I don't have time to talk to anyone who thinks a few dozen fewer deaths per day does not matter. Those are real lives. Real people man. They shouldn't have been in danger in the first place? Yeah, no shit! Go find somewhere I've defended the invasion. Or better yet, go invent a time machine and stop the invasion - clearly science fiction contains the only action you're willing to consider.
"A lot of you will die unnecessarily, but not as many as before."
Yeah. Look, everything decision you make in Iraq will be ugly, in the sense that you should not be there in the first place.
Until somebody invents a time machine and stops the invasion, "you should not have invaded" is not an actionable criticism. You already *are* there and so to make a serious argument you have to consider how to make the best of the situation.
That's what the surge is trying to do. To provide basic security after 3 years of murderous chaos. The result so far has been a dramatic reduction in civilian deaths. The Iraqis are now securing more of their country than we are. The Iraqis have turned against the insurgency, which is in disarray and hiding in Iran. The rebuilding of their infrastructure is finally making progress. And their police and military institutions are finally maturing to the point where - other than Air support - they don't need the USA to do large operations. All of these are facts. To the extent that any news coming out of Iraq is good, that is good.
I'm not going to enter a debate about a hypothetical life saving policy. It may have been better if we left, and it may not, and that's something people will debate till the end of the universe.
What I was talking about is the fact that the Surge and the Awakening DID safe Iraqi lives.
This is a verifiable fact. Civilian and US military deaths after both are a small fraction of what they were before. Are you seriously saying that's a bad thing? An absolute reduction in death is a bad thing?
I'm sorry, I'm completely failing to understand your latest post.
Did you miss the part where I wrote "any degree of caution you force on the US army is a degree of safety for yourself."? I didn't mean to imply this makes you invulnerable to the US army, thus the words "degree of safety".
What surrounding yourself with civilians does is make the US army more hesitant to simply blow you away. It forces them to fret over the propaganda implications of action they take against you. It forces them to take extra precautions if/when they decide to move against you. It forces them to limit the amount of force they'll use against you. Finally all of that together will tend to force them to leave you alive longer than they would have were you not around civilians.
This is an extremely effective tactic against an overpowering enemy that wants to avoid civilian casualties. Not so much otherwise.
"Of course the ultimate policy "that saves lives of Iraqis" was... not to fucking invade in the first place. Hence the "turd"."
Yeah, and when you invent a *time machine* you and I can hop aboard and try to prevent the invasion.
Until then I'll be here in the REAL WORLD where Iraqis are dying TODAY, and I'll call every step that saves an Iraqi life a blessing and not *polish on a turd*. Thank you.
"So you admit that there have been lots of civilian deaths."
Um. It's undeniable.
I was responding to a question of whether the US tries to avoid killing civilians or just does not care.
Leaving morality aside (because that's a harder argument to make and a lot more charged), in just a practical sense they'd have to be *amazingly* stupid not to avoid it. So you can believe the military cannot grasp basic propaganda OR you can believe they can, but sometimes fail at it anyway. Either could be true; the former requires you to believe the entire institution is professionally retarded, but the latter requires you only to believe they're human.
In any case it in no way negates my argument that insurgents are safest when surrounded by civilians. Any degree of caution you force on the US army is a degree of safety for yourself. You may still end up killed, but if you can drag women and children into the casualties, you'll at least give the US a black eye in press. It's extremely effective.
"The entire purpose of the surge was to provide stability so political reconciliation could happen."
No. Political reconciliation is not something you resolve with combat forces. Iraqis will manage it or fail at it in the coming decades.
The purpose of the surge was to *finally* provide a basic level of security in Iraq so that the Iraqis themselves could rise to counter the insurgency. And it's worked so far. The number of civilian deaths is a fraction of what it was before the surge and the awakening. Sadr's forces have been decimated and are hiding in Iran. Al Qaeda in Iraq is in disarray. Whatever Rumsfeld thought was supposed to happen in Iraq(I certainly won't defend anything he said), the Surge and Awakening are *not* failures.
Yeah. Iraq is not a turd. Iraq is full of real people dying every day because of our war. Characterizing a policy that saves a lot of their lives as "polishing a turd" is so fucking wrong I don't even have the words to describe it.
I certainly don't disagree with what you wrote. In fact I think you're restating my point in more words.
The Surge was always about creating conditions in which Awakening movements could prosper, and I have nothing but the highest respect for Gen. Petraeus. If I were religious I'd call the man a Godsend.
I think even if you believe the US is indifferent to the morality of civilian deaths (which it may or may not be - you can make a fair argument either way), it is at least aware that each is a propaganda victory for its enemies.
Given that Iraq is a counter-insurgency operation, it would be wildly irrational for the US to do anything but strive to avoid civilian deaths simply on *pragmatic* grounds. Nevertheless, there have been a lot of civilian deaths, so to explain that you could argue that the world's foremost military is actually a wildly irrational organization incapable of grasping that it's helping its enemies. Or you can argue that insurgents have worked out a good way to avoid getting shot. Personally I'd employ Occam's razor at this point and go with the latter.
If killing children were America's goal, every child from Iraq to Afghanistan would be dead already.
A simpler explanation for the civilian deaths is the USA abhors it, and insurgents (or terrorists or freedom fighters or whatever you want to call them - I don't care) know it. Its avoidance of civilian deaths means that by living with civilians you ensure the US will be more reluctant to attack you and will take a very real propaganda hit every time it does.
Nobody with respect for innocent life would ever adopt this tactic, and "civilized" armies are forbidden from it for that and some other reasons. Not realizing this difference represents a major propaganda coup for insurgents.
Certainly true that the Surge is only partly responsible. If you listen not to fucktard Bush but to General Petraeus' testimony he'll be the first to say that providing a basic level of security - which was the goal of the Surge in the first place - is what allowed movements like the Anbar Awakening to flourish. They awoke on their own, but into an environment hostile to growth.
The same can be said of the Iraqi Police forces and Army - they've been trying to form for years now, but until there was a proper counter-insurgency going, and until someobdy else could relieve them to train, they couldn't make enough progress to be effective.
But in any case, even if the Surge itself is only responsible for a tiny fraction of the reduction in violence, in absolute numbers that's an incredible amount of Iraqi lives saved. And that's something to celebrate - even if you (rightly) oppose the war.
It's possible to oppose the Iraq war without denying its progress since General Petraeus' takeover, the Anbar Awakening, the Surge, and whatever tech (real or fake) was mentioned in the article.
Even if we never know the true reasons for the improvements, that they're a blessing for the Iraqis is undeniable.
Your suggestion implies US businesses are far more nationalistic than they actually are - they're probably less home-team-centric than their counterparts in any other country in the world. Kind of funny, actually, to see the opposite suggested on Slashdot, home of all the usual "the corporations are selling out our country" moans, don't you think?
"Basically, ever since vietnam america has backpedaled from the original ideals to a state of doing just enough to still be considered good while doing anything possible to reach the desired goals."
Oh nonsense. To believe that you have to ignore the entire history of the United States. From the moment this country was conceived, we've justified violence against our neighbors with the same axiom: that our way of life is better than yours.
Where you go wrong is ignoring this basic fact. Just about every war in American history - and there have been a fuck of a lot of them - can be traced back to this same idea. Our way is better.
The idea that we used to just leave people alone is complete bullshit. The only people we've ever "left alone" fall in to three categories: (1) people who live just about exactly like us, (2) people who're strong enough to thoroughly deter us, or (3) people who make us enough money that we look the other way.
If that sounds terrible to you, here's a bigger shock: it works. That's either the worst or the best part, depending on your morals - that we can keep doing this and it keeps working. Listen up rising powers (seriously): We got here by fighting for the principle of "our way is better", and that principle has generally been right.
Yeah, leaks still happen. But the parent is basically right. Access to these systems in the real world tends to be limited to (1) people who really are supposed to get it or (2) people doing state-level espionage.
If getting in was even a little easier than that, we'd have a lot more information than we do.
"With web crackdowns like this becoming more and more frequent do you think we will start to see similar (overt) activities from US and European governments?"
No, and equivocating a place that gets rocked by military coups to the most stable, progressive democracies in the world leads me to think your world view is wildly fucked up.
The right to criticize the governments of the west tend to have been enshrined in law at the most basic level for decades or even *centuries*. Our right to criticize the government is one of the civic cornerstones of our culture. Nothing short of catastrophe, revolution, and fascism will change that. Get out of the basement and get some perspective.
To all who will provide examples of recent "fascist" tendencies, I say these aren't recent - they've always been with us and they always will be, because we're human, and humans are horrible shits. Luckily we have very mature systems of government that minimize our tendency to be shits to each other, like representative government, independent courts, and the right to disagree enshrined in fundamental laws.
"In the old days other countries could count on the US to do the right thing and play by the rules. Since we've thrown the rule book away we've started losing friends and other countries don't trust us to do the right thing anymore. It's really pretty simple."
When were these golden old days? The Reagan years? Nixon presidency? Johnson and Vietnam? Kennedy instigating the Cuban missile crisis? Or are we going further back? FDR's internment camps? Hoover's isolationism (I suppose some would count that a good thing, other than the depression it contributed to)? How bout Teddy Roosevelt's doctrine - you know, the one Bush admires? Uh, do we even need to get into the 19th century presidents? Manifest destiny? What about that whole slavery business?
No, we only look good from a historical distance. At any one time, this country is doing any number of nasty, awful things - they're just seldom big enough to keep the rest of the world hostile longer than a decade. And the only reason we look decent historically is because, well, everybody else fucks up too. And they tend to fuck up worse.
Er, no, they're extremely relevant when given in response to a sweeping, asinine claim that "The government doesn't fund research. They fund people who build weapons". US universities - who take government funding - do completely outrageous amounts of research, and juxtaposing those two sentences our anonymous coward invites a comparison between the money spent on each.
I could have spent a half hour reading PDFs to find *exactly* rather than *implicitly* relevant figures, but I felt the five minutes I'd already used were more than an anonymous coward, who's probably trolling anyway, deserved.
The US spends around 4% of GDP on the military, which is only marginally higher than other international powers (France is about 2.6%), and far lower than the various military dictatorships around the world.
By comparison it spends about 5% of GDP on education, which places it about 10th in the world. A huge share of that money goes to Universities doing world class research. In dollars spent per student it's second in the world.
I'm not sure I agree that non-uniformed soldiers should be treated as ordinary criminals. If they're part of a regular army acting in violation of the convention, I'm satisfied with summary execution. To the extent you can call any battle fair, the US military tries (though sometimes fails) to keep it fair - show the same effort or else. On the other hand if they're part of an irregular army they're operating in a gray area between a regular army and organized crime (which itself tends to be subject to special laws in the civilized world). The question of how they should be dealt with is extraordinarily difficult to answer - if it weren't, it's likely that few of the insurgencies around the world would ever have lived through their infancy.
But in any case I want to emphasize I was only replying to a very specific claim that the US violates the spirit of the Geneva Convention by not granting its protections to soldiers caught out of uniform. You can make any number of fair criticisms of the US - but this isn't one of them. That should be very clear from my post. And I'm really not sure where you got the idea I think the US has not earned its reputation. Unless you will only accept those exact words, that I think otherwise is very, very clear.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on.
"One of the biggest failures of Bush was that he doesn't explain what's going on in terms that everyone can understand."
Totally agreed. All other problems aside, this is probably his single biggest failure. The inability to communicate with Europe and the American Left.
I don't have time to talk to anyone who thinks a few dozen fewer deaths per day does not matter. Those are real lives. Real people man. They shouldn't have been in danger in the first place? Yeah, no shit! Go find somewhere I've defended the invasion. Or better yet, go invent a time machine and stop the invasion - clearly science fiction contains the only action you're willing to consider.
"A lot of you will die unnecessarily, but not as many as before."
Yeah. Look, everything decision you make in Iraq will be ugly, in the sense that you should not be there in the first place.
Until somebody invents a time machine and stops the invasion, "you should not have invaded" is not an actionable criticism. You already *are* there and so to make a serious argument you have to consider how to make the best of the situation.
That's what the surge is trying to do. To provide basic security after 3 years of murderous chaos. The result so far has been a dramatic reduction in civilian deaths. The Iraqis are now securing more of their country than we are. The Iraqis have turned against the insurgency, which is in disarray and hiding in Iran. The rebuilding of their infrastructure is finally making progress. And their police and military institutions are finally maturing to the point where - other than Air support - they don't need the USA to do large operations. All of these are facts. To the extent that any news coming out of Iraq is good, that is good.
This is absurd. Troll somebody else.
I'm not going to enter a debate about a hypothetical life saving policy. It may have been better if we left, and it may not, and that's something people will debate till the end of the universe.
What I was talking about is the fact that the Surge and the Awakening DID safe Iraqi lives.
This is a verifiable fact. Civilian and US military deaths after both are a small fraction of what they were before. Are you seriously saying that's a bad thing? An absolute reduction in death is a bad thing?
I'm sorry, I'm completely failing to understand your latest post.
Did you miss the part where I wrote "any degree of caution you force on the US army is a degree of safety for yourself."? I didn't mean to imply this makes you invulnerable to the US army, thus the words "degree of safety".
What surrounding yourself with civilians does is make the US army more hesitant to simply blow you away. It forces them to fret over the propaganda implications of action they take against you. It forces them to take extra precautions if/when they decide to move against you. It forces them to limit the amount of force they'll use against you. Finally all of that together will tend to force them to leave you alive longer than they would have were you not around civilians.
This is an extremely effective tactic against an overpowering enemy that wants to avoid civilian casualties. Not so much otherwise.
"Of course the ultimate policy "that saves lives of Iraqis" was ... not to fucking invade in the first place. Hence the "turd"."
Yeah, and when you invent a *time machine* you and I can hop aboard and try to prevent the invasion.
Until then I'll be here in the REAL WORLD where Iraqis are dying TODAY, and I'll call every step that saves an Iraqi life a blessing and not *polish on a turd*. Thank you.
"So you admit that there have been lots of civilian deaths."
Um. It's undeniable.
I was responding to a question of whether the US tries to avoid killing civilians or just does not care.
Leaving morality aside (because that's a harder argument to make and a lot more charged), in just a practical sense they'd have to be *amazingly* stupid not to avoid it. So you can believe the military cannot grasp basic propaganda OR you can believe they can, but sometimes fail at it anyway. Either could be true; the former requires you to believe the entire institution is professionally retarded, but the latter requires you only to believe they're human.
In any case it in no way negates my argument that insurgents are safest when surrounded by civilians. Any degree of caution you force on the US army is a degree of safety for yourself. You may still end up killed, but if you can drag women and children into the casualties, you'll at least give the US a black eye in press. It's extremely effective.
"The entire purpose of the surge was to provide stability so political reconciliation could happen."
No. Political reconciliation is not something you resolve with combat forces. Iraqis will manage it or fail at it in the coming decades.
The purpose of the surge was to *finally* provide a basic level of security in Iraq so that the Iraqis themselves could rise to counter the insurgency. And it's worked so far. The number of civilian deaths is a fraction of what it was before the surge and the awakening. Sadr's forces have been decimated and are hiding in Iran. Al Qaeda in Iraq is in disarray. Whatever Rumsfeld thought was supposed to happen in Iraq(I certainly won't defend anything he said), the Surge and Awakening are *not* failures.
Yeah. Iraq is not a turd. Iraq is full of real people dying every day because of our war. Characterizing a policy that saves a lot of their lives as "polishing a turd" is so fucking wrong I don't even have the words to describe it.
I certainly don't disagree with what you wrote. In fact I think you're restating my point in more words.
The Surge was always about creating conditions in which Awakening movements could prosper, and I have nothing but the highest respect for Gen. Petraeus. If I were religious I'd call the man a Godsend.
I think even if you believe the US is indifferent to the morality of civilian deaths (which it may or may not be - you can make a fair argument either way), it is at least aware that each is a propaganda victory for its enemies.
Given that Iraq is a counter-insurgency operation, it would be wildly irrational for the US to do anything but strive to avoid civilian deaths simply on *pragmatic* grounds. Nevertheless, there have been a lot of civilian deaths, so to explain that you could argue that the world's foremost military is actually a wildly irrational organization incapable of grasping that it's helping its enemies. Or you can argue that insurgents have worked out a good way to avoid getting shot. Personally I'd employ Occam's razor at this point and go with the latter.
If killing children were America's goal, every child from Iraq to Afghanistan would be dead already.
A simpler explanation for the civilian deaths is the USA abhors it, and insurgents (or terrorists or freedom fighters or whatever you want to call them - I don't care) know it. Its avoidance of civilian deaths means that by living with civilians you ensure the US will be more reluctant to attack you and will take a very real propaganda hit every time it does.
Nobody with respect for innocent life would ever adopt this tactic, and "civilized" armies are forbidden from it for that and some other reasons. Not realizing this difference represents a major propaganda coup for insurgents.
Certainly true that the Surge is only partly responsible. If you listen not to fucktard Bush but to General Petraeus' testimony he'll be the first to say that providing a basic level of security - which was the goal of the Surge in the first place - is what allowed movements like the Anbar Awakening to flourish. They awoke on their own, but into an environment hostile to growth.
The same can be said of the Iraqi Police forces and Army - they've been trying to form for years now, but until there was a proper counter-insurgency going, and until someobdy else could relieve them to train, they couldn't make enough progress to be effective.
But in any case, even if the Surge itself is only responsible for a tiny fraction of the reduction in violence, in absolute numbers that's an incredible amount of Iraqi lives saved. And that's something to celebrate - even if you (rightly) oppose the war.
Mod parent up, please.
It's possible to oppose the Iraq war without denying its progress since General Petraeus' takeover, the Anbar Awakening, the Surge, and whatever tech (real or fake) was mentioned in the article.
Even if we never know the true reasons for the improvements, that they're a blessing for the Iraqis is undeniable.
That's a pretty fair response ;)
Your suggestion implies US businesses are far more nationalistic than they actually are - they're probably less home-team-centric than their counterparts in any other country in the world. Kind of funny, actually, to see the opposite suggested on Slashdot, home of all the usual "the corporations are selling out our country" moans, don't you think?
No, none of us ever read history.
And we are terrified of global capitalism, which is why we fight it so hard.
Think harder.
"Basically, ever since vietnam america has backpedaled from the original ideals to a state of doing just enough to still be considered good while doing anything possible to reach the desired goals."
Oh nonsense. To believe that you have to ignore the entire history of the United States. From the moment this country was conceived, we've justified violence against our neighbors with the same axiom: that our way of life is better than yours.
Where you go wrong is ignoring this basic fact. Just about every war in American history - and there have been a fuck of a lot of them - can be traced back to this same idea. Our way is better.
The idea that we used to just leave people alone is complete bullshit. The only people we've ever "left alone" fall in to three categories: (1) people who live just about exactly like us, (2) people who're strong enough to thoroughly deter us, or (3) people who make us enough money that we look the other way.
If that sounds terrible to you, here's a bigger shock: it works. That's either the worst or the best part, depending on your morals - that we can keep doing this and it keeps working. Listen up rising powers (seriously): We got here by fighting for the principle of "our way is better", and that principle has generally been right.
Yeah, leaks still happen. But the parent is basically right. Access to these systems in the real world tends to be limited to (1) people who really are supposed to get it or (2) people doing state-level espionage.
If getting in was even a little easier than that, we'd have a lot more information than we do.
"With web crackdowns like this becoming more and more frequent do you think we will start to see similar (overt) activities from US and European governments?"
No, and equivocating a place that gets rocked by military coups to the most stable, progressive democracies in the world leads me to think your world view is wildly fucked up.
The right to criticize the governments of the west tend to have been enshrined in law at the most basic level for decades or even *centuries*. Our right to criticize the government is one of the civic cornerstones of our culture. Nothing short of catastrophe, revolution, and fascism will change that. Get out of the basement and get some perspective.
To all who will provide examples of recent "fascist" tendencies, I say these aren't recent - they've always been with us and they always will be, because we're human, and humans are horrible shits. Luckily we have very mature systems of government that minimize our tendency to be shits to each other, like representative government, independent courts, and the right to disagree enshrined in fundamental laws.
"In the old days other countries could count on the US to do the right thing and play by the rules. Since we've thrown the rule book away we've started losing friends and other countries don't trust us to do the right thing anymore. It's really pretty simple."
When were these golden old days? The Reagan years? Nixon presidency? Johnson and Vietnam? Kennedy instigating the Cuban missile crisis? Or are we going further back? FDR's internment camps? Hoover's isolationism (I suppose some would count that a good thing, other than the depression it contributed to)? How bout Teddy Roosevelt's doctrine - you know, the one Bush admires? Uh, do we even need to get into the 19th century presidents? Manifest destiny? What about that whole slavery business?
No, we only look good from a historical distance. At any one time, this country is doing any number of nasty, awful things - they're just seldom big enough to keep the rest of the world hostile longer than a decade. And the only reason we look decent historically is because, well, everybody else fucks up too. And they tend to fuck up worse.
Er, no, they're extremely relevant when given in response to a sweeping, asinine claim that "The government doesn't fund research. They fund people who build weapons". US universities - who take government funding - do completely outrageous amounts of research, and juxtaposing those two sentences our anonymous coward invites a comparison between the money spent on each.
I could have spent a half hour reading PDFs to find *exactly* rather than *implicitly* relevant figures, but I felt the five minutes I'd already used were more than an anonymous coward, who's probably trolling anyway, deserved.
Oh bull fucking shit.
The US spends around 4% of GDP on the military, which is only marginally higher than other international powers (France is about 2.6%), and far lower than the various military dictatorships around the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
By comparison it spends about 5% of GDP on education, which places it about 10th in the world. A huge share of that money goes to Universities doing world class research. In dollars spent per student it's second in the world.
http://www.oclc.org/reports/escan/economic/educationlibraryspending.htm
Saying the US only funds people who build weapons is nonsense. It funds *gobs* of it.
I'm not sure I agree that non-uniformed soldiers should be treated as ordinary criminals. If they're part of a regular army acting in violation of the convention, I'm satisfied with summary execution. To the extent you can call any battle fair, the US military tries (though sometimes fails) to keep it fair - show the same effort or else. On the other hand if they're part of an irregular army they're operating in a gray area between a regular army and organized crime (which itself tends to be subject to special laws in the civilized world). The question of how they should be dealt with is extraordinarily difficult to answer - if it weren't, it's likely that few of the insurgencies around the world would ever have lived through their infancy.
But in any case I want to emphasize I was only replying to a very specific claim that the US violates the spirit of the Geneva Convention by not granting its protections to soldiers caught out of uniform. You can make any number of fair criticisms of the US - but this isn't one of them. That should be very clear from my post. And I'm really not sure where you got the idea I think the US has not earned its reputation. Unless you will only accept those exact words, that I think otherwise is very, very clear.