We're against arming Iraq against Iran and vice versa. We're against arming Al Qaeda against Russia. Once that genie out of the bottle, I believe you do what you can to set things right for the people affected, and go home. So we propped up Saddam, we are sorta obligated to take him out. Like arresting Noriega in Panama - get in, get the mission done, and leave.
That's your personal opinion, and contrary to the Libertarian viewpoint. You're a teabagger republican, and have little in common with true Libertarians.
It's not contrary to the Libertarian viewpoint. Keep throwing out the bullshit, Maris, it's fun to laugh at those posts.
Ron Paul opposes abortion. I do not. The thing is, I agree with him that we should bring the troops home and not intervene anymore. However, we HAVE ALREADY DONE GREAT DAMAGE via our intervention, so the question to me is whether we owe it to the Iraqi people (and others, perhaps) to at least try to mitigate the generations of suffering we participated in.
So 99% of the time you're a warmonger, just not the first 1% part when they lie to everyone, and you believe that war propaganda and keep repeating it for years. And when you socialize with some people, and they decide, let's have some fun and kill this guy outside the club, you oppose it the first 1% of the murder, but once it's inevitable you figure that they need your help so you bury the body.
Backwards. 99.9999% of the time, I don't want any part of us being involved in some war. And 100% of the time I don't want us propping up some government or dictator in some country. The only lies I've been seeing are the ridiculous "millions" figure for how many people died in Iraq during the invasion and occupation. Basic math and a minimal amount of common sense disprove this myth. Let's use just a "million" figure, lower than "millions" you lie about. Consider 20K were killed during the invasion, leaving 980,000 over 10 years and you come up with 268 killed per day. That is the worst day, when simultaneous bombings occurred in multiple places in the country. That's for a "million," not "millions."
When will you ever learn not to doubt my irrefutable truths. I've often shown you the Wikipedia article with the estimates of Iraqi deaths (war-caused including noncombat), ranging from the U.S. propaganda version (that bogus Body Count thing you always link to) to the most famous medical journal in the world (the Lancet). As you well-know after lo so long, the Lancet laboriously calculated 1.5 million as of a few years ago. Add a few years, plus the half-million Iraqi children that the U.N. estimates died in the siege mandated by Bush I and executed by Clinton like a good servant, and you get over 2 million, which is what the English language calls, plural millions. Edit: I think it was the Lancet that had the 1.5M estimate. Maybe they were second-highest. You look it up this time instead of me.
Like I said, do the math. To come up with 1.5m over 8 years is an absurd daily number. Far beyond the bloodiest days of the occupation. The Lancet study has been shown to be flawed. You repeat those lies.
You wanted me to "look it up this time" instead of you. I find not a single organization or study that claims 1.5M deaths. You're pulling stuff out of your ass. The Lancet study came up with a 650,000 figure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, was quoted in an interview for Nature.com saying that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts. "Why are they doing this?" she asks. "It's because of the elections.".[32] However, another interviewer a week later paints a more measured picture of her criticisms: "She has some methodological concerns about the paper, including the use of local people — who might have opposed the occupation — as interviewers. She also points out that the result does not fit with any she has recorded in 15 years of studying conflict zones. Even in Darfur, where armed groups have wiped out whole villages, she says that researchers have not recorded the 500 predominately violent deaths per day that the Johns Hopkins team estimates are occurring in Iraq. But overall Guha-Sapir says the paper contains the best data yet on the mortality rate in Iraq."[33] A subsequent article co-authored by Guha-Sapir and Olivier Degomme for CRED reviews the Lancet data in detail. It concludes that the Lancet overestimated deaths and that the war-related death toll was most likely to be around 125,000 for the period covered by the Lancet study, reaching its conclusions by correcting errors in the 2006 Lancet estimate and triangulating with data from IBC and ILCS.[34] Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer known for producing death estimates for the first Gulf War, evaluates the Lancet survey and other sources in a paper for the International Review of the Red Cross.[35] Among other criticisms, Daponte questions the reliability of pre-war estimates used in the Lancet study to derive its "excess deaths" estimate, and the ethical approval for the survey. She concludes that the most reliable information available to date is provided by the Iraq Family Health Survey, the Iraq Living Conditions Survey and Iraq Body Count. Mark van der Lann, professor of biostatistics and statistics at UC Berkeley, disputes the estimates of both Lancet studies on several grounds in a paper co-authored with writer Leon de Winter.[36] The authors argue that the confidence intervals in the Lancet study are too narrow, saying, "our statistical analysis could at most conclude that the total number of violent deaths is more than 100.000 with a 0.95 confidence — but this takes not into account various other potential biases in the original data." Among the main conclusions of their evaluation are that "the estimates based upon these data are extremely unreliable and cannot stand a decent scientific evaluation. It may be that the number of violent deaths is much higher than previously reported, but this specific report, just like the October 2004 report, cannot support the estimates that have been flying around the world on October 29, 2006. It is not science. It is propaganda." Borzou Daragahi Iraq correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, in an interview with PBS, questioned the study based on their earlier research in Iraq, saying, "Well, we think—the Los Angeles Times thinks these numbers are too large, depending on the extensive research we've done. Earlier this year, around June, the report was published at least in June, but the reporting was done over weeks earlier. We went to morgues, cemeteries, hospitals, health officials, and we gathered as many statistics as we could on the actual dead bodies, and the number we came up with around June was about at least 50,000. And that kind of jibed with some of the news report that were out there, the accumulation of news reports, in terms of the numbers killed. The U.N. says that there's about 3,000 a month being killed; that also fits in with our numbers and with morgue numbers. This number of 600,000 or more killed since the beginning of the war, it's way off our charts."[40][41] &c
Only a sociopath sees a point to be made by quibbling over whether millions or 1 million or 1 thousand or 100 or ten people are murdered. For arguement's sake, let's say the next war will kill only ten people. You and your 9 closest relatives. You probably think that's "unjust", so what should we do to "fix" that? Attend your funeral and kill the rest of your relatives?
I think the occupation was a debacle. We didn't kill many civilians - Iraqis were killing Iraqis with car bombs and militias, etc. By international law, we were responsible, as occupies, for every one of them. Only a liar would grossly inflate the figures. As if for political gain, or some sense of holier than thou bullshit. If a guy wit a machine gun is shooting at a crowd of people, you shoot the guy ASAP. Why? To save many more lives than the one life you take. We killed maybe 20,000 over there and saved millions.
kill everyone who owns a fast food restaurant, think of the millions of lives we would save fuck it, kill everyone who makes guns for a living, world peace
I don't think we or any corporation doing business with the govt. should be exporting weapons. Period.
What if the guy with the machine gun is defending his family from a religiously inflamed lynch mob? fixed.
http://www.bing.com/search?q="1,446,063" iraq&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq="1,446,063" iraq&sc=0-11&sp=-1&sk= The ORB survey estimated up to 1,446,063 deaths. The 1.5M number plus subsequent years plus the .5M in the Clinton years equals 2 million, ergo the word "millions." I have shown you this about 3 other times in the last 2 years, yet each time you bat your eyelashes innocently as if it's the first time you've heard it. The ORB study has of course taken criticism from its government-backed proxy competitors, with whom you side. Naturally, you disagree with all expert studies except the ones with the lowest numbers. Instead of criticizing the experts, why don't you criticize the military for covering up its own body count, which causes all this disagreement?
