THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

So, xingu, cut the pseudology and answer my questions:
(1) What source do you recommend {i.e., recommend for Iraqi violent death counts?} Why?

(2) So what do you conclude from all that {i.e., all my doubling of IBC counts}?

In 24 years of the Saddam regime, from the beginning of 1979 to the end of 2002, the number of Iraqi civilian violent deaths that occurred = more than 1,000,000; average per month = 3,472.

So what do you conclude from all that?

Your claim that I labeled "all others that conflict with IBC's garbage as 'liebral pseudolgist' ", is pseudology. I did not label all such others liebral pseudologists. I specifically labeled the NYT, and the UN as liebral pseudologists. And earlier I also specifically labeled ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN as liebral pseudologists.

xingu wrote:
I also would like to know just what Saddam's death rate has to do with what is currently occurring in Iraq.

This IS the key question for ican. How other country's leader treats their citizens is an oxymoron as an argument; there are too many leaders in the past and current history to make this a justification for our preemptive attack and occupation of any country, because we don't have enough resources to control it. Other leaders killing their innnocents doesn't justify our killing of their innocents. Any attempt to justify our involvement and killing of innocents based on any leader's tyrany is an oxymoron; he/she killed them, so we are allowed to kill them too!

McG, You're a moron; our forces have killed over 30,000 innocent Iraqis - and growing. This is only an estimate, because our government doesn't do body counts.

cicerone imposter wrote:

McG, You're a moron; our forces have killed over 30,000 innocent Iraqis - and growing. This is only an estimate, because our government doesn't do body counts.

How many guilty ones have we killed, or were they all innocent?

The US not only doesn't do body counts, but disallows the showing of flag drapped coffins coming home from the war.

Bushco claims it would show "disrespect."

Go figure.

LBJ wouldnt allow it either.
Neither would Nixon.

Are you saying that they were wrong also?

Afghanistan close to anarchy, warns general

· Nato commander's view in stark contrast to ministers'
· Forces short of equipment and 'running out of time'

Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday July 22, 2006
The Guardian

The most senior British military commander in Afghanistan yesterday described the situation in the country as "close to anarchy" with feuding foreign agencies and unethical private security companies compounding problems caused by local corruption.
The stark warning came from Lieutenant General David Richards, head of Nato's international security force in Afghanistan, who warned that western forces there were short of equipment and were "running out of time" if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people.

The assumption within Nato countries had been that the environment in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2002 would be benign, Gen Richards said. "That is clearly not the case," he said yesterday. He referred to disputes between tribes crossing the border with Pakistan, and divisions between religious and secular factions cynically manipulated by "anarcho-warlords".

Gloom descends on Iraqi leaders as civil war looms
Fri Jul 21, 2006 2:16 PM BST
Email This Article | Print This Article | RSS [-] Text [+] By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.

Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.

Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.


"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said -- anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq's unity.

Sources: Negroponte Blocks CIA Analysis of Iraq "Civil War"
Posted on Friday, July 21, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
SourcesI reported in May that despite the deteriorating situation in Iraq, no National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been produced on that country since the summer of 2004. The last NIE, a classified document that the CIA describes as "the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue," was rejected by the Bush Administration (after being leaked to the New York Times) as being too negative, though its grim assessment subsequently proved to be highly accurate.

The situation has gotten even darker since my initial story?-a United Nations report cited in Wednesday's New York Times found that an average of more than 100 Iraqi civilians were killed each day in June?-and I've learned from two sources that some senior figures at the CIA, along with a number of Iraq analysts, have been pushing to produce a new NIE. They've been stonewalled, however, by John Negroponte, the administration's Director of National Intelligence, who knows that any honest take on the situation would produce an NIE even more pessimistic than the 2004 version. That could create problems on the Hill and, if it is leaked as the last one was, with the public as well.

"What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?" asked one person familiar with the situation. "The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters." Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, "doesn't want the president to have to deal with that."

A United Nations report released this week says that the death toll among Iraqi civilians since January 2006 is 14,338. The number killed has been rising steadily each month, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June. That report significantly understates the actual totals. The U.N. relied on official data reported by the Iraqi government, which is prone to omit some of the dead. But in any case the situation in Iraq is so chaotic that it is impossible to count their numbers, especially in far-flung provinces. Still, the U.N.'s figures far surpassed previous estimates of casualties from any source.

The toll among ordinary Iraqis is immeasurable. Iraqis are dying in ones and twos, in a wave of rampant murders, kidnappings, and assassinations throughout the country. They are dying in fives and tens, through roadside bombs, car bombs, and sectarian violence. And they are dying in large numbers, in scores, as organized armies carry out atrocity after atrocity in brazen, public attacks.

On July 9, in a first, scores of uniformed Shiite militiamen invaded and cut off a Sunni neighborhood in a Baghdad suburb and carried out a bloody pogrom. The heavily armed Shiite gunmen systematically singled out Sunni men, woman and children and shot them in cold blood, sometimes entering homes and murdering entire families in a face-to-face orgy of slaughter that lasted for hours, leaving as many as 60 dead. Since then, violence in Iraq has spiraled out of all control, in a wave of bombings and killing beyond anything that the country has seen since 2003?-worse, even, than the outburst that followed the Feb. 22 bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra. Since July 9, freelance gunmen, militias, and paramilitary armies have attacked buses and minivans, killing all aboard, and they have carried out mass kidnappings of scores of Iraqis at a time. Some of the violence seems literally senseless, as this July 13 report reveals:

Security forces said the bodies of 20 bus drivers kidnapped earlier in the day from a bus station in Miqdadiya north of Baghdad were found in a village to the north. They had been blindfolded, bound and shot in the back of the head. Major General Ghassan al-Bawi, the police chief of Diyala province, said the kidnappings aimed to undermine a recent reconciliation accord agreed by Sunni and Shiite tribes in the area. He said 10 of the drivers were Sunni, the rest Shiite…

Among the most horrific incidents, on July 17 Sunni gunmen invaded and surrounded a largely Shiite crowd in a marketplace in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, and using assault rifles, machine guns, and rocket propelled grenades, killed 48 people in broad daylight?-an attack described as revenge for the July 9 massacre. The next day, a suicide bomber in a truck killed 59 people in Kufa, a Shiite city in south central Iraq.

In nearly all of these cases, Iraqi security forces were either powerless to intervene or chose not to do so. In some cases, the perpetrators themselves are believed to have been members of the Iraqi police or Interior Ministry forces. And in Mahmudiya, according to some reports, U.S. forces stood by and decided not to act, and a U.S. commander told the press that the United States will not intervene in Iraq's civil war strife. So much for the U.S. presence in Iraq preventing civil war.