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Originally Posted by Rekna
Or there are 1000 dead bad guys and 200 dead innocents. I doubt that this whole seige happend without the deaths of innocents. Unfortunatly there is no way to kill the bad guys without killing innocents also. Another unfortunate side effect is every time we kill Iraqi's especially innocents we just add more people to the resistance.
When the US first invaded Iraq there was very little Iraqi resistance. But we started down a slippery sloap where we killed Iraqi's which angored other Iraqi's and no matter how many we kill/killed there were always more in their place.
This is the situation were in now. We will NOT win this war by simply killing people who choose to fight against us. We need to win this war by winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Get them to work with the process not against it. (I hope that this is still possible) Displacing an entire city does not help us acheive this goal.
Maybe it is time we start working with the clerics instead of against them. They are the key to this whole conflict. We cannot let our irrational fear of muslims effect our judgment. Muslims are not the enemy. If it takes a Islamic government in Iraq to bring stability and peace then let it happen. I'd rather have a friendly Islamic government then civil war and 4 more years of death on both sides.
I seem to recall an irrational fear of an ideal causing simalar problems in the past. Let's see wasn't it called communism?
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There are actually estimates in the tens of thousands of civilians by agencies like the International Red Cross. They claim that hundreds of thousands of women and children are in refuge, but they aren't able to get adequate supplies to them. I have yet to see much on how they are faring the winter months. But in light of how the international aid agencies are saying that they were blocked from fallujah for weeks before the operation, and that they can't get adequate medical, food, and shelter supplies to the refugees who have left, it didn't look promising.
Ustwo claims that the Iraqis as a whole aren't engaged against the US troops. But the witness accounts claim that no men were fleeing the city. They either stayed behind to fight or were killed in rubble defending their homes from marauders.
The Lancet (one of the most respected peer reviewed journals in the world) claims that over 100,000 civilians have been killed since the invasion began in 2003. The article I read argued that was equavalent to 1 million US citizens by population.
My bad, Lancet doesn't "claim" this, I worded the conclusion poorly (based on their title). This number was derived from an extrapolation of the data. Hopefully people will read the study, however.
I watch Link TV occasionally and they have a show called Mosaic, which is a series of international news channels. They also feature independent journalists (who have been cordoned off from the action, whereas embedded reporters are granted access but their reporting is sanitized before dissemination) who risk life and imprisonment to report from inside the hot spots. Reports are coming back that Al Jazeera reporters have been detained and whisked away without anyone hearing from them again. Presumably they are sent to detainee stations where there wouldn't be much incentive or method to differentiate them from insurgents.
Regardless of how one views the words they may use to describe the situation, the pictures I have seen of the place (the rubble, the sheer destruction of the city) doesn't mesh with the sanitized presenations on our American media. Bluntly, the city is in ruins. The US is offering something like $500 to $2K for families who can prove damage was done to their homes by the operation.
There is no head to lop off, there is no backbone to break, there is no command center to disrupt. These are decentralized cells operating both among and automously from one another. It must be increasingly clear to the civilians that our actions are less about tactical evisceration of the enemy and more about symbolic might. But I don't know how many people are being added to the insurgency roster. My guess is not many from these shattered places. That is, this kind of destruction is just more of the same and they are just waiting for the bombs to quit dropping in the middle of the night. Just praying to Allah that they live one more day, and that the men can continue to provide shelter and resources for their families. Just faith and prayer day in and day out to keep going. Some are picking up rifles they see laying around, but most are probably just hunkering down and waiting.