "grab her by the p----y" is worse than starting two wars
No, it isn't an open question. The United States dragged the world into a war based on lies and false pretenses. It invaded and destroyed a sovereign state, allowing museums and priceless cultural artifacts to be looted and burned, murdered millions of people - Iraqis and allies - and left a broken country to the depredations of the insurgent forces their own ham-fisted belligerance created.
And no one knows why. It wasn't because of WMD, that was bullshit. Not because Iraqi intelligence had a hand in 9/11. Not yellowcake from Africa. All lies. Not even for the oil. We didn't even take the fucking oil. Why? Because the neocons already had plans to Christianize and democratize the Middle East? Because Bush wanted to cement his family's legacy? Because Afghanistan wasn't big enough to satisfy American bloodlust against Muslims post 9/11?
It was evil. Unqualified evil. Absolute evil. Evil that will have the United States mentioned in the same breath as Nazi Germany for the next hundred years.
But, yes, we should have a congressional inquiry with teeth to find out why and punish wrongdoers and establish a precedence by congress that a president cannot go sending American soldiers to war capriciously without having to answer why and have convincing reasons.
(apart from the bit where the illegally conducted private foreign policy was selling arms to the other side in order to fund some other terrorists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair ; really it was the pardoning of everyone involved in Iran-Contra that set the stage for the Iraq war misconduct. Oliver North ending up as a TV host rather than, say, jail)
American policy in that regard was already to put up with him because he was the "devil we knew", and we didn't want to risk someone worse filling the power vacuum if he was overthrown. If there were a credible threat of him starting another war with Iran that justified the US changing policy, The US could have presented a case with credible evidence. None of this "you're either with us or you're with the evildoers" nonsense.
Infinite hypotheticals always exist, but they don't carry moral weight in this universe because they could be used to justify anything in hindsight.
If he hadn't put that ridiculous "I disagree" after the obviously true explanation of the failure, this article would not have been published.
Which regime would rather live under if you were a normal Iraqui?
I was back at my units "home" base where they spent most of a year. Recently US and, I believe, Georgian EOD troops were engaged in heavy fire outside of town and an IED exploded as they tried to defuse it. You hear a lot of these stories day to day so like the author I was pretty desensitized to hearing about people dying trying to do their jobs. Not a day later I was reassigned to the small jail that we had and I met a man who didn't speak English, had a gut but wasn't overweight, and who lacked any education beyond religion and farming. I kept him fed, kept him safe, made sure he had rec time, time in the bathroom etc... I could do basic communication with him through a combination of hand signals. Mostly though I had no way of having any real conversation with him.
HumInt came to visit and interview him. They had gathered his side of the story and were going back out to gather information based on what he told them. He was captured after detonating the IED that had killed the EOD troops just days before by connecting a battery to a buried cable. It became clear to me early on that this man did not have the know-how to create a projectile cone, the REX for the explosive material, or the electrical knowledge to determine the battery and wire gauge necessary to carry out this attack. I read through his jacket and understood he had lived mostly a farming life, he was devout in his religion (as most were in that area), and he had a family. The Taliban had approached him to carry out this attack, his gut was a combination of disease and malnutrition most likely which is why they targeted him. They offered him the chance to do this act in exchange for his family being taken care of.
A day or so later HumInt came back. They asked me a lot about how he was acting and I told them mostly normal, he'd been sleeping most of the day, he prayed as usual, and had asked for some religious items. They informed me that they had gone to his house with representatives from one of the units on our base and had found that his family had been killed. They had been debating on whether to tell him because he was surely going to the jail in Kabul where he would likely be hanged. They told him during the interview and I remember from that time until he left he was just mute. This will be how I forever remember the Taliban and sister groups like Al Queda.
> And yet.
> It is hard to express what it means, if you have lived under an authoritarian regime, to experience freedom. Those who have grown up with the privilege of liberty are lucky not to understand it—and the heavy price you are willing to pay for it if you have lived without it.
This sentence punches far above it's weight class.
Additionally, in Latin America if memory serves me correct paramilitary units were used because the US didn't want to go there as a military presence for both optics and cost. We (the military) were already present in Afghanistan.
Lastly, as I said earlier as well, this one death and one attack among many. There was very little significance to this attack. EOD was doing civilian route clearance, trying to clear civilian roads of IEDs and bombs planted by the Taliban. We didn't use these specific roads so that the Taliban wouldn't put bombs on them, but they did anyway and used it as leverage on the local populous. These types of operations were part of "hearts and minds" operations. The real message from the US military was sent every year during Opium Interdiction operations where after the Taliban had enslaved farmers to produce poppy for them we would raid the Taliban opium production facilities.
You are right about paramilitaries, but the governor's of districts in Afghanistan ran their own militaries that are not Geneva bound. That said, in this particular part of Helmand I don't remember seeing many ANA.
What a sad ending.
> This will be how I forever remember the Taliban and sister groups like Al Queda.
Something that amazed me was to see how fast the ANA capitulated.
Billions of dollars were spent on education and training for the Afghan army so that they could stand against the Taliban. I was expecting the population to be very happy to get rid of them for good, seeing how they were treated under their regime. And yet it only took them a few weeks to completely undo decades of work. This reeked of double allegiance. In some regions, the village elders accompanied by ANA soldiers were welcoming the Taliban and cheering for their return. No fights. Worse, ANA soldiers were seen giving military supplies to the Taliban.
Apparently, families frequently sent their sons to fight on both sides of the conflict.
I hesitate to publish it because, frankly, I think it'd be co-opted by the right and ignored by the left. If meaningful change is to be made for future wars, both of them need to sit up straight and listen with sober ears.
> rather than doing the arduous work of freeing Afghanis. [...] but I suspect this was out of fear and coercion knowing that they were not ready
Did they want to be free at all?
To me it sounds completely alien. A regime that abducts and coerce people into fighting for them should be fought tooth and nail by the population.
To contrast this, if you go to Kabul people wear jeans, go to nightclubs, women attend university - it's very modern and still Muslim. Most of what I've described occurs in the rural parts of Afghanistan which are predominately not served by Afghanistan's government and are thus co-opted by the Taliban and other groups.
Not being able to face historical facts and be honest is a major, major problem for the future. Again, to pick on Russia look at how many of them genuinely do not understand why almost all of Eastern Europe would gladly go back in time and suffocate baby Stalin with their bare hands, without thinking. Homo Sovieticus can only see the exaggerated glory of the Soviet Union without seeing the millions farmers starved to death in the Holodomor, or the hundreds of thousands tortured in KGB offices for absolutely no reason.
I appreciate blowback arguments but drawing a line from A to B to C is easier once you get to C - when you're at at A it's pretty impossible.