The US, UN & Iraq III

I'll give you Baghdad Bob if you give up Ari Fleisher...

LOL at your sig.

BTW, a convincing lie is more harmful than an obvious one.

I hope you refer to Bush, and not my bosom.

'Twas neither. I was talking about Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf.

craven

Yes, we are information-hungry on this one.

A soldier's blog from inside ....


http://www.chiefwiggles.blogspot.com/

a

My bias shines through?

I just said that IMHO the option of surrender never was given serious consideration.

I belief in justice and i don't think assasinating people is the right way to teach people our Western standards for democracy. I thought one of the reasons those neo-cons wanted to intervene was to westernize Iraq and let them share the benefits of our democratic system.

I dont think bullet-riddled houses and 'trial and error assasinations' are an option.

And NO i dont think American soldiers are fair game. I feel sorry for those ignorant youngsters. They're gonna die in a place they should never have been at all.

Let's look at Bush's State of the Union speech:

One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice

Parsing this, what Bush means by "American Justice" is finding the "bad guys" and killing them. Silly me, I thought American justice was about The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, trial by jury, and the rule of law.

Not to exclude, Frolic, the open trial in which the whole community (America) is involved and for which it takes full responsibility. Removing the accused from sight and dealing with them autocratically makes Americans in fact much more insecure than they actually have been following 9/11. Our real security lies in the law and in an open society.

Frolic


What gives you that insight do you have some inside information or is it based on your bias.
From all reports and no one has disputed them that the butchers were given the option to surrender and answered with gunfire wounding three soldiers.
Stop and consider for a moment would it not have been of greater advantage to capture them alive and put them on trial than to have to take pictures that many Iraqi's question to prove that they are dead.
It was surrender or die and they chose to die. I hope that when and if they catch up with Saddam he makes the same choice.

The biggest advantage would have been a signal to people believing in blood revenge and executions without a trial that our system works and works even better.

It could have been the best commercial clip for the American(Western) System of Justice!

At least the option of catching them alive wasn't given serious consideration. The firepower the soldiers used proves they wanted them dead. As far as i know they only had some AK 47 and limited ammo. No RPG, no handgranates. It wasn't necesary to blow up the entire house. Rememeber the the Waco standoff. Was that ranch bombed with helicopters? David Koresh also had repeatedly stated that he would not surrender. Why was that range besieged for 51 days!!!!!!

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three U.S. soldiers were killed guarding a children's hospital in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad, and four were wounded in a grenade attack Saturday morning.
The deaths of the soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division brought to 161 the number of troops killed in action in Iraq (news - web sites) since the start of the war, 14 more than in the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites).
The killings marred what had been a quiet day in Iraq, as residents debated the authenticity of video images of the bodies of Odai and Qusai Hussein released Friday by U.S. authorities in a continuing effort to convince Iraqis the brothers were dead.

CAIRO (AFP) - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites) warned of increased armed attacks against coalition forces in Iraq (news - web sites) if the United States did not stabilize the situation and hand power over to Iraqis swiftly.
"If the Americans do not quickly redress the situation, there will be big problems, terrorist operations and gang wars will increase," Mubarak, an Arab leader close to the United States, told a meeting of students in Alexandria on Saturday.
"A timeline must be drawn up for a government and elections, otherwise the (chaotic) situation will persist in Iraq ... violence will increase," he said.
Saying Iraqis had "nothing to lose" after years of repression by Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime, Mubarak warned they were "capable of anything" when it came
to acts of resistance against US forces.
Since the official end of the US-led war against Iraq on May 1, some 47 American soldiers have been killed in almost daily attacks launched by what are thought to be Saddam loyalists.

au said... That assumption is no more self-evident than its converse, though you and craven hold it to be so.

As discussed earlier, we are lacking adequate dependable information to make a judgement in either direction, and likely will continue to be, but it is not the case that one position here is founded only/mainly on bias whereas the opposing position is admirably objective.

First, there is the matter of differing interests/goals - the military commander at the site will have different interests/goals than Bremer or the intelligence people or State or Paul Wolfowitz or Carl Rove. We have no way of knowing whose interests played a part in the specific decision in this instance or in the broader policies regarding what to do with these key individuals. So, which end result is 'best' will vary. It seems quite reasonable to argue that for the soldiers attacking the home, 'kill and don't get killed' might describe their particular interest/goal. We know from civil policing experience that other non-lethal options are available in such a situation (eg stun grenades, tear gas) but these boys aren't going to have a lot of patty-cake tools or notions. So, it seems to me that if the pattern of the attack was established entirely by the commander at the scene, then the result which occured is quite understandable.

But, if one adds input from Bremer, State, etc., then different interests come into play. And then it is not at all clear that keeping the Hussein boys alive would have been preferred, as you and Craven claim. If you'd like me to explicate the negatives of this more fully than I'd done earlier, I can, but most of them seem fairly evident.

Just as a relevant side note however, we ought to keep in mind that Bush's record re the death penalty in Texas tells us quite clearly that the President is quite happy to kill people where he sees 'justification'.

blatham


This is not a civil situation it is war. And these are not police officers in a hostage or suicide situation they are soldiers trained to fight and to protect themselves. As I said the brothers grim were given the option to surrender or die and they chose death. Is there anyone here that feels they did not deserve that fate.
Do I sense sympathy being expressed for the death of this scum or is it just the unflagging dislike for the US.
Question what were your feelings regarding the US when Clinton was in office.

au

For goodness sakes, that's what I just said above.

"Unflagging dislike for the US"? No. That's an arrow that misses the mark by a fair distance. Though I confess I have an deep and poorly-tempered disdain for the nationalistic stupidity which lies beneath the charge.

Au, I wish you would stop getting personal and stop mischaracterizing others. ("Do I sense sympathy being expressed for the death of this scum or is it just the unflagging dislike for the US.") It weakens your argument and diminishes your credibility, in my view. I'm going to shout at you for a moment: NONE OF US KNOWS ALL THE FACTS. WE ARE ALL SPECULATING. TO WISH THAT OUR GOVERNMENT, WHICH PROFESSES TO BE TAKING DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM TO IRAQ, WOULD USE THE STANDARDS OF OUR CONSTITUTION AND OUR CULTURE IS NOT REPEAT NOT TO SYMPATHIZE WITH THE ENEMY.

i've been very taken with the op-ed piece in Forward this week. http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.07.25/oped5.html





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Excuse me,I did not vote for Bush ... I voted with the majority!
I resent the implication that he is 'my' President.