Subject:
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Dead Men Tell No Tales
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 5 Aug 2003 14:58:57 GMT
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Viewed:
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241 times
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The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4725751,00.html
US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the
number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily
high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that
have gone largely unreported in the media.
Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat
operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to
Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total number of
US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112.
The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American
wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
Bumbling Bush may have given Osama an open goal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4725732,00.html
It is at this point that the doubts about Bush’s divisive and frequently crude
leadership of the “war on terror” come more sharply into focus. Bush is accused
of many things - but never of being imaginative. From the very start, and
despite much spin and waffle about fighting a new kind of conflict by
unconventional means, Bush has opted for the obvious.
In Afghanistan, nebulous al-Qaida networks posed a complex and subtle challenge.
Bush’s solution? Invade the country and overthrow its rulers. The Taliban may
have had it coming; but that is hardly the point. This was the old-style
“overwhelming force” approach long favoured by US presidents, Daddy Bush
included.
The Iraq campaign was conducted, for whatever reason (and many were given), on
much the same principle: kick the door down, then charge in - and to hell with
the wider consequences. While such behaviour brings quick, short-term results
and may be superficially gratifying, innovative or imaginative it definitely is
not.
These tactics bear little relation to an effective defence against terrorism in
the round, let alone to tackling its root causes. Many al-Qaida in Afghanistan
were merely dispersed; now they are returning. As for Iraq, they were never
there in the first place.
edit: note that Iraq remains a confusingly oblique location for an “attack” on
terrorists not in evidence, so why invade? Certainly, no justification for a
“preemptive” act aggression can be made. “Preemptive” is in quotes because the
idea is that one acts in advance of some other event that one intends to deflect
or to stop in its tracks -- in this circumstance, we are still awaiting proof
this unprecedented move on the part of the U.S. was somehow necessary. The fear
and increasing certainty is that we are waiting in vain. Of the little nuclear
material to be found in Iraq is our own depleted uranium. We should be SO
proud...
US Wants Saddam, But Dead - Not Alive
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0803-06.htm
edit: the Toronto Sun no longer allows free access to its archives
If put on public trial, Saddam would have a field day revealing the embarrassing
alliance between his brutal regime and Washington:
•The CIA’s role in bringing the Ba’ath Party to power in a 1958 coup, opening
the way for Saddam to take control.
•U.S., Israeli, and Iranian destabilization
of Iraq during the 1970s by fueling Kurdish rebellion.
•Washington’s egging on
the aggressive shah of Iran in the Shatt al-Arab waterway dispute, a primary
cause of the Iran-Iraq War.
•The U.S. secretly urging Iraq to invade Iran in
1980 to overthrow that nation’s revolutionary Islamic government.
•Covert
supply of Saddam’s war machine by the U.S. and Britain during the eight-year
Iran-Iraq conflict, plus biological warfare programs and germ feeder stocks,
poison gas manufacturing plants and raw materials.
•Billions in aid, routed
through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Italy’s Banco del Lavoro and the
shadowy BCCI. Heavy artillery, munitions, spare parts, trucks, field hospitals
and electronics.
•Equally important, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and
CIA operated offices in Baghdad that provided Iraq with satellite intelligence
data on Iranian troop deployments that proved decisive in the war’s titanic
battles at Basra, Majnoon and Faw.
•The murky role played by Washington just
before Iraq’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. ambassador told Saddam “The U.S.
takes no position in Arab border disputes.” Was this a trap to lure Saddam to
invade Kuwait, then crush his army, or simple diplomatic bungling? Saddam could
supply the awkward answers.
-- Hop-Frog
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