Billmon:
The problem, Ralphy boy, is that you and your kind already have asked them to do just that — repeatedly …
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October 11, 2006
WB: The Peters Principle
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A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.
…
But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
Dozens of Bodies Found in Baghdad
Dozens of explosions rocked the capital for several hours on Tuesday night, alarming residents more used to sporadic mortar and rocket attacks, but the U.S. military said the cause was a fire at an ammunition dump at a U.S. base in southern Baghdad.
“The fire ignited tank and artillery ordnance as well as small arms ammunition,” the military said in a statement.
U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver told Reuters the cause of the fire, which lit up the night sky, was under investigation.
Best guess, there is a lot of such things happening, but we only learn about it when reporters actually hear/see the explosions and start asking questions.
Ralph Peters:
“If Iraq does fail, the cold truth is that the United States will do fine. We’ll honor our dead, salve the wounds to our vanity and march on stronger than ever (with the world’s most powerful and most experienced military). But the Middle East will have revealed itself as hopeless.”
Wow……
Posted by: anna missed | Oct 11 2006 4:45 utc | 5
@anna missed #5
All I can do is shake my head, I can’t even put a sentence together, dumbstruck.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 11 2006 5:07 utc | 6
Blitzer & Condi in orchestrated CIA-asset mode
Lipstick on pigs and all that…
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 11 2006 5:11 utc | 7
More than 150’000 deads a year? Congratulations, still not Vienam, but coming close, and already far worse than anything Saddam ever did. Mission accomplished indeed.
And the “they included common murders in it” defense is bullshit. We’re speaking of a country 1/10 of US population. US doesn’t have 1.5 mio murders a year, last time I checked.
Posted by: CluelessJoe | Oct 11 2006 7:38 utc | 8
Fine paper by Louis J Cantori on Imperialism posted on Pat Lang’s blog:
[…] It is also a useful marker to inform us as to “What Comes Next”, the most important of our considerations.
Robert D. Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (see the review by John Grey, “The Mirage of Empire” in New York Review of Books, January 12, 2006, pp. 4-8, where the subject of “empire” is also discussed more broadly.) is important for its concrete and sympathetic discussion of imperialism and the American military. For example, Kaplan has a chapter entitled “Injun Country”. “Injun country” is the term used by soldiers on the ground to describe their relationship to the culture of their adversaries. It turns out that metaphorically, the “injuns” in North America in the nineteenth century and those in Iraq or wherever else that American troops fight is a foe whose language and culture is not only not known but need not be crucially known. One reason is the imperative of combat but another more telling one in reference to policy is the importance of what is called American “exceptionalism”(originating with Alexis De Tocqueville), meaning that the American political experience is so unique and so superior in terms of individualism , freedom, equality ,secularism etc. that the point of view of others pales by comparison. America is after all, especially in foreign policy, always on a mission. It follows, therefore, that the American policy of democratization is neither benign nor technical. Instead, such “democratization “ is really “democracism” i.e. the use of the appeal of the ideology of democracy as a means to achieve American control and influence. The perception of others who see this as hypocritical generates the near world wide unanimity of hatred for the United States which in turn fuels the fire of “terrorism”. The consequence is that the “signaling” of American policy such as the policy of democratization and the attitude of troops in this instance and that of Secretary Rice at a higher level, is unilateral or one way in terms of communication (for example, as in paraphrasing actual statements by Rice, “We are not in need of diplomatic representation in Syria nor direct communication with Iran, because these parties already know what needs to be done and, also, the massive aerial bombing of Lebanon represented the birth pangs of democracy.”) .
[…] During this period, America will be indeed following the path of international policy futility labeled “stay the course.” In addition and more speculatively, one might also note that the global system may also be seeing a similar turn from global American unilateralism and unidirectional globalization to a balanced system of a more self-confident Europe plus America and India on the one hand and Russia and China on the other in a rivalry for markets and energy in central and south Asia and, most importantly, in the Middle East.. What may appear in the next foreseeable time period is an American policy that will be disoriented and weakened in capacity in both the Middle East and internationally. This suggests that in the next phase in especially the strategically important Middle East and in the protection against terrorism, American policy will become defensive with an emphasis upon domestic as opposed to international means. America will in effect circle the wagons as it falls back upon that which it can manage and not the international environment over which it is losing control. In short, the past until now may not necessarily be the worse, that may be yet to come.”
Posted by: anna missed | Oct 11 2006 7:57 utc | 9
The Alive in Baghdad link reminds me: nothing from Riverbend at Baghdad Burning for over two months now.
@ anna missed #5: that Ralph Peters quote ranks right up there with some of Condi’s pronouncements of “impatience” with the Iraqi’s re: their slowness in “standing up so we can stand down.” I guess that particular talking point didn’t play well and now seems to have been shelved. Impatience……..sheeesh.
re #5. yes, i noticed that sentence when i first read the article. i am feeling kind of numb. i tried to sleep but it is impossible. i keep thinking of the casualties. i think about all those people having holes drilled into them, what are the chances they felt less pain than any one of us. no chance. what are the chances their loved ones hurt less from their loss than i would. no chance. what do you do with the frustration, anger, hate. really i hate what we have brought to iraq. that is not a word i use lightly. these lives, so much pain these people must feel every moment, and for the most part totally powerless. tomorrow it will be a million.
a crime against humanity. last night(actually pre dawn)i imagined certain people i feel responsible having holes drilled into them. i suppose this won’t do any good, my imagining. i suppose my good cry won’t make anything better. sorry. i just had to say it.
Posted by: annie | Oct 11 2006 13:30 utc | 11
So let’s see if I retained anything from all those arithmetic courses I took.
What if we were occupied by a bunch of trigger happy aliens under the control of arrogant chickenhawk policy wonks determined to impose their flakey half-baked imperial delusions on us?
Iraq: 24 million; 600 thousand dead
USA: 300 million; ??? thousand dead
??? thousand dead= 600K dead X 300/24= 7,500K dead.
Jeepers. 7.5 million dead in three years. Yikes!!!
That would be a national catastrophe and an international crime of epic proportions.
Thank the lord we have a national security elite that regards our protection as their paramount concern.
Ahoy, Condi. Do the birth pangs! Citizen.
Posted by: Pvt. Keepout | Oct 11 2006 14:28 utc | 12
annie,
I think we feel the same – we just wish there was some way to make the evil people who brought this about UNDERSTAND the suffering they have caused.
Being non-violent, I hope the newly dead come and visit them in their dreams/nightmares and they never have another peaceful night’s sleep.
But I would bet they sleep just fine, since they are psychopaths.
Posted by: Susan | Oct 11 2006 14:47 utc | 13
montysanto, about riverbend. i saw in my email recently that there is a film about her, so perhaps she is busy with that? i believe there is a screening coming up in new york or it may have already happened.
Posted by: conchita | Oct 11 2006 15:35 utc | 14
iraq, other than being an exercise in imperial violence has become day by day, a tidal wave of murder
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 11 2006 17:02 utc | 15
@annie #11
Right there with you, friend. Each day I am aware that I am no better than all those good Germans who just stood by mute – and I am in fact much worse because I can’t say, “I didn’t know.” Add to that the pain of the awareness that we have also destroyed so very much in the way of preserved history — archives, books, works of art, archeological sites that centuries of so-called “backwards A-rabs” took such huge pains to carefully and lovingly honor and preserve…” we have actually in that sense committed crimes against humanity and civilization that go beyond even the irreparable harm to Iraq as a modern-day nation state. What gets me the most is that most Americans are so blithely unaware of any of this.
Posted by: Bea | Oct 11 2006 18:40 utc | 16