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I have here a list of the names of 207 jews
Rumsfeld
Wolfowitz

I have here a list of the names of 207 negroes
Colin Powell
Condi Rice

I have here a list of the names of 207 scumericans
Bush
US Constitution

I have here a list of the names of 207 scumerican opinions
support for nazi-style invasion

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
versus
Censorship
more Censorship

Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
versus
Murder
Gangster justice

Maybe the Iraqis are merely exercising their "Right to bear Arms" in their own country against a foreign invader.

Not long after 2001-09-11 attrocities, I saw the words 'NUKE 'EM' scrawled in the grime on the back of a semi truck trailer traveling down the highway.

That the USA didn't rain down instant death and destruction on the homeland(s) of those perceived responsible for the attacks shows a commendable measure of restraint on the USA's behalf not to 'replay' Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In a ghoulish(?) coincidence, the death toll at Pearl Harbor (1941-12-07) is about the same as that of '9/11'. Is it no wonder that the events of 2001-09-11 are now inextricably linked to the date 'which will live in infamy': 1941-12-07?

What a day '9/11' was....

The attacks were vivid, simple, and brutal.

THEY GOT THE WHOLE WORLD TO TAKE NOTICE--the hallmark of such activites.

As an 'encore' of sorts, we now have the terrible events of '3/11' in Madrid, Spain (2004-03-11).

How does one defend against such attacks by using 'the right tool for the right job' without the 'kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' results one would get using nukes in retaliation against the homeland(s) of the perpetrators of such attacks? Take a look at what happened in the past:

Pearl Harbor: 2,403 dead. Source.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki: 350,000 dead. Source.

Take a look at what is happening now in Iraq:

US soldiers killed: 544 Source.

Iraqi civillians killed: 8,700-10,000+ Source.

The punishment(s) doesn't seem to fit the crime to me....

OK. Autonomous Fighting Machines are bad. I agree with you. Or, at least, I can't think of a reason they're good. (oh, here's one: I'd rather have coallition soldiers home and AFMs killing the terrorists, but that's such a pipe dream it's not worth going into.)

But, self-driving vehicles are good. And saying that a failed attempt at getting them working is *great* news is like chopping down a forest because you don't like one tree.

Sample cost/beneift analysis: Krugman at the NYTimes just wrote about this stat: 117 deaths/day on America's highways. That's 43,000 deaths/year. Let's assume that robotic cars reduce this number to 10% of it's current rate. That's 106 lives/day or 38,700 lives/year saved. Currently the only Iraq Body Count I could find (I don't have any reason to trust these numbers) puts the body count for the war at "over 10,000". So, after making lots of assumptions: robotic cars would save 3 times as many lives in America in a year as one war in Iraq would cost. Not too shabby. I can't substantively defend these numbers, since they're all vague, but it does show a reasonable expectation of benefit from this research. You are right about one thing--the political cost of America going to war is greatly reduced if actual American lives are not at risk.

To object to robotic vehicles is like saying nuclear power is bad because people who design power plants can figure out how to build bombs.

Or fire is bad because it can be used to burn down villages.

I think your fears are overblown. Should they be noted? Sure. But I say: don't stop the DARPA challenge just because of a Skynet nightmare.

Oh yeah. The "other ways" no one bothers to mention, or the ones that involve putting light pressure on Saddam so maybe, maybe he will give up his throne in 20 years or so.

no you ignorant fuck, the "other ways" that don't involve thousands of iraqi civilian casualties and little kids getting all their limbs blown off, while american soldiers write messages to them on their missiles.

have you ever *really* thought what would happen if a ship anchored off new york and shot thousands of missiles straight into nyc?

would that be ok with you if it was for good reason, ie; to remove a dictator?

know anyone in nyc?

yes, saddam had to go, he tortured his own people, etc, etc, etc, i have met iraqis personally that are glad he's gone, but that was not the way to do it.

The war in Iraq proved to have the least number of non-combatant casualties of ANY war, EVER before.

Completely false.

A quite conventional war, the Falklands War, fought in 1982 between England and Argentina had a 1 figure count for civilian casualties: 3. Check here: House on the outskirts of Stanley hit by British shelling, causing the only civilian casualties of the war. Killed in Action: Mrs Doreen Bonner , Mrs Mary Goodwin , Mrs Susan Whitley .

The Iraq War had a lot more casualties. Check for estimates at http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ (about 9000 civilian casualties).

You sir, are extremely misinformed. The fact that you pushed some of the buttons means nothing to me.

What about:

The restaruant and the three houses that were destroyed because we thought Saddam "might" have been there. He wasn't, we killed dozens of civilians. The stories about "smart" bombs missing their target are plentiful, but the targets themselves being wrong are even more worrisome.

Check out this link. So, I assume you had nothing to do with cluster bombing? Well, that's good. You at least left that to other US servicemen... Iraqi children are still picking up the bomblets (5-20% do not go off, leaving little toy like objects around to make kids armless. Nice.)

And as far as FoxNews, don't get me started...

Ask the *Civilian* survivors of the firebombing of Dresden if they were terrorised, or the cars with families in them that enter the wrong checkpoint in Iraq. It's not unheard of for civilians to be killed in a "low intensity" war such as the one in Iraq, in fact it's quite common.

1) Iraq Death Toll
The Age.
And yeah, there are mass graves, lots of them. But do we right a wrong by killing more people? It's easy to win a war, but much harder to win the peace. There's also a very good reason the humanitarian argument for invasion wasn't used before the war. Because it would have directly led to the argument why the US was invading Iraq rather than a dozen other countries with worse human-rights records.

2) We know Iraq had WMD, US supplied them and the UN destroyed them. The question is whether Iraq had a WMD program capable of threatening the US or surrounding countries. These things aren't easy to hide. You require facilities, research papers, scientists, engineers, factories. The fact that these have not been found indicates that Iraq wasn't a threat. After all, Saddam could have ordered the destruction, but with a realistic weapons program, traces of evidence will be left behind. Soil samples tainted, research papers unburnt, people willing to talk for a new life in the US. You can't just dig a hole and hide a weapons program that was supposedly a threat to the world.
Anyway, you can't prove the non-existence of something. There's anthrax in soil, but there's a big difference between having a small sample of anthrax and having a weaponised anthrax along with the weapons systems to target, launch and the personnel to run it.
Anyway, where's your evidence? David Kay seems to disagree with you multiple times.

3) I'm unsure, about this, someone else would have to answer this.

4a) Okay, again, you want me to prove evidence that something doesn't exist. That's impossible. Saddam did provide some evidence of the destruction of some of the weapons, he simply couldn't provide all the evidence. That seems realistic to me, records get lost, misprinted, mislaid, incorrectly filed, not filed at all. Lack of evidence of destruction does not equate to no destruction occuring.

4b) Oh, do you mean "Ansar al-Islam"? A terrorist group situated in non Saddam-controlled Iraq, you know, the northern no-fly zone. With doubts whether there are actually any real links between Saddam and terrorist groups here and here.

5) No, there's ill-will in Australia (and UK and Spain) and our government entered the war even though the majority of public opinion and the parliament opposed the war. Secondly, France and especially Germany has historically been relatively pro-American. France may not be bending over friendly, but they've always been relatively friendly.

From the article:
the station has suddenly become a $100 billion dead end.

It's certainly much better than other ~$100 billion dead ends.

"Indymedia doesn't count them either. They just make up stuff for the hell of it: fiction writers masquerading as columnists. In the article linked to, they merely quoted some opinion pieces by political pressure groups (no accurate sources welcome at Indymedia)"

I'm guessing it's not the easiest job in the world, to do accurate investigations in a war zone, but their main source, iraqbodycount seems to be referencing news articles and reports of varying reliability, and they seem to be taking care to include their margins of errors in the report, and providing details of each case counted. They list some 20 or so people as working on the website, so you'd imagine they've got enough people. I'm not sure we can really critisize them for not carrying out inquiries and post-mortems though, especially if the reports of US army being actively hostile to such inquiries are founded.

The U.S. gov't knew that 15 years earlier, Saddam gassed the Kurds, in part because U.S. companies and the CIA provided the materials needed to produce those WMD, and continued providing Iraq assistance even after the U.S. had knowledge of their use against the Kurds.

We also knew the WMD existed because the U.N. oversaw their destruction after Persian Gulf War I.

Isn't it funny that, after getting the green light from the U.S. to become a mass murderer, the U.S. spun that knowledge to begin their own campaign of death and destruction in Iraq? You don't know who to believe anymore.

BUSH IS LEAVING TOWN IN 2004!

I won't have time to discuss much this week, for obvious reasons.

That's cool... just respond when you feel like... if you feel like...

I'm going to quote all over the place. I am NOT going to be quoting chronologically. I think it is best to divide up up argument into different topics.

Democracy & Media

I'm not arguing that capitalist democracies are perfect, only that they are the best thing we have found.

First of all, I am not arguing against capitalist DEMOCRACY; I'm arguing against capitalism. Capitalism has nothing to do with democracy. If anything, pure capitalism and pure democracy are contradictory. You can just look around to see why this is so. As a matter of fact, democracy can even be traced back to Roman and Greek societies. Those societies were hardly capitalist. In addition, no country is a democracy. I refer to countries like USA as a PLUTOCRACY. Capitalists like yourself don't like to admit it but that's how I see it.

USA isn't a democracy? NY Times and Washington Post seems to unearth more scandals in the US president administration than the rest of the world's media do in all of the world's governments.

Do you think the intellectual elite created no scandals when monarchs ruled? You can even find the media reporting on "scandals" in a totalitarian country like China of all places!

Washington Post is a mouthpiece of the government. One day it is pro-Democrat; the next day it is pro-Republican. Its opinions and words are based on who is in power.

Although better than others, New York Times is an establishment paper. Sure it unearths hidden issues. But how many of these are important? Figure out how many US media covers the atrocities committed by right wing forces allied with the Colombian goverment, which is supported by USA! Or, try to find an article that talks about "iraqgate" ( another here). How about the Waco atrocity? I mean, people STILL have no idea what happened to President Kennedy! Or better yet, how come the media has said nothing about the Anthrax Assasin? The Anthrax Assasin killed more Americans than than Saddam Hussein! Where is your "democratic and free" media?

The problem is that you have no idea what is going on. It's not just you but the VAST MAJORITY of people are like that. They just take what is fed to them. When the media just regurgitates White House press releases, you just accept it. You also fall for propaganda and disinformation. It's just too bad that you don't realize that the New York Times (or for that matter, most media) are controlled by the government. How many US media had anti-war commentators or activists in the run-up to the war? Almost ZERO! That's not a free media! That's not a fair media! And it certainly isn't democratic either!

Just because the media is supposedly free, doesn't mean all is well. Similarly, just because someone can vote doesn't mean it is democratic. I mean, citizens were able to vote as far back as 150 years ago yet no one in their right mind would consider these countries very democratic at that time. In fact, if you went to government propaganda, almost 70% of the countries are democratic. Of course, nothing is further from the truth.

Premanent War for permanent Peace

Personally, I don't really care that much about the rights of dictatorships. The Iraq invasion was stupid -- but good for Iraq, I guess, since it was a Stalin-like dictatorship and probably couldn't have been overthrown in any other way.

So let me ask you this. If I invaded your country and killed 10,000 people to kill a dictator, it's ok with you? What if one of your loved ones--or even you--were killed? You live in a black & white world driven by the propagandists. To you, only the d

--VERY LONG--
I hope you take the time to read this because I spent some time on it :)

Since the "end of major combat", fewer civilians have been killed as a result of insurgency than would have been killed by Saddam's regime (on average).

Speculation can lead to your demise. Let's see. Approximately 1500 have died since the "end of major operations" in Baghdad ALONE. That's all in half a year (approximately). Who knows how many have died in other areas. Let's say an average of 3000 in one year (that's just one city too, although the biggest city). What was Saddam's biggest atrocity? Probably his chemical attack against Kurds in Halabja. Supposedly this killed 5,000. Now, are you telling me that Saddam was killing more than 3000 per year before the war? Do you have any proof other than the US government (propaganda) documents?

As a side note, Saddam killed A LOT during the Iran-Iraq war. I'm not counting these people because it is hard to say what was going on at that time. It's not clear how many of the deaths at that time were human rights abuses, and how many were war casulties. Also, the US government backed Saddam Hussein at that time (remember this famous photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam?)

I envision an Iraq where the money from oil revenues pays for schools, roads, hospitals, and other social services, so that people don't have to pay taxes or have any other financial burden of the like.

Is USA going to be profitting from this? Or is this supposed to be a neutral thing left to the Iraqis to decide? How much do you want to bet that American oil companies will control all the oil coming out of Iraq in 10 years?

I envision free press (which already exists now), and a place where people can be as secure in their persons as people are here in the U.S. Part of my vision is already come to pass - there is freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to dissent - freedoms they didn't have before.

There sure is a lot of free press in Iraq right now ;| Just recently the IGC banned Al-Jazeera and a bunch of other media. That's free media to you? A while ago the same thing happened. I can't find a link to the newsj--sorry about that (sucks how you have to pay for newspaper archives). But read the beginning of this article. This article is from Justin Raimondo who is on the far right so I don't necessarily agree with it or him (I'm on the far left) but it illustrates my point. You only have to read the beginning part.

The problem is that you are either a neoconservative who is in favour of imperialism (unlikely), or that you are a naive "liberal" (likely). You ACTUALLY think what Bush said in front of the National Endowment for Democracy will happen/is true. Sad to say, it won't and it never has. You just CANNOT bring democracy and freedom to a country with a gun. Gunpoint democracy is doomed to fail. The last person to try that was probably Lenin (and his invasion of Poland) but it never got anywhere. Name ONE country that USA has meddled with since WWII, that ended up democratic or free. The answer is absolutely ZERO! There are lots of examples (El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Panama, Colombia, Iraq (before), Iran, Indonesia, Philliphines, and so on) but it never worked.

Democracy and Freedom has to come from WITHIN the people (if you are a liberal you should know this already). Foreign forces can never impose it on others. It's just like say women's rights or equality or something. Contrary to what conservatives think, you just cannot bring equality to women in the Middle East (for example) by forcing the people to accept it. It's too bad the conservatives don't understand liberalism (whi

a detailed body count is here. here. the current number is 7935-9766. most of the large numbers are air raids, but a significant number are gunfire, which could be by the coalition or by Iraqi forces.

We don't kill innocents.

Count 'em!

No, they would (rightly) say that it's a little strange to kill the people you're supposed to be liberating. The best estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties is found here, a list of the casualties accounted for by various sources. Even if we take the current minimum estimate the US has caused the death of 7935 Iraqi civilians in the process of liberating them.

I do find it greatly disturbing that you'd rather trust Saddam Hussein, a man who stayed in power for over 30 years thanks to the reign of terror in his country, than George Bush, who was elected by the people of this country, 3 years ago

Here you go all black and white again. I don't trust Saddam and I don't trust Bush either. See, I don't have to make a choice between them, as you all seem to believe. I don't trust anyone who goes to war on false pretexts, I don't care if they're called Hussein or Bush.

It occurs to me that you truly believe that Iraq is worse off today than it was when Saddam has his secret police throwing people off buildings if they said "Saddam sucks", or beheading them in public squares, or torturing their children to death while they watched.

Read this carefuly, because it seems almost impossible for you to understand:

I very much condemn the way Saddam treated his people, but that doesn't mean I applaude the invasion of Iraq. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I think a person must be either brainwashed or just plain stupid to think starting a war against a country is the best way of helping the people of that country.

Just like that tax cut he promised!!
The ones that he passed in the middle of soaring deffecits? Any economics 101 student will tell you how smart that is...

Just like the prescription drug benefit he promised!!!
Same idea... spending, spending, spending... borrow and spend... reminds me of what Argentina was doing, didn't turn out too well for them, though...

Just like that War on Terrorism!!!
Killing somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 Iraqis, raising anti-U.S. sentiments to unbelievable heights (I wish there were a way to measure it...), and tying up the US in a lengthy occupation that will probably end up another failure.

As was said, all hat no saddle. He sais he does the things he does, but terrorist threat is greater now than it was ever before, the tax cuts are going to hurt the economy more than anything else he could have done, and if you went out and researched anything beyond what Bush tells you, you'd realize how unbelievably full of shit he is.

...providing civilians with an inside perspective and a virtual role in today's premiere land force, the U.S. Army.

Oh? So the game provides you with thousands of innocent civilians to kill? Or does it offer you leisure time to get some feedback from the locals?

I hope not. I hate it when fun little fantasies get complicated by reality. Hopefully all the bad guys look like Osama or Saddam.

Actually the perfect weapon would kill ONLY your enemies. Those insurgents in Iraq aren't all Hussein loyalists that survived. Killing and maiming civilians also breeds hatred and insurgence. And there were a lot of civilian casualties...

That would be a great question to ask the politicians who just murdered upwards of 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.Do they really, truly beleive that their actions are moral and justified?

Bin Laden is evil too. As is anyone who purposely targets civilians

Sorry, did we forget to mention the 8000 to 10,000 more recent civilian deaths?

He was saying, don't let the gov't take my gun because I may need it to protect myself from intruders or even the gov't.
Why would you think that anyone would need to protect themselves from the gov't? Could it be because of the threat of tyranny? Let's turn this around, shall we? Couldn't this act be the very sort of thing that you claim he was talking about?

You can quote dead white men all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that in the past two hundred odd years society has changed significantly and a single individual's ability to wreak widespread havoc has been increased million-fold.
First thing. 19 people killed 3,000 people. This is 157.89473684210526315789473684211 people killed per killer. If we assume that your statement about a millionfold is correct, then in Franklin's day, the same killer could have killed about 0.00015789 people. That is, no one could be killed unless 6,333 other people worked together. This is obviously wrong. There were murders without mobs of 6,333 people in the past. OK, so there may be an increase, but not as much as it may seem, I would hazard. Furthermore, if we look at the number of deaths relative to the size of the population, it would likely be lower. Indeed, on 9-11, only one in one hundered thousand people living in America died. More died in car crashes, more died from the flu, more died from alcohol than died on 9/11. Yes, 9/11 was a horrible thing, but let's keep perspective, too. For an example of perspective, consider that anywhere from 7784 to 9596 Iraqi civilians were killed by US troops since the War in Iraq started (source). Given this, how do you think that the Iraqi people should react? I leave you with these thoughts.

Idi Amin and Tony Blair are morally equal?

No more than George W. Bush and Mother Teresa are morally equal. You're wrong -- righteousness is relevant in your eyes if you're pushing our current administration as the Good Guys. This is an administration that has may have deliberately misreported intelligence information to its people to justify a war that has cost over 7000 Iraqi civilians their lives and injured 20,000 more. Maybe the rest of the Iraqis will be better off, but it's pure utilitarian philosophy so say that that justifies the death of the 7000 others.

This is also the same administration that authored the PATRIOT Act and that wanted to have citizens spy on each other. This is the same administration that keeps protesters walled off from the president in so-called "Free Speech" zones. This is the same administration that has awarded expensive civil contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq to the vice president's former oil company without competitive bidding. This is the same administration that continues to fund warlord butchers in Columbia at the expense of lives in the name of fighting drugs.

The United States of America was founded on the principle that freedom is an inalienable right of ALL people.

Yeah, too bad we're currently tossing those rights out the window in our own country in the name of security over freedom via the PATRIOT Act. We also don't seem to be applying the rights of a fair trial, of habeus corpus, and of counsel with an attorney to the captured Taleban soldiers (who happen to be a part of "ALL people").

It is not hypocritical of the US to engage in behaviors that we find unacceptable for others.

You do realize that that is the definition of hypocrisy, right?

Unless you come up with some sort of argument that we attacked Al Queda them first, it is not the same.


attacking doesnt have to be dropping bombs. it can be killing people with sanctions, tyranny and opression all of which the USA is very good at. You cant be a good person/country when you go around killing people because your pride was a little hurt. according to iraq body count the conservative estimte is almost 8k dead. how many died in sept 11th (which is completely unrelated but you braught it up) - i believe that figure is around 3 or 4 thousand. its not even an eye for an eye.... im sure that for the 10+ years that iraq has been under sanctions many many more people have died even than in this current occupation. have you seen the pictures of the hospitals? they cant even get chlorine to clean the water and yet other countries happily are able to develop agent orange and all sorts of terror weapons. Just wait till they outlaw oposing political views, im sure you'll love the superbug they send after you.

al queda while having nothing to do with anythign sadam related, are the only people fighting to expose the tyranny of the usa. i believe his intention (osama) was to make the us realize it cant create terror in other parts of the world. kind of trying to show americans what its like for the other 99% of the world. unfortuantely since you have a cowboy not to bright president and an even less bright media, it backfired. bush, having not even recounted properly was appointed the dictator* of the republic of the USA and what was his goal? to get another term. so people are pissed off that bad things happened to the saints which are the american public and demand a response. trouble is the cause of the problem was the USA training and funding people like osama... OOPS! and of course the last thing anyone wants to do is blame themselves. still them invading iraq has played right into his hands as now he has a whole other country to recruit suicide bombers from.... now do you see why you cant go around killing people indescriminatly?

it comes back to bite you in the ass.

*the definition i like to use is "An ancient Roman magistrate appointed temporarily to deal with an immediate crisis or emergency."

These guys are counting.

Try exercising your trolling skills a bit less obviously...

And check out this for a (very conservative) estimate of the number of civilian Iraqi caualties, or this for a less conservative one.

The US military, of course. The exact number of innocent deaths is unknown, but the count is well into the thousands. Here is one article you may be interested in: Extraction of media-reported civilian injuries from the Iraq Body Count database and archive of war reports provides evidence of at least 20,000 civilian injuries on top of the maximum reported 7798 deaths. 8,000 of these injuries were in the Baghdad area alone, suggesting that the full, countrywide picture, as with deaths, is yet to emerge.

when polled by Gallup great majority of Iraqis (80%) want US army to stay for another year

Yet another example of the problem I just described. This 80% (if the poll wasn't complete BS that is) are obviously not the ones who lost friends or family in the war. Does a lack of concern from 80% of a country make murder acceptable? Absolutely not.

Very good, who told you that? Look there. Amazing technology. This shows what a bomb really does and the effects are very well known and intended. The damage to humans is so immense, would the real effects shown on TV, people in US would not support this.

Why do you think that napalm-like fire bombs are developed and used? Probably to surgically melt down bridges and buildings at night;)

I find it interesting that in almost all press reports in USA only US losses are counted and never the total count of injured and killed humans is mentioned. Could it be that the numbers would not look very good?

It is talked about 60-something billion $'s of cost for this war - the total material cost of destroyed infrastructure, building, bridges, equipment is completely unknown.

Human losses are not publicized either the www.iraqbodycount.net tries to get number but those are only civilian deaths. How many are injured and to which degree is unknown.

The total count of humans killed in this escapade is intentionally kept quiet, or maybe the corpses of "other" soldiers dug under somewhere are not even counted.

I guess, it would be simpler, to lock the "leaders" causing wars into a room and only let them out again, once they get along. This would save all this stupid and destructive war making and weapons developing.

Since it minimized the death of civilians, it also minimizes the ability to blame quite intentional civilian deaths and civilian target damage as "unavoidable collateral damage".

After all, with our "surgical strikes" and "smart bombs" and "precision munitions", we've managed to kill somewhere between 6,087 and 7,798 civilians so far in this war. (Figures from IraqBodyCount.net)

Yes, civilian casualties do happen (6055-7706)
We have bombed hospitals and shot crowds that where protesting our interim government. Regardless of weather or not we meant to shoot a 14 yr old boy, the result is the same. He is dead, and the US is responsible.

We should have killed these Iraqi bitches along with the rest of the innocent Iraqi children we slaughtered.

We support our troops 100%.

Just because you can say War==bad and Terrorism==bad, this does not mean that War==Terrorism

That isn't the equation I am using. The equation I am using is: Terrorism = killing innocent civilians, War = killing innocent civilians, ergo War = Terrorism. See Iraq Body Count for details.

English is a wonderfully decriptive language Yes it is, and using a term like terrorism as an excuse to commit terror is the worst kind of abuse of the language.

If what you're telling me is "We're right and they're wrong so they're terrorists and we're heroes", that is the same argument Osama Bin Laden makes and I don't believe him either.

Then maybe america should move out of the dark ages sometime.

No, we'll just bomb the rest of the world back into the dark ages with us, thank you very much.

>I don't agree with murder laws so how about I go around cutting peoples heads off like OJ did?

No, you'd just go to a foreign country and do it, like America's mass murdering army.

Why not join today?

But these people do.

1904 civilian deaths reported so far. Less than Kuwait lost when they were invaded, or the number killed in NY Tradecenter destruction.

Not bad.

pretend that the tens of thousands of other Iraqis who gave up their lives in an overwhelmingly lopsided fight against the invation of the US troops.

Who is the one pretending? Where is your source? Even Iraq Body Count only places it between 1367 and 1620 (as I write this). And, I won't even bring up how many people died under Saddam's regime...

"How many innocent people would die during the next 10, 20 or more years of Saddam's reign?"

I honestly don't know, but I readily confess that it may be higher than the number of civilians we killed. It also may be lower; I'm really not sure. But (a) our government is in the business of protecting it's citizens. It is not a world government. I won't argue that this means we shouldn't get involved in other issues; I'll simply say that our chosen route was guaranteed to kill Americans, the very people the government is supposed to protect; the alternate route showed no particularly high probability of resulting in American deaths. And (b) guaranteed deaths by an outsider are bad. Possible deaths by a local ruler are bad too, but I honestly believe that we will end up killing a large number of people, both in the fighting and in the reconstruction afterwards, and this is a greater danger to Americans (through increase in world anger) that than the alternative, just as it is a greater danger to Iraqis.

I've done my best to not dodge your question, but the truth is I just don't know, and I'm not sure it matters. Is 1100 deaths ((admittedly biased ref) higher than we might have seen with Saddam? It depends. Saddam was not immortal, and was not actively causing death. You may be right that we saved lives, but we really never can know. What we did do is kill Americans and destabilize one of the most politically stable regions of the world.

Here's a unbiased report on the civilian casualties

More likely there are more deaths that can't be reported, and not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqis defending their homes with WWII style guns, but who cares about them right?

Saddam wasn't a mass murderer when it came to his own people excluding the Kurds after the first gulf war of course, but then you don't have the facts, and really, neither do I, on how bad he was.

The correct website is http://www.iraqbodycount.net or http://www.iraqbodycount.org. When I was linked from iraqbodycount.com to the current count page, I was greeted with a notice (probably checking referrer tags) that said "WARNING: You may have been sent to this page by iraqbodycount.com, a website that is illegally masquerading as the Iraq Body Count Project for commercial gain. To visit the true Iraq Body Count site, please Follow this link to iraqbodycount.org (and .net). (And then close this window and the one that sent you here!)"
Their claim appears to be supported by fact: iraqbodycount.com brings up two pop-up windows on visit (which my hosts file blocks: both are from media.popuptraffic.com); and all of the "news" links are on www.interestalert.com, a web site which hosts free (and questionably reliable/plagiarized "news"--most of it copyright United Press International) and has banner ads. Nasty.
The .net and .org versions do not suffer this same problem.

The correct website is http://www.iraqbodycount.net or http://www.iraqbodycount.org. When I was linked from iraqbodycount.com to the current count page, I was greeted with a notice (probably checking referrer tags) that said "WARNING: You may have been sent to this page by iraqbodycount.com, a website that is illegally masquerading as the Iraq Body Count Project for commercial gain. To visit the true Iraq Body Count site, please Follow this link to iraqbodycount.org (and .net). (And then close this window and the one that sent you here!)"
Their claim appears to be supported by fact: iraqbodycount.com brings up two pop-up windows on visit (which my hosts file blocks: both are from media.popuptraffic.com); and all of the "news" links are on www.interestalert.com, a web site which hosts free (and questionably reliable/plagiarized "news"--most of it copyright United Press International) and has banner ads. Nasty.
The .net and .org versions do not suffer this same problem.

Doing a damn good job, too.

Not!

At about 220 civilian dead now for a country of under 25 million, compared to 3000 or so for a country of 300 million, I'd say the comparison is about right.

Now add millitary casualties that wouldn't have happenned without this warmongery. Hell, you might as well add in the US and British "Friendly Fire" casualties while you're at it.

Actually, according to iraqbodycount.net, theres been 16. Exactly.

It was on 14 before the war started.

Well, you can get updated on all civilian Iraqi casualties here.

I would expect the number to dramatically increase pretty soon.