At 07:36 PM 03/23/2003 -0800, James A. Donald wrote:
No one (except the US military which hopes to rule an intact Iraq)
least of all the protestors, care how many Iraqis get killed.
Who recollects how many Iraqis were killed the last time around?
James, I agree with you more often than I disagree with you,
(and in fact I'll agree with you on a different point below),
but in this case your doctrinaire jingoism is not only unfair,
it's 180 degrees inaccurate.
During Phase I of this war (I won't call it "the last time",
because we've maintained an embargo and a no-fly zone and
hostile agents (mainly UN inspectors) in their territory,
so essentially that war hasn't stopped),
US propaganda very seldom discussed Iraqi casualties,
while focusing very heavily on the few Invader casualties,
mostly US but occasionally deigning to admit to the existence of
British and Canadian and sometimes other invader casualties.
There were a few "body count" speeches, with Schwartzkopf announcing
(IIRC) about 20,000 and then about 50,000 deaths, mainly military,
and later on someone, I think Rumsfeld, announcing about 200K
including civilians. But there were very few speeches like that,
and they were usually doing a "We're kicking their asses" deal.
Mostly you'll hear that from anti-war sources (and by the way,
I got thrown off of Federal property for holding a sign about it
near the entrance when there was a pro-war rally going on.)
Government sources mainly talked about what a great job they were doing
with precision-targeted smart weapons (glossing over the fact that
95-75% of the ordnance used was dumb iron bombs.)
Meanwhile, if you want to find the UN estimates of 500K - 1.5M deaths from
the war and early aftermath and the years of bad water because
the Invaders destroyed their water systems and the Embargo prevented
importation of water purification equipment, you've either got to
look it up yourself or listen to anti-war protestors -
you won't hear it from the pro-war side. Now, if you want to argue
that the anti-war side are also a bunch of chauvinists who are
more interested in a million dead Iraqi children as a debating point
than as human beings that they care about individually, well go ahead,
but at least the lefties go to the work of counting them,
while the pro-war side pretend they don't exist at all.
Mike Rosing:
> > The US technology is orders of magnitude better, they can
> > easily destroy large armies.
Harmon Seaver:
> Not inside the cities they can't, not without tons of
> collateral damage, which will crucify Dubbya and Blair.
.....
James:
Furthermore, the plan appears to be to take
cities as they were taken in Afghanistan, by laying seige to
them and fostering revolt from within, a process that in
Afghanistan took cities with very few civilian casualties.
That's probably correct - especially after taking out the
anti-aircraft capabilities, they can just about take out every
truck that tries to drive down the street, doing a much more
thorough version of a siege than medieval warfare ever had.
Not sure it's easy to do that without civilian casualties,
especially if you're expecting the civilians to overthrow their
military government, and if the military can seize most of the food,
but it certainly can be done with a minimum of Invader casualties,
unlike the problems that Allies liberating Germany or
Nazis invading Russia went through.
Rome was not burnt in a day.
Now _that's_ a nice line :-)
