Iraq Photos

I wasn't talking about you, sorry my language was unclear. I was talking about the owner of the site I linked to.

[Edited on Jul 14, 2005 by stockula]

I think its interesting, having grown up in the us in the 80s and 90s, war seems like such an abstraction. Its really a luxury to be able to view war through rose colored lenses. I agree completely with the media's standards about not showing graphic war images or corpses, and yet its that practice that has allowed many americans to in a sense 'forget' the horrors of war.
Alot of those images have really weighed on me today, you cant erase something like that from your mind, and i'm obviously just seeing it secondhand.
I guess what i'm saying is that its important to view some of the 'realities' of war in order to know more fully the weapon we wield. I'm much more likely to advocate going to war if I havent seen any of its darker sides with my own eyes. As unpleasant as it is for us to view tragedy, its infinitely worse for people actually experiencing it, perhaps through the viewing of these images war could become truly the last resort it needs to be?

The thing is, Sarita, is that while there's more access to what happens in war through more unfiltered mediums, the truth is that war as waged by the US today is far less bloody and far more precise than any other time in history.

Yet opposition to war at all costs has never been higher. Kind of a paradox, or at least a refusal to put modern military action into historical perspective.

Anti war types think that liberating a country of 25 million the size of California on the other side of the world at the expense of 1700 soldiers over 2 years isn't worth it, or a huge disaster. That sort of loss of life would have happened in a day at Antietam or Chancellorsville in the Civil War, with very little headway made in the overall course of the war.



[Edited on Jul 14, 2005 by stockula]

Thank you! I usually abstain from these conversations, but wanted to jump in and thank you for pointing out something important. Today's youth are a bunch of pussies who have no concept of history, especially pertaining to war. The freedoms we enjoy every second of every day (including your freedom to bash President Bush.... ) came at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives in the Revolutionary and Civil wars.

Having accomplished as much as we have so far in Iraq and Afghanistan with an amazingly minimal loss of troops is a historical first. My brother is a Special Forces operator, I know what is going on over there. The public in Iraq loves us for what we have done: Removed a despot and mass murderer from power. The death and carnage that continues is the result of foreign extremists who come into Iraq and are trying to start a civil war.

My brother has personally walked through Iraqi buidings full of poisonous gas, bomb-making materials, gas chambers and torture chambers splattered with the blood and intestines of other Iraqis. All the United States did is followed through on what the UN has been threatening to do for years, but didn't have the spine to. (Now that we discover France and Germany's ties to the "oil for food" program, it's no wonder........)

I'm sick of people saying we had no reason to go there, as well as the media's portrayal of the progress. This is the FIRST war ever where we've had a daily death count. You never saw news reports during WW2 telling us, "Today, 45,000 US troops were killed......".

What the US military has accomplished so far is amazing. It was the right thing to do, they are doing a great job, and I applaud those folks who choose to get shot at for someone else's freedom, instead of sitting in front of a computer bitching, hoping all the tyrants and genocidal maniacs of the world just go away all by themselves.

I must have missed the part where you listed non-fatal military injuries, American civilian injuries and fatalities, Iraqi injuries and fatalities, the monetary cost of fighting the war, and the detrimental effect the war has had on global opinion of the United States as "expenses". Care to add those in there?

Thousands more Iraqis have died at the hands of Saddam Hussein and suicide bombers than through any fault of US soldiers. The survival rate of the injured is hundreds of times higher than any war we've fought. Leave it to a liberal to put a negative spin on the fact that most of the injured or amputee soldiers would have DIED in past wars.

And people who are more worried about the opinions of other countries instead of acting and doing what is right are exactly the people that tyrants like Hitler and Hussein love. Ask anyone in France if their Grandparents minded us coming by when the Nazis were marching through Paris. Ask them if they would have preferred that we stayed out, because we might upset our image with the rest of the world.

And you're discounting the legitimate sacrifices of those in the present conflict who don't fit into your convenient single category while at the same time condemning others for not being "compassionate" enough in regard to the class of victims whose ignored-until-it-was-convenient existence somehow justifies a nation-building policy the opposite of which was part of the current administration's campaign platform. Congratulations.

I never discounted a single thing. I simply stated that modern technology and field medicine have taken a huge percentage out of the "dead" column and moved them into "wounded". You'd figure there'd be no way to turn that statistic into a negative, but lo and behold I was wrong. My father has a Purple heart from Vietnam to match his 3-toed left foot, so don't preach to me about sacrifice.

And 64 words constitutes a run-on sentence, my friend. Punctuation can assist you with clarity.

don't forget the iraqis stock. they're paying much more than we are.

My point exactly. For the press to blame America for Iraqi deaths is ludicrous.

I'm sorry. Would "conveniently ignored" be more acceptable to you?

Civilian deaths are negative things. Permanent injuries are negative things. Billions of dollars spent on wars with ever-changing goals and unclear motives which make the aforementioned two things happen are bad things. This is not spin, this is not propaganda--unless you have some way to make the deaths and maimings of innocents into a positive, wholesome thing.

That, as a debate point, is tacky.

If you're going to try to obfuscate a losing battle with an impromptu internet grammar lesson (the moral high ground of any proper debate, no?), at least have the taste to do so without beginning your sentence with "and". Refer to your Harbrace manual for details on fragments.

lucidrous? they'd still be alive if we hadn't invaded them.

You're right. Those insurgent bombs totally dropped the Coalition of the Willing bombs that came before them.

Do you understand what this means? Bombs that can fly military jets and drop other bombs? This is SKYNET, people. Everybody to the bunkers!

I'm sure they prefer the possibilty of a small number of accidental civilian casualties to the constant threat of Saddam's secret police dragging them off in the middle of the night. Just ask someone they dragged out of the mass graves if Iraq is better now, or 5 years ago. They aren't dead because of us, they are dead because the UN refused to act. Or ask any of the thousands of Kurds he gassed if they prefer today's Iraq or Saddam's. Hurly has been there, and he'll confirm what my brother has told me, that the Iraqi people are glad we're there.

My comment about my father was in reponse to your intimation that I was unsympathetic to injured soldiers, by the way. There's no way to "conveniently ignore" war related disability when you lived with someone who suffered from it for 18 years. You're a real bleeding heart, feeling the pain of the wounded. My best friend in the world has permanent health issues because of war and he'd do it again in a heartbeat, so don't accuse me of not caring.

Death and maiming of innocents is NOT a positive thing, that's one thing you and I can agree on. Where we differ is apparently you don't understand that that's what the Baath party regime stood for, and what we have put a stop to. It is preferrable to have some collateral damage for 3 or 4 years, as opposed to allowing the intentional, wholesale slaughter of innocents continue when we have the power to stop it.

small number? ask the tens of thousands of dead civilians who died in the last two years.

So this is why you invaded Iraq in the first place?
'Cause I'd heard otherwise...

He's totally not discounting, nope. Not at all.

So the fact that we can wage a "cleaner" war is justification to wage more war? I see that as no reason to move war up from a tool of absolutely last resort to a convenient settler of differences.

Under what authority, exactly, did we "liberate" them? They posed no threat. As most of the pre-war intelligence has shown, we knew they weren't a threat.

We are not on a crusade. Our job as a country is not to wipe out the "evils" of the world. For that matter, Saddam wasn't even very high on that list. If there's a credible threat, one that can't be resolved without the use of force, well then so be it. But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are far cries from that state of affairs.

[Edited on Jul 14, 2005 by Longpastbedtime]

Small point. when was the last time Saddam commited a mass atrocity? Hint it was over seven years ago...

I understand what youre saying Stock, but i'm not sure I understand your logic. "So many people have died in past wars why are we making such a fuss about 1000 dead iraqis?" The reason there is more anti war activism these days despite the reduced number of war related fatalities is, as you alluded to, mostly due to advances in technology and media coverage. We are no longer fighting a nameless faceless abstract enemy. We can see their faces, hear their voices, and comiserate with their pain merely by virtue of realizing that we have alot in common..

I guess it sort of scares me that someone can see the gruesome images in some of those galleries and not view war as a last resort. .

Still no answer for me? I wasn't asking for an answer from those who attempted to answer for you.