AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!

No wait....

AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Seriously though....

BAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

"There was possibly loss of innocent lives"
"There was loss of possibly innocent lives"

One of these things is what the actually said, one of them is what they probably SHOULD have said, but not necessarily what they meant.

Sorry to seem callous, but that's life. Stuff like that happens every day. They do the best they can, but that kind of thing happens. It's a whole lot better than it was 50 years ago when millions were killed during strategic bombing campaigns. In other news, car accidents probably killed many times that amount of people. A tidal wave killed 155,00 people in Asia. Nothing new under the sun.

Getting bombed by foreign devils is not "life".

true.

i'll have to hear the statement. if what he meant was 'possibly the loss of innocent lives', it'll come through in the way he says it.
the way i read it and the way it's punctuated on the cbc's site makes it sound like he says the lives were possibly innocent.

maybe i am making a big deal out of it. :/ i think it is one.

Uh...no. Your grandpa dying of a heart attack is life. Skippy the Wonderbeagle dying of (relatively) old age is life. Spilling a bowl of soup in your lap is life. Having a bad day at work is life. Sitting in your house and being killed by a bomb is not life.



No. A tsunami is a benign force without any intent. A bomb dropped is dropped with the intent to kill. While that house was obviously not the intended target, comparing an intentionally destructive force to an act of nature is just...plain silly.

Uh, yes it is life. Everyone lives everyday knowing there's a possibility of being killed. Such things has become part of life, Wolfy.

Convince the people living in war torn third world countries that living with the threat of day to day mass bombing and RPG fire isn't life and maybe you have something going for you there.

Except it wouldn't be a possibility if the invasion didn't take place.

No, instead they would be dealing with suicide bombers and thier ilk, who were also working in retaliation against Saddam.

But oh wait, you don't hear anything about that because Saddam was an excellent leader and America's unjustified invasion was unwanted by the entire population of Iraq.

What Farix said.

I don't know if we should have necessarily freed Iraq, but there is one thing you can't deny. Iraq is better of now than it was under Saddam. We did it mainly to get rid of the terrorists, and Saddam who was very likely to detonate a WMD if he got his hands on one. But now were stuck trying to impose order on a society that’s filled with idiots running around detonating pipe bombs, at an extraordinary expense and cost of lives to us. What will we get in return? Nothing! That’s right, nothing! Nothing except know that that jerk Sadam isn’t trying to blow up one of our cities. So we’re not exactly getting the best end of the deal. I hope those Iraqis are grateful.

Lets put things in perspective.

While I do not support in any way shape or form the loss of innocent life, and am not happy when it occurs, in a war, such things are to be expected.

First of all: The pilot is under enormous stress. He is flying a 40 million dollar+ plane, that is extremely complex to operate. Quite often, he is flying in formation with other planes. He must maintain station while trying not to ram the other planes.

His workload is tremendous. He must absorb all the infromation that is being given to him by the myriad of sensor and instruments his plane has to offer. He has quite literally seconds to absorb all this information and act on it.

He is constantly at risk of being killed by either enemy or friendly troops. His life is quite literally in mortal danger from the moment he sets foot in that plane.

His sensors are constantly reporting new planes, which he must determine are enemy or friendly. Several of these, he simply will not be able to determine their status, and must keep an eye out for them.

He must first fly the plane, which in itself is not terribly easy. He has to watch the weather, because it can change almost instantly and create hell for him.

He must be listening to the radio constantly for his callsign, and act on the information given to him, while at the same time listening to all that is going on around him.

And thats all before he gets to the target.

When he reaches the target he has a huge amount of work to do in a very short amount of time.

He must:
a) Ensure he is at the right place
b) Find the target
c) Activate his sensors as requried, and target his weapons.
d) Looking at a small screen about 4 inches square, he must figure out what he is looking at, and make sure that it is the right target. This is difficult enough as it is. If he is under ground fire, it makes a difficult situation worse.
e) Do all the of things I've mentioned above.

And finally, he is human. He will make mistakes. This is war. This is what happens. America is not the first and will certainly not be the last to stuff up.

War is not good.

Why should they be grateful? They didn't ask to be invaded.

Iraq is certainly not better off. There are attacks every day, people are dying every day, Iraqis are fleeing their homes, fleeing their country, because it isn't safe. What more and more Iraqis are saying now is This didn't happen under Saddam Hussein. There were not suicide bombings on the streets of Baghdad in Saddam's Iraq.
Yes, Saddam Hussein had many enemies within Iraq and the Middle-East in general, he was very unpopular with neighbouring countries, but there were not attacks on a daily basis. Saddam Hussein ruled with an iron fist because that is the only way that Iraq can be ruled, and this is what many Iraqis are coming to realise.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the countries of the Middle East were more or less drawn up arbitrarily by the British Empire. Iraq isn't a 'unified' country of shared ideals, it is compromised of several warring factions. Under Saddam Hussein, these warring factions were oppressed to the point where they couldn't fight and kill eachother.
Now, without Saddam Hussein, the floodgates are open. Up until recently, most of the attacks have been against American and British targets, the warring factions have united against the invaders, but you can see now the various groups fighting eachother.
Iraq is going to see civil war - a civil war not dissimilar to those in Africa.

Iraqis have nothing to be grateful for.

Iraqis under Saddam Hussein were considerably better off than those in other countries in the Middle East, primarily because the Ba'ath party did not follow the Shari'a, or other aspects of fundementalist Islam. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a secular state.
This gave women rights that they would not have had (rights that they theoretically should have, under Islamic law, but tend not to have in practise).

There was no legislation against homosexuality. In neighbouring countries, it would be illegal and sometimes a capital crime. The Ba'ath party simply didn't care about it. This position is probably the most useful of all.

Being a pseudo-socialist state, Iraqis had the benefit of excellent social services, health care and education. Oil money was (mostly) going towards social services, not extraordinarily wealthy corporations. In the 60s and 70s, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had the best standard of living in the Middle East (and that includes Turkey and Egypt). Iraq's economy took a serious blow after the Iraq-Iran war, and it went somewhat downhill from there.

But it was nowhere near the chaos and mess that Iraq is today. Even after the elections, the government is unlikely to be able to sort out the country, and it is even more unlikely that Iraq will retain the standard of life under Saddam Hussein. They might not have liked him, but he did a lot of good for Iraq. The elected government is far more likely to adopt a fundementalist Islamic stance, as that's an easy way to win cheap support, despite all the benefits of a secular state.

Iraq doesn't need democracy. Iraq needs security. Democracy is probably inevitable, once a nation has achieved stability, but not before then. Trying to 'accelerate' that process will result in chaos, and it has.

And the thousands of Kurds that Saddam massacred?

This is an incident that few people really understand, but many people spout.

Saddam Hussein was even charged with 'genocide', which is frankly ridiculous. I think it was dropped, recently.

The gassing of the Kurds occured in Halabja. This was during the Iraq-Iran war. Halabja is on the border with Iran. The chemical attack was to stop a column of Iranian forces from occupying the town. It isn't entirely certain whether Iraq was responsible for the attack in the first place, it may have been Iran. The highest estimate of the death toll is 7000, but most of those were not killed by the gas attack, they died from gunshot wounds. They were caught in the crossfire between Iraqi and Iranian forces. Iran were at the very least partly to blame for this incident.

The Kurdish civilians were not the the intended target for this attack. They were 'collateral damage'.

Now, the ethics of 'collateral damage' are precisely what we're talking about in this thread, but it is somewhat hypocritical to suggest that American 'collateral damage' is acceptable when invading Iraq but Saddam Hussein's 'collateral damage' is not acceptable when fighting back invading forces. And of course, all the chemical weapons Saddam Hussein had were provided by the United States..

Except that a terrible dictator and his sons are no longer around to brutally murder innocent people. Feeding people to lions, tossing them into shark tanks, etc.

My friend's family is from Iraq and while I can't provide any documentation, his mother told me that Saddam's sons murdered his uncles for no reason. She spent years absolutely terrified to let her two sons go outside.

Now, if that is the way it was for everyone, ousting the Hussein's is quite a bit to be grateful for.

I would agree. You never hear of Iraqis who wished they lived under the old regime. And the whole "resistance" seems to be made up more of people that are afraid of the Iraqi citizens being free than anything else. Hell, they are killing more Iraqis than Allied forces.

I think part of it is that some of the people that wanted to be freed, wanted to be freed by one of their own.

Yeah but the ironic thing is she probably still can't send her sons outside cause the US troops might accidently catch them in crossfire.

This was years ago. They live in the US now.

Oh okay let me rephrase my previous statement. Afraid to send her kids outside due to the fact they could get hit in the cross fire of a gang shooting.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is... there is violence everywhere you go.

No, Saddam Hussein was never popular, he wasn't trying to be. But he was what Iraq needed. There simply isn't an alternative. Iraq is not Britain, Iraq is America, Iraq must be run like Iraq must be run, and Saddam Hussein had a pretty solid setup for how that was.

But all the countries in the Middle East are dictatorships, the only democracy I can think of is Israel. Iraqis under Saddam Hussein were far better off than those in Iran or Saudi Arabia.



Uh, the whole "enemies of freedom" line is an amusing piece of rhetoric, but that's all it is.

And yes, they are killing Iraqis, and that's the point. What you're seeing now is the beginning of civil war. It's not as bad now, because much of the attention is geared towards fighting American and British soldiers, but once they're gone, the warring factions will start fighting eachother, Sunni attacks on Shia Iraqis, vice versa, I'm sure the Kurds will get involved in there somewhere.
The only way to prevent such violence is to rule by a iron fist, to be a tough, strong leader. Not necessarily a 'democratic' leader.

You are of course correct, but I'm wondering if that's all there is to it. The fact that the United States plowed into the heart of Baghdad within a couple of days leads me to believe Saddam Hussein wasn't exactly the iron fist you claim him to be. Had these attacks gone on under Saddam's regime, they would have been deadlier.

So, everyone in Iraq needs to be butchered for a slight disagreement with their ruler? Saddam was by far not what Iraq or any country on this planet needed.

What Mort-Hog is getting at is that Iraq and the affected Middle East were far more stable under Saddam's rule than they are now. That much can't be denied. While democracy is a noble cause, it has caused more deaths in the short-term than is possibly justified.

Well, not really, being a strict ruler doesn't really have anything to do with military dominance. He was very good at supressing violent extremeists, but he probably couldn't stand up against a full-blown revolution. Or invasion. Iraq's economy was slowly getting worse, so I don't think he was spending that much money on the military.

Saddam stabilized Iraq(with the exception of the Kurds), but he destabilized the rest of the middle east. He had a secular government, which really pissed off the radical islamists, he was an expansionist who with half a chance would love to take over Iran, Kuwait, Israel, and Saudi Arabia(and he did not hide these desires). Since the embargos were less than effective in preventing him from rebuilding his military he was able to form a considerable army of Cold War weaponry(the same stuff everyone else in that region takes a liking to with an exception of Israel), most notable of which was the unparelleled size of his artillery. He even tried to build the largest artillery piece ever built just so he could shell Israel from Iraq. Saddam fashioned himself after Stalin and he had the same affect though on a smaller scale: he stabilized the country with his ironfisted rule, but it was because of that ironfisted rule that he destabilized the rest of the region because they feared him.

If you doubt me, go read Tommy Frank's autobiography.

Do not take this to mean I promote the war. This is just an analysis.

A lot of these problems are caused by the arbitrary way in which the Middle East was carved up. Throughout the history of what-we-now-call-Iraq, the what-we-now-call-Kuwait was always part of what-we-now-call-Iraq. Many Iraqi intellectuals agree that Kuwait really should be a part of Iraq, as it always has been. Again, one of the many problems caused directly by the British Empire.

To put it all on "Saddam Hussein causing trouble in the area" is a bit much. Ever since the Iranian revolution, all the other countries in the region feared similar revolutions in their countries, most of all neighbouring Iraq. Iran has been destabalising the Middle-East just as much as Iraq has.

Yes, the Ba'ath party would put out a lot of rhetoric throughout the Middle-East, for propaganda purposes. But that's exactly what it was, rhetoric. Most every country in Asia tends to spout it much more freely than in the West.

Mort and Freelancer, your point of view on this is morally reprehensible. You guys honestly think a tyranical dictator is better for arabs because they either can't handle freedom or are too dangerous when they possess it? Aah, only brits and Americans can handle freedom. What a crock...

That was almost a century ago. And that's besides it does not justify his expansion. Otherwise Turkey, Greece, and Iran still has claim over that entire area because it was their land at one time or another.

The problem is that you think 'freedom' is inherently a 'good' thing.
It isn't, necessarily. Often you have to choose between 'security' and 'freedom'. When Iraqis see attacks in their country taking place every day with no forseeable end, it is hardly surprising that they'll opt towards the 'security' end of the spectrum. What good is voting in a government if the country is in civil war?
More and more Iraqis are saying "this didn't happen under Saddam Hussein". It didn't.

America has never had the sorts of problems Iraq is facing, and Britain hasn't had them for a good 500 years or so - though the IRA violence is sort of a small scale version of it. What works in America and Britain will not necessarily work in Iraq, because Iraq has different needs and different circumstances. I know I'm repeating myself, but the problem in Iraq is warring factions. Saddam Hussein partially united them and partially oppressed them in order to keep them apart. Now, without Saddam Hussein, there's nothing to keep them apart.
And 'democracy' inherently promotes competition, promotes conflict, and this doesn't help. When there's a Sunni government, the Shia and Kurds are going to oppose it, when there's a Shia government the Sunni and Kurds are going to oppose it, and it will be nothing at all like the harmless mudslinging of Democrats at Republicans.

Mort, again, I agree. Keeping stability and having military power do not always go hand in hand. I supposed I'm just trying to figure out exactly what it is that is spurring all this violence. It can't simply be the lack of Saddam, as you suggest. There's something else at play here.

Wookie, you're reading too much into what I said. I said that democracy has caused more deaths in the Middle East than is possibly justified. I never even implied that arabs can't handle freedom. I simply stated that many have died. Surely you must agree that there have been an abnormal amount of deaths in the region for the sake of democracy. That's all I said. And furthermore, I said that it's possible that the ends don't justify the means. I said it's possible. Morally, I'm trying to hold the correct view. Even if you accomplish the most noble goal in the world, the means by which you do it in some cases may not justify the accomplishment.

Well.. no, not really. This is what happens when you remove Saddam from power. The floodgates open. It's only going to get worse, much worse, before it starts to get better.

Freedom is the natural state of all people. Some, unfortunately, don't get to realize it. I've never heard of anyone coming from an oppresive lifestyle to a free one, that we all enjoy, say they'd prefer to be oppressed.

What? Are you saying you don't like burgers?

That's sweet of you.

Wolfy wins this game IMO.

So many people don't understand that they can't just show up once every four years for election day and expect this country to go in the direction they want it to. This is the kind of mentality that will lead to an even bigger Republican win in '08 if it doesn't stop.

You're right.

Every two years. Senate elections are important.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'natural', I think any sociologist would cringe at that.

But Iraq has ultimate 'freedom' now, complete chaos in some parts, and Iraqis aren't exactly celebrating it. Iraq needs order, and Iraq needs more 'order' than anything we have in Britain or America because that's just the way Iraq is. Some countries need to be run authoritatively, and Iraq is one of those. Britain and America don't as much, not as overtly. That's just the way they are, countries are different.