THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

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According to your source, as of 2/10/2006 the number of civilians killed directly by and in the war the US and its coalition forces has waged in Iraq is 32,041.
Right and as of 2/13/206 that number is 32,088. According to my source, aproximately 22,000 of those were civilians murdered by Saddamists & al-Qaeda et al. If I interpret you correctly, you are blaming the coalition for those 22,000 as well as the approximately 10,000 the Coalition unintentionally killed. I hope I'm wrong, because that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

It is obvious to me that if the Saddamists & al-Qaeda et al were to stop murdering their fellow Iraqi civilians and concentrated instead on killing members of the Coalition, the Bush administration would be compelled by Republicans and Democrats alike to withdraw our troops from Iraq post haste. Obviously, the reason why the Saddamists & al-Qaeda et al don't do that is because that does not help them achieve their real objective.

I bet their real objective is to regain their lost tyrannical power and avoid having to share power with Iraqis they once subjugated.

The US and the coalition forces did not inadvertently wage war in Iraq. The US and the coalition forces waged this war deliberately. The civilians murdered by and in this war are directly the result of this deliberately war waged by the US and the coalition forces. According to what you've written, mass murder is fanatical, and mass murder is a malignancy.
That statement of yours makes no sense whatsoever to me, because it is nothing more than a semantic manipulation that defies reality. This statement obscures who is actually perpetrating the murders of Iraqi civilians, and instead attributes those murders to those attempting to stop those murders..

Had the US and the coalition forces not waged war against Iraq, the US and the coalition forces would not be murdering civilians in their attempts to kill or capture members of the Saddamist & al-Qaeda et al crowd, and the Saddamist & al-Qaeda et al crowd would not be mass murdering civilians in response to the US' and the coalition forces war waged against Iraq.
That statement of yours makes no sense whatsoever to me. You did not mention that the Saddamists & al-Qaeda et al crowd would have continued murdering more than 65 instead of 29 civilians per day like they did before we invaded Iraq. In the period, 1/1/2003 to 2/13/2006, instead of 32,088 Iraqi civilians killed, there would have been 74,035 Iraqi civilians killed.

If your response to that were , we don't know that 65 per day murder rate would have continued if we had not invaded. My response to that would be, we don't know any reason why that 65 per day murder rate would not have continued, if we had not invaded.

Even if you argue that this mass murdering fanaticism is necessary, the fact remains that it is mass murdering fanaticism. The difference, merely, is that you support the mass murdering fanaticism of the US and coalition forces malignancy over the fanaticism of the Saddamist & al-Qaeda et al mass murdering malignancies.
This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Your supposition about what you allege I might argue is baseless as well as wrong.

ican wrote:

Would any of you like to speculate on the cause or causes of our significant political differences?

It's pretty simple, really. You support mass murdering fanatical malignancy. Others, including I, do not.
This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Your supposition about what I support is wrong. This statement appears derived from your earlier semantic manipulations that deny reality.

Joseph Goebbels performed similar kinds of semantic manipulations circa 1940. Thanks to Joseph, these kinds of semantic manipulations that deny reality, are now easy to recognize by most of us.

InfraBlue wrote:

And, what should be done with mass murdering malignancies, again?

If our goal is getting these fanatics -- these mass murderers of civilians; these mass murdering malignancies -- to completely abandon their repeatedly stated goals,then the only thing that will ultimately get these fanatics to completely abandon their repeatedly stated goals, is to exterminate them.

Ironically, while Americans appear to be growing more pessimistic about Iraq’s future, Iraqis are growing more optimistic. According to a poll conducted by Iraqis affiliated with Iraqi Universities, two-thirds of Iraqis believe they are better off now than under Saddam’s dictatorship, and 82 percent are confident that they will be better off a year from now than they are today. An October survey conducted by the International Republican Institute found that 47 percent of Iraqis believed that their country is headed in the right direction, while 37 percent believed that it was going in the wrong direction. And 56 percent believed the situation would get better in six months, while only 16 percent believed the situation would get worse.

"A rose is a rose is a rose.!" So is a malignancy!

Sectarian Violence Surges After Shrine Bombing
Curfews Extended; Popular Arab Journalist Kidnapped and Killed

By Bassam Sebti, Jonathan finer and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 23, 2006; 8:15 AM



BAGHDAD, Feb. 23 -- A wave of sectarian violence, executions and recrimination swept Iraq Thursday following Wednesday's attack on a revered Shiite shrine.

Authorities in Baghdad, struggling to restore order, expanded an existing curfew in an effort to get people off the streets after dark. They cancelled all leaves for Iraqi security forces.

Politically, the process of negotiating a new government appeared to be in even deeper trouble than before, as some Sunni politicians, protesting what they said was a lack of protection for Sunni mosques attacked overnight, said they were pulling out of the negotiations.

There were a great number of disturbances reported across the country Wednesday night and Thursday, too many to accurately track let alone verify.

In four separate areas around Baghdad, authorities found the bodies of 40 men shot dead, an interior ministry spokesman said Thursday.

In Baqubah, gunmen in several vehicles killed at least three dozen people in buses who were heading to a protest of the mosque bombing, said Gen. Amir Al-Jubouri, Diyala deputy police chief. The riders, Sunnis and Shiites, were stopped by the gunmen who set up their own checkpoint. Their bodies were found in a creek.

Also in Baqubah, a suicide bomber blew up himself amid a group of Iraqi army soldiers in a public market, killing 9 soldiers and two civilians and wounded 19 others, said Ali Al-Khayyam, a spokesmen for the JCC, the Joint Coordination Center.

In the same city, 20 miles north of Baghdad, a muezzin at a Sunni mosque was killed and two of his bodyguards were wounded Wednesday when four armed men attacked the mosque, eyewitnesses said. The four men, dressed in black and wearing masks, entered the mosque just when preachers were getting ready to hold the morning prayers, said Ali Kadhum, 32, who is one of the two bodyguards wounded in the attack. "When they first came in shooting, we hid in the preachers room," Kadhum said, "then they through hand grenades inside the room."

In Samarra, armed men kidnapped and killed a reporter of al-Arabiya, a Dubai-based news channel, along with two of her crew. Atwar Bahjat, 26, was shot dead in northern Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, the channel reported.

All told, Interior Ministry officials said more than 100 people were killed.

And all told, the Muslim Scholars Association in Iraq said 168 Sunni mosques were attacked in the last 24 hours.

The stress created an even more difficult climate for the political process, in which minority Sunnis, majority Shiites and Kurds are struggling to put together a new government.

Tariq al Hashemi, of the Iraq Accordance Front, the main Sunni Muslim bloc, said his group has decided "to suspend negotiations over forming a new government." It also boycotted a meeting of reconciliation set for today with President Jalal Talabani.

Iraq's leading Sunni Muslim religious organization blamed top Shiite clerics on Thursday for fueling sectarian tension that has killed dozens of Sunnis over the past 24 hours, the Reuters news service reported. "The Muslim Clerics Association points the finger of blame at certain Shiite religious authorities for calling for demonstrations" following the attack on the Samarra mosque, said spokesman Sheikh Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi, Reuters reported.

The upsurge in violence followed Wednesday's attack in which bombers blasted the gilded dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra into naked steel and gaping blue sky in a provocative assault that roused tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites into angry protests and deadly clashes.

Though no casualties were reported in the blast, the bombing was the most destructive attack on a major shrine since the U.S. invasion, and Iraqi leaders said it was meant to draw Iraq's majority population of Shiites and the minority of Sunnis into war. "This is as 9/11 in the United States," said Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite and one of Iraq's two vice presidents.

The bodies were those of civilians, said Lt. Mukhallad Ahmed Saeid, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. They "were found handcuffed, blindfolded and shot dead," he stated. .

He said police found 14 bodies in Kasraw Atash area in northern Baghdad, 12 in Nahrwan in northeastern Baghdad, eight in Rustumiya in eastern Baghdad and six in Taji in northern Baghdad.

Further details on the killings were scarce Thursday.

Several neighborhoods bore the scars of retaliatory violence. In Idreesi, east of downtown, a blackened Sunni mosque, its windows shattered, stood locked behind an iron gate. Campaign posters for Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi had been torn from the outer wall. Gunmen had shot at the building with rifles Wednesday afternoon, residents said, before returning with fuel cans and setting it ablaze.

The Al-Arabiya crew, according to Ahmed Al-Salih, a reporter for the network, was kidnapped as it was covering the explosion at the Shrine in Samarra. "She was covering the news from the boundaries of Samarra because the security forces blocked all the entrances and exits" Salih said.

Salih said that Anmar Ashour, a cameraman for a Turkish news agency was with Bahjat at the time she was kidnapped but he escaped.

Bahjat joined Al-Arabiya three weeks ago, Salih said. She was previously a correspondent for Al-Jazeera, the Arabic language news organization. She was also a writer, an artist and a poetess, her colleagues said.

Hadeer Al-Rubaie, another colleague of Bahjat said that "She was assigned in Kirkuk to report on the city." When the Samara events happened, Rubaie said, "She called and said she is going to Samarra to report on the attack. I tried to tell her not to go because it is very dangerous but she insisted to go."

More than 60 other journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion to Iraq in 2003, including three other correspondents for Al-Arabiya.

In March of 2004, correspondent Ali al-Khatib and cameraman Ali Abdel-Aziz were killed near a U.S. military checkpoint while covering the aftermath of a rocket attack on the Burj al-Hayat hotel in Baghdad.

Another Al-Arabiya corespondent, Jawad Kadhim, was seriously wounded last year when gunmen shot him in a failed attempt to kidnap him.

Wednesday, after the mosque bombing, President Bush, as well as top U.S. military and civilian representatives here, appealed for calm.

In Baghdad, Shiite boys and men abruptly abandoned classrooms, homes and jobs to muster outside the headquarters of the influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the heart of Sadr City, the slum named for the cleric's father.

"This is a day we will never forget," said Naseer Sabah, 24, who had left his job at a pastry factory without changing clothes to join the black-clad Shiite militia fighters clutching pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenade launchers outside Sadr's headquarters. Thousands converged on the Sadr offices, on foot or in buses and pickup trucks packed with armed men hanging out the windows.

"We await the orders of our preachers," teenagers around Sabah cried.

"We are the soldiers of the clerics," Shiite protesters chanted in Karrada, another of Baghdad's Shiite neighborhoods. Demonstrators there shouted a warning to their enemies: "If they are up to it, let them face us."

Other protests were reported in the predominantly Shiite cities of Najaf, Karbala, Basra and elsewhere.

Sunni political leaders said retaliatory attacks hit more than 20 Sunni mosques across Iraq with bombs, gunfire or arson. Authorities reported at least 18 people killed in the aftermath, including two Sunni clerics. In one incident, in Basra in southern Iraq, police said gunmen in police uniforms broke into a jail, seized 12 Sunni men and later killed them, according to the Reuters news agency.

Many of Baghdad's millions shuttered shops and left work early, rushing home to tense neighborhoods where gunfire rang out overnight. In one neighborhood, families lay on the floors of their houses to evade bullets as militiamen loyal to Sadr confronted Iraqi troops backed by U.S. military helicopters outside a Sunni site.

REALITY: The U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi government have made substantial progress in eliminating insurgent strongholds in Fallujah, Mosul, Najaf, Samara, and Tal Afar, and in many smaller towns in the western Anbar province along the Syrian border. Most of Iraq is secure from major guerrilla attacks, particularly the predominantly Shiite south and the predominantly Kurdish north, which actively support the Iraqi government. Most insurgent attacks are mounted in the heavily Sunni Arab central and western portions of Iraq, although small numbers of insurgents continue to launch terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings at soft targets, throughout the country. Outside of Iraq's Sunni heartland, which benefited the most from Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime, the insurgents lack popular support. Their terrorist strategy has failed to intimidate Iraqi Shiites, Kurds, Turcomans, and Assyrians, who altogether comprise more than 80 percent of Iraq's population.

As I said, Some Iraqi's lives are improving, others aren't. Ask any of the Kurds if their lot has improved. I bet you a donut they say it has.