THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

[my comments are in bold blue]

revel wrote:

Ican, Where is the proof for the following information?

[I assume you meant where is some evidence in stead of where is the proof]

Quote:

...We've already had a chance to learn that many many of the prisoner abuse accusations are false or terribly exaggerated.

[First, from what I have read and seen, all the prisoner abuse accusations are limited to small groups of less than a dozen people for each abuse situation. They are not systemic throughout all our troops in Iraq and throughout the rest of our military. Second, almost all of that which is termed abusive treatment of non-uniformed prisoners does not really constitute torture abuse as I understand it. That is, it is not wounding, disabling, crippling or killing. It is at worst only terribly obnoxious. Third, in some cases of actual killing of prisoners, the killing was actually justifiable. I'm thinking of one soldier who shot a moving prisoner he first thought was dead. I think the insurgents who booby trap their dead, or booby trap or arm their wounded to kill their captors, forfeit their own, and their dead and wounded's rights to humane treatment. Why? Because captors have a right to human treatment and should be free from the risk of being wounded or killed when tending to the enemy's wounded, or transporting and burying the enemy's dead.]

From what I have been reading lately the earlier reports of the abuse were whitewashed as more and more information comes to light.
[Can you provide some evidence of such whitewash? Anecdotal evidence will, for me, suffice as some evidence]

I suppose what I find the most troubling is this easy opportunity for people not living in Iraq to come and vote.

Foxfyre wrote:

And Revel I don't expect some here to believe anything is good in Iraq when they want so badly for the current administration to be as bad as they think it is and for the effort in Iraq to fail so they can be right. And I think many in the media are of that same mindset. I don't think anybody really wants anyone to experience pain and suffering. But I come from a military family and know lots of folks who are over there. Unless you have talked to people there yourself, you have no basis whatsoever to conclude I'm lying.

I have never concluded that you are lying. I said how do you expect us to accept on blind faith that what you are saying and what you say others are saying is really the truth and the reports in the news are false?

AFTER THE WAR
Voices of Freedom
A roundup of the past two weeks' good news from Iraq.

BY ARTHUR CHRENKOFF
Monday, January 3, 2005 12:01 a.m.


An interesting experiment recently took place in Iraq seeking to uncover a rarely explored aspect of life in the country, writes Jeff Jacoby:


How would Iraq appear if we saw it through not the reporting of Western
journalists, but the candid testimony of Iraqis themselves? American reporters accustomed to freedom and the rule of law experience Iraq today as a place of danger and violence. Iraqis who lived under Saddam were accustomed to tyranny, cruelty, and secret police. What do they make of their country today?

To find out, three Americans (two filmmakers and a former Marine) distributed 150 digital video cameras to ordinary Iraqis, asking them to record anything they considered worthwhile and then pass the cameras on to others. The resulting 450 hours of footage from 2,000 Iraqis was distilled into an 80-minute documentary, "Voices of Iraq." As Jacoby writes, the documentary "is by turns heartbreaking, exhilarating, and inspiring. The war and its destruction is never far from the surface. . . . But bad as the war is, the horror it ended--Saddam's 24-year reign--was worse. . . . Yet for all they have been through, Iraqis come across as incredibly optimistic, hopeful, and enthusiastic. And above all, normal."

Occasionally--but not too often--we catch in the media the glimpses of that other Iraq: the optimistic, hopeful, enthusiastic and normal one. More often than not, however, our access is restricted to the now very familiar Iraq of constant bloodshed, rampant terrorism, political instability, stalled reconstruction and widespread disillusionment and frustration. Only time will show which Iraq proves to be more resilient and consequential. But for the time being, as the struggle for the soul and the future of the country goes on, it pays to bear in mind that this struggle if far from a one-sided one--that as the violent Iraq strikes, the normal Iraq fights back, on thousands of fronts and in thousands of small ways. Here are some of these stories from the past fortnight.

...

In recent security successes: "Iraqi Security Forces defeated two separate attacks in Mosul by anti-Iraqi insurgents as they attempted to ambush an Iraqi National Guard patrol and seize a police station in northern Iraq"; the capture of remote-controlled rockets smuggled in from outside Iraq for use against election infrastructure; the capture of two senior al Qaeda operatives active in Iraq; seizure of another significant arms cache near Ar Rutbath; and the defeat by Iraqi security forces of an attack on a police station in Mosul ("the sixth time since Nov. 10 where insurgents have tried but failed to overrun police stations").

In addition, 353 foreign terrorists are currently in custody in Iraq. This total includes "61 Egyptians, 59 Saudis, 56 Syrians, 40 Jordanians, 35 Sudanese, 22 Iranians, 10 Tunisians, 10 Yemenis, eight Palestinians and five Lebanese, among others."

And so Iraqis continue on their journey. The situation is difficult and dangerous, no doubt, but for the first time in generations there is hope and there are real possibilities of a better future. As the election approaches and the building of the new country continues, the shape of things to come in Iraq is not entirely new and certainly not an alien imposition. It is here, after all, on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates more than four millennia ago that concepts such as government by consent and the rule of law made their first appearance in the history our civilization. The new Iraq will hopefully be able to recapture and reincorporate into its fabric that lost legacy.

Mr Chrenkoff is an Australian blogger. He writes at chrenkoff.blogspot.com.

Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Quote, "What I am wondering is if the women are doing for the money and if so what is going on there, a prostitution ring or what?"
Revel, Prostitution is/was common in most countries that struggled to make a living during and after wars. When one has no money, shelter, and food, the only opportunity for many women was to turn to prostitution. Let's not make judgements about those women; we can understand the conditions by which all cultures have experienced at one time or another.

revel wrote:

I suppose what I find the most troubling is this easy opportunity for people not living in Iraq to come and vote.

Do you know, if there are ballot stations in foreign countries, and when 'yes', where and how many?

It doesn't matter who is in power so long as they are committed to human rights, personal freedoms, and some sort of democratic structure.

Assumptions and logical leaps are not mutually exclusive, ican.
[I agree.]
The assumptions you've made that I've quoted are logical leaps.
[Again, please re-post those specific assumptions you allege to be logical leaps, or remind me where I can find them. I will then review them to see if I have some evidence to support them.]

Bush and co. had long had a hard-on for Saddam and used 9/11 as a pretext for their invasion. If they wanted to avoid futility, all they had to do was to look at what they accomplished in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was not destroyed; Cheney himself said they were merely scattered. Their leader of leaders, Osama bin Laden, is still in the area, and the Taliban are still around. Our stooge, Karzai, controls all of Kabul and little else in Afghanistan. The country is now the worlds largest producer of opium, and the country, save Kabul, is controlled by warlords involved in the illicit drug trade, our other war of futility.
[With regard to Afghanistan, I agree that the Taliban in Afghanistan are scattered--what's left of them. I also agree that the al Qaeda are scattered--what's left of them. I claim we are now helping secure the Afghanistani's developing democracy. Many Taliban are surrendering by returning to the cities and requesting amnesty. Too many al Qaeda escaped to Iran and subsequently to Iraq. The opium trade problem continues to be very difficult to solve. However, so far we've made far more good progress in Afghanistan than either the Soviets or the Russians did before us. But what has all this got to do with the question of whether or not the al Qaeda in Iraq had to be removed by us, because we couldn't get Saddam to do it?

The three underlined sentences in the following were put there by me]

Saddam's entrance into the autonomous area was not unilateral. It was by the invitation of the KDP, a realpolitik allegiance of convenience, and the US was OK with it. According to the KDP, by 1996 all of Saddam's soldiers had left the area. There was no need to involve Saddam and his army in the attack and capture of Ansar al-Islam and it's leaders, and it is highly unlikely that the KDP or the PUK would invite Saddam into Iraqi Kurdistan to do a job they had accomplished before--deal a blow to Islamist terrorists there. By then they had both made amends and had begun to work together towards a unified autonomous self-governance. By 2002 the PUK and the KDP were prepared to deal Ansar al-Islam a blow, but what ultimately prevented their move was the growing imminence of a US attack against Baghdad.
[I think you are guilty of several logical leaps here. I have underlined three.

You apparently assume that one invitation implies there were no subsequent unilateral entries by Saddam. We disagree. Here's why I think there were subsequent unilateral entries by Saddam.]

Quote:

From Britannica.com (boldface emphasis added by me)
Iraq Under Saddam Hussein, from the Iraq article, page 90.
...
In April 1991 the United States, the United Kingdom, and France established a “safe haven” in Iraqi Kurdistan, in which Iraqi forces were barred from operating. Within a short time the Kurds had established autonomous rule, and two main Kurdish factions—the KDP in the north and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the south—contended with one another for control. This competition encouraged the Ba'thist regime to attempt to direct affairs in the Kurdish Autonomous Region by various means, including military force. The Iraqi military launched a successful attack against the Kurdish city of Arbil in 1996 and engaged in a consistent policy of ethnic cleansing in areas directly under its control—particularly in and around the oil-rich city of Karkuk—that were inhabited predominantly by Kurds and other minorities.