dlish

this news story seriously piss me off. since when is 122 dead people even acceptable? ...and the media brushes this off like it's an accomplishment? a school massacre every few years a 1/10th the size of these deaths makes worldwide news, but 122 dead iraqi's is collateral damage, and no one really gives two hoots.

time and time again, i see iraqi lives devalued against the lives of others around the globe. we have been desentitised to deaths in iraq, afghanistan, and pakistan, so much so, that we usually flick the channel to something that wont ruin our appetite for apple pie. little do we know that every death turns 10 people into sworn enemies.

congratulations to the Coalition, they just produced 1220 new insurgents this month.

__________________
An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay?
- Filthy

Willravel

They're continuing to manufacture the consent of the public.

Cimarron29414

Nothing ruins my appetite for apple pie.

__________________
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"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

matthew330

"little do we know that every death turns 10 people into sworn enemies."

what am I missing here? If as the article suggests, the deaths are a result of insurgent suicide bombings then:

1. How is it the coalitions fault? they actually themselves killed 38 people who were likely to repeat this, and arrest 510 of them thereby reducing the number of deaths from insurgents. That's something to celebrate right? Not like party hats and blowing those little noise makers that unravel celebrating, but celebrate as the article does, by acknowledging the obvious progress. Seems like a good thing to me.


2. The more obvious question: If an insurgent suicide bomber kills my family, why are me and 10 of my friends gong to join the insurgents, and kill more innocent people. There's some logic misisng in there somewhere.

Willravel

You guys do care that 122 people died, though, right?

matthew330

I wonder if ratbastid will randomly show up and kindly inform you that you didn't address my point, and then roll out.
Rat???

highthief

I'm against the war in Iraq, but 122 is pretty good. You got more than that in New York and LA every month in the 90s.

But the thing is, so far, it's just a blip. One month means very little on its own.

__________________
Si vis pacem parabellum.

Willravel

I was addressing what you didn't write, what often never said. And you didn't answer the question.

Cynthetiq

c'mon guys, I was going to respond to the thread, but felt I need to respond to the responses first.

It's only 7 posts in and we're already borderline trolling.

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hiredgun

If you're merely pointing out that an improvement in the overall level of violence should not wipe out our consideration of those still being killed, I am with you. Or if you are lamenting the very human psychological tendency to normalize our expectations to a recent baseline and then focus on deviations from that baseline, then I agree, that tendency can often cloud our ability to prioritize among events.

But I don't find anything particularly objectionable in the article you cite. It is in fact true that conditions in Iraq have improved markedly, and given the time horizon of the news cycle it makes sense for this to be the arc of the story. Beyond that, if you feel that this reporting somehow causes people to forget or lose sight of the fact that 122 people still died this month, than I feel like either you're seeing it elsewhere (i.e. in something you don't reference in the OP) or are projecting that view onto people who don't actually espouse it.

Willravel

I can't speak for Dlish, but this was what I was going for.

timalkin

..

__________________
Trinity: "What do you need?"

Neo: "Guns. Lots of guns."

-The Matrix

Willravel

According to Johns Hopkins, Iraqi civilian deaths increased dramatically after the invasion across the board. Saddam was a horrible, murderous dictator, make no mistake, but he did not kill his citizens at anywhere near the same rate that they've been dying since he was dethroned and subsequently put to death. In fact, before 2003, many of the civilian deaths in Iraq could be attributed to sanctions, instead of Saddam's tyrannical regime.

Baraka_Guru

Saddam is dead. He isn't coming back, and he has nothing to do with what's going on in Iraq at the moment.

I don't see how we can continue to miss the point here: we in the West (and perhaps elsewhere) don't seem to mind much or notice that scores of people continue to die each month in Iraq. And the question isn't whether Saddam's regime was worse. It's whether the Coalition will or can actually do anything to stem this tide.

Bringing up Saddam at all is a red herring. He doesn't matter. It seems that Iraqis in general don't matter. I tend to hear more about Afghanistan here, being in Canada. What do you get on your radars in the U.S. regarding Iraq these days?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Willravel

I'm in the SF Bay Area echo chamber, so I mostly hear progressive views on the wars (namely that they're wrong and we need to stop getting involved in other countries' civil wars and concentrate on fixing things here). I can't really speak for elsewhere.

ratbastid

Casting an eye up and down this thread, I begin to wonder why people get so defensive when it's pointed out that they value white lives more than brown lives? Hmmm. A little close to home, maybe?

The civilian death toll is, in my humble view, the single most reprehensible part of this thing. And there are lots of reprehensible parts of it. The causalness with which it's treated in the press is nothing short of disturbing.

Obviously not every one of those was killed by Coalition forces. Many of them were certainly victims of civil warfare that became possible then the Coalition knocked out the only thing stabilizing Iraq, the heavy hand of Saddam Hussein. He was a bad dude, to be sure, and it's also bad without him around.

This is the lesson we really should have learned a LONG LONG time ago about armed conflict in the Middle East: even when you win, you lose.

Baraka_Guru

Well, I can't say that Iraq is off the radar here. I just remembered I read a Canadian magazine article last month detailing how certain oil companies are making quite the killing in Iraq: high risk = high reward.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

iraq has tended to fall out of the trivia-cycles these days. out of sight out of mind. except of course for these bizarre-o factoids which show up---this one is obviously designed to both remind and reassure, as if the fact that iraq is no longer a central item in the dominant media spectacle should be of no real concern as everything is getting better and better every day in that the best of all possible worlds except of course for the good ole us of a the greatest country humanity has ever known if it wasn't true why would so many mythical beings try to get here every day every day and add to the endless cycle of persecution endured by right-thinking conservatives?

afghanistan is dominating the trivia-cyles along with those vital questions on the order of what will the post-oprah world order look like and who will run it and the various adventures of sarah palin brought to you by harper collins who fronted her 2 million dollars to write those memoirs and goddamn it there's a recession on so it is of course all good if you can get book tour adverts passed off as news segments but whatever there's about to be 30,000 addition troops sent to afghanistan presumably in order to facilitate the withdrawal of the whole 100,000 after the vital missions of keeping al-qeada from coming back into afghanistan is accomplished because god knows the most important about whatever that group may or may not have carried out was their location and keeping the taliban from getting into power because, well, it's what the us has been doing these past 8 years once it became a party in a civil war rather than some kind of mediating presence above it.

so yeah, everything makes sense and the way in which it makes sense is probably a big reason why it is time to celebrate the fact that only 122 people died in iraq.

besides, its not like the deaths involved are of actual people who love and are loved by others.
no no, it's just a bunch of brown people far away.
but fewer than other periods.
so.

um.

yeah.


something.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

The_Dunedan

Because your prejudicial assumption that they're racists is offensive condescending holier-than-thou bullshit, that's why.

Look, it's simple. People worry more about American dead than Iraqi dead for the simple reason that they (Americans) know other Americans. Very few Americans know even one Iraqi. Therefore, the death of an American (someone from their own culture, who most likely speaks their own language and who they feel a sense of national connection to) impacts them on a personal "death in the family" level that the death of an Iraqi does not*. If this were a white-vs-nonwhite issue, dead American servicemen/women who were black/native/asian/etc would be treated differently in the media or not treated at all. This is hardly the case. Both regimes (Bush & Obama) have done their level best to sell Iraq and Afghanistan as "Our Wars" being fought by "Our People," and have even gone far out of their way (Jessica Lynch BS anyone?) to create "enough diversity" among the dead and the heroes.


*Not that I'm a fan of this way of thinking, mind you. Humans are humans, and the 20th Century's murderous Democide toll in individual human lives is one of my greatest objections to Government in all forms. We are dealing, however, with the way in which Joe Sixpack or Mohammad al-Teacup sees the world, which is not a view conducive to perceiving all of Humanity in equal lights.

Willravel

I dunno, people don't seem to care about the coalition deaths either and they're certainly of our culture to a point. The most people can muster is "oh that's too bad", which is nearly indistinguishable from the response to this 122 deaths number.

roachboy

where exactly do folk get information about iraq from the states that is not mediated by the dominant infotainment systems?
people are concerned with what they're told to be concerned about in the main, and usually in the way they're told to be concerned about it.
so the way this information is staged or framed says alot about how folk will and won't be concerned, because (to repeat the word mediation in another way) that's how they encounter the information.
so we aren't talking here about the attitudes of some "joe sixpack" directly--we're talking about the ways in which this "joe sixpack" is positioned with respect to information by the way(s) in which that information is presented.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

The message I've been getting from MSM from day one is "care just enough to be scared but not enough to take an active role in anything". Caring a lot about troops deaths or civilian casualties might cause one to not support the war, which could mean ratings trouble for MSM. War sells.

Plan9

122 is the body count in Rambo III. They're not impressing us anymore.

__________________
Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

ring

Recently I tried searching for an account of civilian deaths during
the 1990-91 gulf war. The numbers still seem to vary widely.

I haven't heard much lately about the recent Israel/Gaza atrocities.
roachboy's thread concerning this, was very informative,
and he kept sight of the true losses; not only the loss of human lives,
but also the suffering and anguish of those injured, displaced..etc.

& the suffering continues:
A recent article in the Guardian.

Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja | World news | The Guardian

I despise the term collateral damage, & all the other terms the US military
invented to cleanse and manipulate.

YaWhateva

This is the part that I hate the most. It reminds me of a song. It's called Anatomy of Your Enemy:

__________________
“If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again.” - Bill O'Reilly

"This is my United States of Whateva!"

ottopilot

Except for tonight, the president rarely mentions, even in passing, anything that would indicate that the USA is involved in military action. In the political shell game, the diversions have served their masters well. Since the new administration, the focus on anything regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. have been all but intentionally swept under the rug. The body-counts, demands to bring the troops home, vigils, and focusing on the likes of Cindy Sheehan (who?) have all but vanished. Gitmo???

__________________
"It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

dlish

mathew,

i dont see any cause for celebration really. not until the toll is zero. send me a PM on that day and we'll celebrate together..hm.....'kay?

as for your question as to why family and friends would join to fight against the coalition.. maybe for the same reason thousands of people joined the US armed forces after 911, maybe its because they have nothing better to live for because not only are their houses bombed, but their family, kids, paerents, brotehrs etc al have been vapourised. poverty and tragidy are two of the catalysts for breeding fundamentalism. when will the coalition learn this? but keep sipping on your mint flavoured herbal tea in your armchair..they are after all just a bunch of 'brownies' eh?.... 122, 150 257, 566, 398,.. just a bunch of numbers right?

im with BG here, you cannot justify current civilian deaths with how many saddam would have potentially killed. That's not really the issue here.

but on the subject of saddam, he was a stabilizing force for his country, he was the supreme ruler who was recognised by all world leaders alike, and he did a damn good job of keeping the different factions together under difficult circumstances. the people of iraq are tough rebellious people. throughout the arab world, this is common knowledge. i remember my father sitting me down when i was a kid explaining the history of iraq and why the iraqis would never be subjugated by an external force. saddam understood this very well and his rule took this perspective.


hiredgun - thank you, your words are spot on. its not the story itself that i have an issue with. your first paragraph hit it on the head.

__________________
An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay?
- Filthy

Marvelous Marv

Perhaps you could pass that on to our warmonger president.

Don't look now, but a brown president just sent white soldiers to kill brown ones. Must be a racist.

Which is why it took the messiah so many months (and lives) to get off the pot and make a decision about Afghanistan.

BTW, Cindy is still around. She crammed a megaphone into the face of a 70-ish veteran (twice) a few days ago, and when he finally slapped it out of her hand, she shrieked like the sand in her vagina was particularly abrasive. And looked for someone to hide behind.

Yes, she's a model "progressive" in every way.

__________________
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Margaret Thatcher

Baraka_Guru

Don't you read the news?

* * * * *

Smokescreen'd!

[With apologies to Plan9]

Which is it? Warmonger? Sitting on his laurels? Messiah?

Why are you in this thread?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

timalkin

..

__________________
Trinity: "What do you need?"

Neo: "Guns. Lots of guns."

-The Matrix

dlish

ive never justified the actions of sadam or any dictator for that matter. period. i just said he understood his people's reactions and ruled with an iron fist. rightly or wrongly, this is a matter of fact.

but this thread isnt about saddam, but rather the numbing of the masses to the daily deaths that occur.

this also isnt about muslim vs the west, nor is this about muslims vs muslim. indicriminate killing knows no boundary. and in case your havent noticed, im a muslim myself and im well aware of what's going on in the region since i live in the region myself, so i have a fairly better idea than most. but thanks for the pointer columbo.

I'd like to point out that since the fall of baghdad to coalition forces, each and every death will be blamed on the coalition forces in the same way that each and every death under saddam was blamed on him, and rightly so. so any killings perpetrated in whatever god, country or system you follow will be a bi-product of the coalitions actions

when was the last time you picked up an arabic newspaper? or do you think iraqi's get their information from cnn?

__________________
An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay?
- Filthy

roachboy

saddam hussein was a product of british colonial strategies, as were the divisions within iraq that he sat atop & controlled in an often quite brutal manner--with american support for most of his regime, btw. more or less up to the invasion of kuwait no less.

no-one has ever said he was a swell guy, but the fact is that for many years he was an american-supported dictator & for that whole time there wasn't a whole lot of shirt-rending from american conservatives about what was happening there for some strange reason. but now, of course, things are otherwise, particularly for those who politically supported the bush administration & it's debacle of a military adventure and who continue to support it.

i wasn't aware that the thread was about whether conservatives do or do not personally like their imaginary "progressives" counterparts.
i thought it was mostly about how information concerning iraq is now being spun, when it emerges at all in the cycle of trivia that passes for news.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

dc_dux

The "Mission Accomplished" mantra - a brutal dictator is no longer in power - seems to be the spin of the supporters of the policy that failed miserably to plan for a post-invasion Iraq.

Beyond the death counts resulting from continued sectarian violence (which was predicted by many outside the neo-con circle of believers that removal of Sadam would bring peace and prosperity),the country faces immense problems and the stability of the region is still in question.

To believe that the sectarian divides that have existed for years would suddenly come together was based more on hope than an understanding of those deep divides.

We hear little of the 2 million refugees who fled the country after the invasion or the 2 million displaced within......hundreds of thousands of whom represented Iraq’s professional class, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists, bureaucrats, teachers, etc.

We hear little about the influence of Iran with its close ties to the controlling parties in the Iraq parliament or the unrest being fed by the more religious parties and movements such as al Sadar's Mahdi army.

We hear little about the corruption in the present Iraqi government and the fact that, according to the US Inspector General for Iraq, the $billions of US dollars spent on rebuilding the infrastructure were poorly planned, badly transferred, and not sustainable by the present government (as a result of the lack of expertise described above).

We hear little about the fact that despite those billions in American funds, more than 40 percent of Iraqis still lack access to clean water, according to the Iraqi government and ninety percent of Iraq’s 180 hospitals do not have basic medical and surgical supplies according to NGOs.

We hear little about the fact that many in the military and civilian police force may still be putting sectarian or tribal loyalties over peace and stability.

Sadam has been removed.....Mission Accomplished?

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire

Willravel

He doesn't return my calls. Or my congresswoman's. And my senators seem to be in favor of the surge in Afghanistan despite both being relatively liberal (centrist).

The_Dunedan

We did.

We did. Mostly, however, we just took to using Saddam's old facilities. Abu Graib, remember?

We did. What did you think Blackwater was for?
Blackwater: Stop Acting Surprised - By Gary Brecher - The eXiled

We did. What do you think atomised Depleted Uranium does, cures lung cancer?

Nowadays, yes. Previously, however, a lot of those casualties came about as a result of the fact that when you drop 2,000lbs of high explosives into densely built-up residential areas, you wipe out a lot of civvies. It's that whole "blast radius" thing, terribly inconvenient.

Source?

Yes, the chance to live in a chemically-denuded wasteland that's lost something on the order of 10% of its' breeding-age males, with little or no electricity, clean water, education, roads, or jobs. A real favor we did, that, blowing up their country and several hundred thousand of their people.

Because that's been -so- successful everywhere else it's been tried...Germany? Japan? Fine, fire up the Enola Gay. Until then, all this "bringing democracy" twaddle is just self-congradulatory hot air.

No, thousands of American citizens have been killed and horribly wounded to enhance the wealth and power of our entrenched political classes and their knob-nobblers in the corporate/lobbying world. If you seriously think that any of these clowns in Washington, Republican or Democrat, give 1/3 of a rat's turd about some poor people half a world away [i]who cannot vote to re-elect them[i], the primary concern of all politicians, you're crazy. If you think they -want- these people, who have very little reason to be fond of us, actually -having- a representative and responsive government that does what it's constituents want, you're out of your friggin' mind.

Baraka_Guru

Well, that didn't take long. Looks like December numbers might be up compared to last month.

Iraq's Maliki Blasts Foreign Support For Bombings

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Baraka_Guru

Is it time to rejoice now? No US combat deaths in Iraq for December! And the death toll in 2009 is the lowest since the invasion!

No US combat deaths in Iraq in December
Iraq death toll in 2009 lowest since US-led invasion | Herald Sun


Oh, wait. Maybe not:

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Derwood

The irony of the "war on terruh" is that we've now lost far more American lives fighting this idiotic "war" than were killed on 9/11, and we're no closer to "winning" anything than we were 8+ years ago

Baraka_Guru

Even if both Iraq and Afghanistan became as stable as Canada, the GWOT would be far from over. (How's the War on Drugs going?)

I personally don't think it has anything to do with anything anymore. The idea of the world banding together to fight terrorism is a bit of a spectre now, I think.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Derwood

agreed. I just find it interesting (sad? funny?) that there was so much outrage about 3000 people dying on 9/11 but not nearly as much anger over the nearly 5000 people out government has gotten killed in these "wars"

but I digress, as I've gotten off topic