Comments on: More Data on the Iraqi Civilian Death Toll

By: JohnnyWalkerRed

JohnnyWalkerRed — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 18:31:45 +0000

So I was in Sociology today, and we were learning about something called “white privilege”, wherein all white people have certain advantages over other racial groups. It was pretty interesting, because it had this survey to determine whether there really was such a thing, and it had all these questions that you answered true or false to, like this…
“I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.”
So I answer true. In fact, being a caucasian male, I answer true to all 50 of these survey questions. Then, at the end of this survey, everyone tells how many they could answer true about, and all the white males were in the upper 40’s or 50. So we all know that we have “white privilege”. We are all aware of it. You couldn’t go to a public school and this country and not be aware of it. Pretty obvious.
The thing that I didn’t like about it was that at the end of the reading it asked whether we thought people knew about and acknowledged our advantage over other races. And all the girls were like, “No, I don’t think we really think about it at all, because no one tells us that we are privileged like that article says we are. But we see it now.”
Good God! Were they paying attention to our feedback at all? Of course we know that we are privileged. To say they didn’t know about it is close to saying that they would change it if they had known. They take no responsibility for the way the world works. I swear, high school girls are all retarded. I know I’m privileged, I’ve always known I have a better life than most people, and part of it is being white. Well, I have to go now, school is out for the weekend. Gonna get blitzed.

By: b.

b. — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:15:07 +0000

well, dl. how can you say islam is a religion of hate since the begining of time? have you studied the religion itself to pass a comment like that? if so then what about all the Christians who are killing the Iraqi’s now for oil. which is really the religion of hate. Osama is really the person we need to worry about. its like everyone forgot about sep 11. and now Osama is out free. every religion has people who are wrong or are extremists. before passing a comment and being narrow minded. get your facts together.

By: Sue

Sue — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 01:35:14 +0000

Rich …. As I said, Saddam could have prevented it all by letting the Inspectors in unconditionally. It was a UN resolution. Why didn’t he do it? Remember, if he did, this war would not have happened. The entire world suspected he had WMD’s, and we didn’t know for sure. What would you be saying now if he did have WMD’s and a Nuke hit NYC, but we didn’t know because we let him slide with the inspections. Please look at what led up to this war … and address the inspections (or lack of). Should we have given him more time? How many deadlines can he miss without us taking action, when an unknown threat is against our country. He was told to show his cards by the world. When he wouldn’t, we could not be assured that he wasn’t hiding alot more.

By: Rich

Rich — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 03:31:18 +0000

Yes we did have a choice – unfortunately it didn’t fit the administration’s political worldview. It worries me when the “they” in “they hit us” is used in connection with Hussein. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The only reason there are terorists in Iraq now is our incompetence in handling the siuation – particularly after we “won”.

By: Sue

Sue — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 13:47:49 +0000

Well … I’m not sure who’s right and who’s wrong when it comes to making decisions of war. Some say war is justified under NO circumstances, others say it is a necessary evil to prevent further tragedy. I do know that when the decision was made to go to Iraq, Saddam was well warned. UN resolutions (a joke) were repeatedly ignored, inspections were played around with and we, as the United States, DID NOT KNOW if they had weapons of mass destruction. Remember September 11th. They hit us when our eyes were SHUT! And they hit us bad. There was alot of speculation that Iraq did have WMD capabilities. Even other countries agreed to this possibility. Why didn’t Saddam just let us in to complete inspections the way they needed to be completed. In my opinion, this war was caused by a tremendously narcissistic, egocentrical, self proclaimed god who thought he could continue to mess with the human race, threaten and hold hostage the world, and get away with it. We Had No Choice!

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 03:32:28 +0000

The world is now facing a natural disaster that may have killed 150,000 people and we are justifiably horrified. The attack on Hiroshima intentionally killed ~150,000 people, and many of us have been horrified. Annie Dillard once asked how many casualties it took for Americans to take notice when “others” were killed – wondering about the threshold of our humanity. John Donne’s powerful 1624 statement that “any man’s death diminishes me” remains the ideal, and yet we as a nation continue to ignore famine, genocide, and epidemics in both our own family and in the developing world. To justify intentionally killing any number of people (including our own soldiers) to “gain a foothold against terrorism” sounds very similar to bleeding and leeching sick people to restore the balance of their humours. Terrorism cannot be defeated with armies – it must be fought on the battlefield of poverty, oppression, ignorance, and despair. Fundamentalism breeds terrorism out of fear and loathing of “the other.” Countering it can only be accomplished by eliminating the concept of “other” when it comes to humanity – Islam, Christianity, Buddhism all have a foundational belief in the value and innate goodness of humans and can only be warped when “humanity” is denied and negated by defining an “us” against a “godless, evil them.” (I love the comment about Islam being a faith spread by war and violence. Obviously the person didn’t pass their Western Civ class – the Crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms conducted in the name of Christianity provide most of the atrocities in the last 18 or so centuries – including the holocaust. Islam, while having a definite activist wing, pretty much stuck to killing its own in internecine rivalries.) WWII was a “traditional” war of states against states – The “war on terror” is not, and never will be, a war. It is a way of denying failed policies, support for the wrong people (e.g. Royal Saudis) and gross negligence. 9/11 was a criminal act perpetrated by humans – not an act of war. Preventing another such act is justified – conducting ourselves in ways that echo those of terrorists is not.

By: Alison

Alison — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 11:32:03 +0000

Bush after knowing the sexual harrassments of Iraqi prisoners and civilians due to war, and still mongering to go to war against North Korea, Iran and other nations, gives the clearest proof that JESUS considers Bush as nothing more or less than DEVIL IN HUMAN FORM FULLY SUPPORTED AND BACKED BY DR.LUCIFER.

By: Tyler Durden

Tyler Durden — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 22:24:45 +0000

In response to the first post;

Those dead are ours? How many of the civian dead were caused by our soldiers or planes and how many were caused by insurgents? Thats the question we should be asking and THEN contemplate the “why” or “is it worth it” questions.

Or are you trying to insinuate, in a rather snotty manner, that we are to blame for the insurgant’s killings? That’s pretty thin and a gross oversimplification of the current situation in Iraq.

By: mark

mark — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:47:44 +0000

War sucks.. true.. However when Osama and the rest of Al Quaida decided to attack the united states, they weren’t planning a one time attack to never strike again. The goal of Al Quaida is to completely destroy the united states! to leave every person, every family, every institution either dead or completely bankrupt. Al quaida wants to destroy antiwar population just as they want to destroy war supporters. They don’t care. When national leaders support terrorist groups they are essencially waging war on the united states. You can’t say that Iraq was no harm to any surrounding country or the US simply because they don’t have nuclear weapons. Iraq along with several other countries in the world support financially as well as by other means terrorist activities. Officials provide them with weapons, false identifications etc.

The new fad right now is to call Bush a terrorist or a Dictator. I don’t agree with how the war was fought (air bombing etc) howevever, Bush is far from being a terrorist or a dictator. The invasion of Iraq was not to only free the people but to gain a foothold on the war against terrorists.

A real dictator is a leader who changes the constitution so that he can stay in office forever, eliminates freedom of expression to avoid the spread of his killing his own people who oppose him on the news, Changing the vote system so that someone who doesn’t vote counts as a vote for him, and forces the public to listen to his broadcasts every day on every channel in which he informs the public of the great and terrific job he is doing as their “president” This is the case in Cuba and Venezuela. Venezuela is where I live. George Bush fully supports freedom of expression as he has made several coments to the dictator of venezuela that freedom of expression should not be removed. George bush also will never change the constitution in order to stay in office more than his 8 years. George bush doesn’t force the public to listen to his speeches every day on every channel. therefore I say if you call your president (george bush) a dictator or terrorist I think you need to come live in venezuela for a while with me. If i say anything about the “president” in public I go to jail for 5 1/2 years.

If you don’t like George bush that’s another thing.. by all means hate him if you want.. hate his politics.. but he’s not a dictator or a terrorist.

Another thing, Our electoral college might not be perfect but it’s the system we use. It can favor a democrat just as much as it can favor a republican. Bush won by over 3 million popular votes but Kerry is trying to get Ohio. If somehow he gets ohio he’ll be president. Then would all the republicans be allowed to complain that Kerry wasn’t “elected” he was “appointed”???

By: dl

dl — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 22:00:31 +0000

The simple fact of the matter is that Islam has been a religion of violence since its very beginnings. The muslim faith is spread through war and violence. Much like our stand against hitler, we must now take a stand against Islam. That is what we do, as americans. We stand up for what is right and we put our asses on the line for the freedom of others. We do this because of the christian foundations of our culture. We value and respect the fundamental value and dignity of the human person, and we are willing to die to allow others in the world to live with the same liberties we have been afforded. In a perfect world, I would agree that we should never do harm. We should never do harm to ourselves, to the environment or to each other. Unfortunately, the world has become a place where we sometimes have to make decisions based on doing the least amount of harm. Attacking iraq, regardless of Bush’s ulterior motives, is doing less harm than allowing a despotic dictator to trample on the lives, the liberty, and the freedom of an entire country full of iraqis. Sure, we killed some innocent people, but how many people have we saved? If we stay in iraq and finish the job, how many people will get to experience the freedoms and liberties intended by the Creator for the first time? We can sit idly by and watch evil wash over the entire world, but if we do, just realize that one day it will reach our shores. And i am talking about much more than a couple of thousand people dying in a terrorist attack. We have a moral obligation to stand up and fight evil in its many forms and i am glad that we stand up to meet that obligation.

By: jph of

jph of — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:48:48 +0000

Well, Russ perhaps you should consider what it is you where putting your ‘life on the line’ for. Blind faith kills. The constant refrain of “protecting our way of life” as the USA motive for manipulating other countries governments, and when that fails, invading them to get access to their resources is utterly sickening. It is time to examine and change our “way of life”. Oil dependancy to feed this grotesque over consumption is not a way of life, it is a way to death and suffering. This war has killed many iraqis, so did the 10 years of daily bombings since the last USA war there.
The fact is that these actions have nothing to do with helping those people,. it is only about ca$h money . As in most political situations just follow the all mighty money trail to find the real motives. The Bush regime is deep in oil and military investments,. the Carlyle Group has bush’s dad on the board,. Halliburton has Cheney all over it,. these people are profiting from this war, search the net the truth is obvious if you are willing to see it.

By: Russ

Russ — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 13:11:00 +0000

Do all of you idiots not realize that more of the Iraqi civilian death toll can be attributed to the Iraqi insurgents than it can to the American liberators. I personally served in Iraq at the outbreak of the war as a US Marine, and I promise your support would be much more appreciated from you by the troops who put their life on the line than your sarcasm and negativity. You all need to think long and hard about what it means to be an American.

By: Alan Poirier

Alan Poirier — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 02:20:33 +0000

Let me say first off that I am a Canadian. Our government took a lot of heat when it decided to stay out of the war against Iraq. When I see the civilian death toll, I’m glad we sat this one out. Canada chose to fight in Afghanistan. That was a different story. There the Taliban hosted and protected terrorists who were responsible for a horrific act in NY. A lot of Canadians died in the attack on the WTC and we were justified in attacking Afghanistan. Iraq, however, never posed a credible threat to anyone. There’s little doubt that Iraq is probably better off without Hussein. But the rules of international law are fairly clear on such matters. Unless a state poses a threat — i.e., launches an attack — there is no justification for invasion. That makes the loss of life in Iraq — civilian and military — all the more shameful. We need to hold our politicians accountable on both sides of the border.

By: Rational Christian

Rational Christian — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 13:32:47 +0000

Stating that loss of life is never justified by war is an oversimplification. Of course, many families of the individual who died will feel that their loss is not justified. In the case of WWII, however, the U.S. joined a coalition of forces that were already engaged in trying to stop the maniacal idealog, Hitler. I think history has shown that WWII could not have been avoided. In the case of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I do beleive that Harry Truman felt that that was a mistake (he refused to use atomic bomb again, even with the insistance of his military leaders, most notably Macarthur) but again history has justified the idea of attacking Japan, since they attacked the U.S. We are still debating the justification for the war in Vietnam.

Comparing those situations with the current war in Iraq I list the following published statements (I do not attest to the accuracy of all of them): 1) Iraq never attacked the US or any American; 2) Saddam Hussein did attack Kuwait but was quickly stopped and was kept under close surveillance by the UN’s weapons inspectors and human rights commission (the latter was to stop his murder and torture of innocent civilians, which was effective and a fact rarely, if ever reported by the media); 3) George Bush did site WMD’s and links to terroists as the reasons to attack Iraq; 4) the 9/11 commission has concluded that both claims by George Bush were based on faultly information; 5) the Roanoke Times quoted an article from the Lancet that in the last 18 months an estimated 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war in Iraq.

My conclusion is that George Bush’s case to go to war was far more flimsy than any other in history, yet the collateral damage is greater than Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden. One has to seriously consider all of the facts and the repercussions of his act before taking that action. Either George Bush did not do so or he did not care. Clearly George Bush is intelligent enough to learn from history and to listen to his advisors like Colin Powell, who told him something like “you break it, you own it.”

But on second thought maybe not. George H.W. Bush wrote that he did not try to go after Saddam Hussein because he did not want to have to rebuild the country (again paraphrasing here). Yet when George Bush was asked if he consulted his father before invading Iraq, he said that he consulted a higher father. So a third possibility is that George Bush’s ideology forces him to turn a blind eye to rational thought.

So George Bush declared war on Iraq because he had faulty information and invaded before checking the facts, had an agenda that has not been stated or revealed and did not care about the repercussions of his act, or invaded Iraq for some idealogical reason, like saving the world kind of thing. I don’t know how anyone can come to any other conclusion. In my view all three reasons are very bad ones when you consider the huge loss of life of Iraqis, citizens and soldiers from other countries and, of course, our brave American soldiers. In addition, the world is now stuck with having to deal with this gigantic morass Bush has created and perhaps worst of all, a great detioration of human relationships, particularly between Muslims and Christians. I hear Christian leaders advocating a holy war against Islam. I don’t believe they would have been as bold to say something like that if anyone else were in the White House.

Face it, this Administration promotes hate and violence. I for one do not see how that comports with Christian thought. “Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (Ro 13:10). Frankly, why in God’s name would anyone have contempt for Muslims in the first place? They are deeply religious people who love God and Jesus.

We really need to stop this madness.

By: Stanley Dorvil

Stanley Dorvil — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:52:27 +0000

What I find so amusing is how desperate so many sound using comparative statistics to justify to themselves how great their USA is.

By: Gerald Davis

Gerald Davis — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:57:49 +0000

What you seem to forget is than Saddam killed 10x as many civilans and his killings were murder. UN estimates that Saddam killed as many as 250,000 people and another 150,000+ died due to him illegally using Oil For Food money to buy weapons. The sad truth is that the US invasion resulted in less deaths annually than what happened in the 10 years priot to the war. The only difference is that the US deaths are in the open and covered by CNN and MSNBC while Saddams killings were in the middle of the night or people just “dispeared”.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 19:40:03 +0000

The events surrounding the use of the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are extremely complex and involve issues such as the entrance of the soviets into the war against Japan, the estimated casualties to be sustained (anywhere from 30,000 to 500,000)if the planned November invasion occured, the obdurate Japenese militant leaders (not all were, and the emperor could always intervene, as he did after the bombings) that would rather sacrifice the whole country than give in to an unconditional surrender, the fact that noncombatants were targeted first by the Japaneese against the Chinese then by the Germans against the English(only then did allied forces consider using noncombatants as targets), the diplomatic gains against the soviet union that might be advanced after the war, the fact Truman kind of inherited the whole plan that was already in motion, and the fact that other nations were developing nucular war programs. All of these factors must be examined, as well as the information that scientist had at the time, such as the thought that the radioactive fallout would be relatively small. Some plans actually called for using nuclear bombs as part of the invasion process if it were to go forward. Exploding a bomb on concentrated enemy forces and then moving soldiers in after detonation. If they had know about the radiation, then plan like this would not have been contemplated, likewise, had they know about the radiation, the decisions to use the bombs may have been different. The truth is that there is no difinitive answer, such as “the decision to use the bombs saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and many Japanese lives as well.”

By: Jo

Jo — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 20:50:21 +0000

War in any shape or form, is dishonorable. The fact that some chubby paper pushers sit in offices far far removed from what is going on and have the comfort and control of remote controls and phones to help aid them in a process that leads to your average jane and joe ultimate death makes the whole process repulsive.

By: Gargoyle

Gargoyle — Fri, 28 May 2004 17:55:14 +0000

The simple truth folks is people love killing one another.

By: just another guy

just another guy — Mon, 24 May 2004 23:53:42 +0000

War is never justified, though sometimes it is necessary. It is neither justified nor necessary. The fact that they did get rid of Sedam Hussein does not justify the countless death toll. And the fact that they could care less about countries in Africa where kids are being enlisted in “glorious battle” for some twisted warlord dosent matter to them. The only reason Sedam Hussein was special, was that without him, oil could be bought at cheap prices. I am disgusted at the racism in Iraq. You get Sedam Hussein out, the Iraqis are better off, sure they are, but than you stay to make sure everything is better when it is the American way.

God bless america…. turns to ashes everytime i say it