Letters to the Editor
Dawggone
Published Letters: 451 Editor's Choice: 69
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Has anyone quantified what an "attack" means?
[Read the article: Pentagon still juking the stats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Months have passed and I Joe Citizen still has no idea how many Sunnis are working for the insurgency, how many of them are attacking US forces, how many attacking Shiites, Kurd's, the government, etc., how many Shiites are attacking Sunnis, how many are attacking the US, or it's ally(s?), how many Kurds are involved in fighting. Or how many Iraqis not openly firing at people are supporting those who are. Don'tcha think this might be something important to know before we send another 20 to 30 thousand troops into that meat grinder? Dontcha wonder why know supposedly upstanding well respected journalist hasn't asked such straight talkers like McCain if they know?
As for attacks, my guess is, depending on the history of warfare and the current history of Lebanon and other low level civil war or insurgencies, is that for every attack that results in serious numbers of casualties there are at least ten times that many that result in nothing more than a shooting spree with a few flesh wounds that are not reported. This probably explains the ISG finds in which they found over a thousand attacks but less than a hundred reported attacks. The reported ones led to casualties or major engagements. The unreported ones involved the odd handful of mortars landing within a compound or a firefight in which neither party could confirm or deny anyone got hurt. still, those were instances in which a person or groups of people, on their own, or under direct orders, attacked another person or group of people.
Add to this the number of alleged "criminal acts." If an American soldier or worker or foreign worker is kidnapped, that is a action reported. If an average Iraqi is kidnapped, or his/her spouse, child, relative, is that reported as an attack. And is that a criminal act merely for money for personal benefit, or an attack designed to finance the insurgency or sectarian violence. If the VietCong kidnapped wealthy South Vietnamese to use the ransom to buy guns or intelligence against Americans can we really call that a "criminal" but not insurgent act?
Read your newspapers. Check out your websites. And take everything your read about Iraq and multiply it by a factor of ten. Then consider before you post as to whether we should just get the heck out of there, should really trust this government to do the right thing (we shouldn't) or find some other alternative. But don't make that decision in the fantasy of a few killed or a sudden burst of violence or the so called "fact" that so many provinces are doing so well. (Did you know that apart from Darfur, 90 percent of Sudan is genocide free?)
If we weren't America this would be criminal. Actually it is, and because we are America this should be criminal and those responsible should be held responsible.
Or we are really not America. At least not the one I believed in.
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Sounds like a good deal.
[Read the article: Exiling Dick Morris]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'd gladly vote for Hillary if Dick Morris agreed to emigrate if she won. Hell, that should be one of her campaign slogans. "Vote for me and the toe sucker is gone!"
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Bush's Waterloo
[Read the article: Behind Bush's "new way forward"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The French had their own "great battle" plan 52 years ago. It was called Dien Bien Phu. We know how that turned out. Putting 30,000 more troops in a city of several million to defeat both the insurgents and militias may be even more foolhardy than anything the French came up with. I don't know if he has noticed, but the violence is accellerating. What this just might mean is that the insurgents and militias are growing, getting more arms and improving their tactics and strategy. More importantly, the insurgents never have to fight a pitched battle to defeat as they can quickly melt away into the populace or country side. We can kill a few of them, capture a few of them, maybe even take or kill a second in command or two. What will never happen is the sight of the "leader" of the insurgency or militias handing his sword to a victorious American general while GIs cheer and Sunnis and Shiites pile up their weapons and walk single file home to herd goats or make falafals.
Which begs the question, are these thinktank intellectuals incredibly stupid or do they have some nefarious plan to foment even more violence. Underneath the American Enterprise Institute is there some secret chamber straight out of the DaVinci code where virgins are sacrificed before Richard Perle while the neocons feast on her blood and pray to Baal?
It doesn't matter what political bent one may be to see that the military option is not an option and for reasons as plain as the smoke rising from the streets of Baghdad. Are they just self deluded? Do they sit in front of PowerPoint charts listing numbers, wealth, size, thinktanks? Do they just compare military hardware, relative IQ? Do they take proportionate maps of America and place them over a map of Iraq and think, "Our country is so much bigger than theirs. How can we lose?" Can people with years of education be this incredibly stupid? And if so, how did they get to such positions of influence?
By contrast, the catastrophic decisions that led to WWI make more sense than the decisions preceding the Iraq fiasco. I just hope that in years to come while historians dissect the war and the Bush presidency, someone will do a cohesive study and how so many "bright" people could be so incomprehendingly dim.