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Originally posted by ctembreull
Dragonlich:
What absolute twaddle.
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What a well thought out response.
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That is patently the most asinine statement I have yet seen on this board. Would you like me to tell you, in detail and at great length, exactly why?
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Simple: anti-war people seem eager to find anything to back their stance, while pro-war people don't give a rat's arse. Just a fact, really.
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Now that the soda I spewed through my nose upon reading your utterly ridiculous canard has been wiped from my monitor, I would point out that we may have saved a country, but only in a Colonel Klink sort of sense. We had to burn Iraq to save Iraq. And I'm pretty sure that those thousands of civilian, women and children among them, don't feel all that "saved." Nor do the tens of thousands who are still without water and electricity. As for Iraq's future, that future is being sucked out even as we speak through pipelines belonging to companies like Halliburton and Unocal. Saved Iraq? Destroyed it, more like. Destroyed it based on a justification that was an out-and-out lie. Where are the WMDs? Answer me that, then tell me about "saving" Iraq. Bush lied. People died. It's that simple. Sort of a calculus of politically motivated death, if you will.
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Iraq was already burned, the US attack didn't destroy that much. The tens of thousands without water and electricity were already without water and electricity *before* the war. It took Saddam & co YEARS to rebuild the utilities after the '91 gulf war, and then it usually only worked in Baghdad, and only at certain times of day. That is a fact, sir.
The future of Iraq is in the hands of the Iraqi people. You THINK it is being "sucked out" by US companies, even though this is a huge overstatement of reality, and in the end just plain bullocks. Those US companies have to hire Iraqi people to man their operations, they'll have to pay taxes to the Iraqi government, and they will have to compete for the goods like every other company on the face of this planet. Besides, the *US government* is paying for that reconstruction, so why wouldn't they hire US companies, especially if those companies have tons of experience in rebuilding infrastructure?
The WMDs have nothing to do with saving Iraq. The Iraqi people have more freedom than they ever had, and this freedom will only increase. Just because the US can't find WMDs doesn't mean that the Iraqi people are somehow not free anymore.
And yes, people died during the attack, but that's to be expected. When my country was liberated by the allies during WW2, thousands of Dutch civilians died; does that somehow change the fact that we were liberated? Should we now blame the allies for killing those poor unfortunate civilians? Or should we blame our oppressors, the Germans, for creating a situation where those civilians might be killed? The same goes for Iraq: Saddam is ultimately responsible for those civilian deaths, because *he* refused to avert the war; *he* refused to step down; *he* practically invited the US army to invade, then made damn sure that civilians were caught in the resulting cross-fire.
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I would dearly love for you to provide me some documentation for that. Considering that somewhere between five and ten thousand Iraqi civilians and many many more in their military forces are now dead, I'm failing to see how Saddam would have accomplished that. Sadly enough, we may never know how many Iraqi civilians died. It's not exactly like the U.S. is going to release an accurate count, is it?
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Saddam killed hundreds of thousands, even millions, of his people. It is safe to assume he would have kept doing that if he had stayed in power. If we discount the military deaths (common practice, given that we're only looking at *civilian* deaths here), we're looking at 5,000 to 10,000 deaths caused by the war. That includes many that were killed at the hands of the Iraqi army and irregulars, either through direct action (execution, falling AAA ammo, deliberate targeting), and indirect action (human shields, hiding in civilian clothes, in civilian areas). Now, suppose we remove 1,000 civilian deaths for this. That leaves us with 4,000 to 9,000 deaths. Given that, on average, Saddam is said to have killed some 20,000 of his people each year... he would probably have killed more.
Lots of murky numbers there, I admit. But unfortunately we'll never know exactly how many Iraqi civilians died at the hands of Saddam. After all, it's not exactly likely that he'd ever admit that, now is it? If you want to compare the "evil" US invasion to the "evil" Saddam, I'd suggest you take a good look at the news reports about mass-graves popping up all over the place. Those were the result of Saddam's actions, not US actions.
Now, if you were to suggest that civilian casualties are to be avoided at all times, even if that means not going to war in the first place, I'd respect that opinion. Just remember that this would also have meant that *my* country would never have been liberated from German occupation. If you happen to have another option... how would *you* have gotten rid of Saddam? After all, leaving him in power would be bad; UN sanctions didn't help one bit; He wasn't willing to go... That leaves very little room for compromise, doesn't it?