GeoffP:“By "unprecedented hell" I presume you mean the terrorism."
No, I mean the totality of Iraq's present agony.
”Oh, God, I knew you were going to say that. "Oh, the horror, the inhumanity!" Can you please specify what you mean, Hindenburg Lad? "
You are being disgustingly flippant about the horrors that Iraqis are enduring, and I suspect that it is because you are exhibiting a conditioned dehumanization of the victims. There is literally a horrific inhumanity taking place in Iraq right now, and the American leaders who concocted this failed occupation are directly responsible for initiating this downward spiral into depravity.
I'm not experiencing a conditioned dehumanization of anything. I'm simply trying to pry out of you a statement on the exact nature of the suffering of the people of Iraq and how the American departure will aid that. The main negative consequence of the Yank presence is terrorism, which apparently the Yanks invoke through their continued and obstinate presentation of themselves as targets, apparently. Now: exactly what other suffering are they responsible for and how will their leaving fix it? Will the roads reknit themselves when the last GI boot is lifted from the sacred soil of Iraq? Will the grace of Allah permit the re-establishment of electricity and water: for, doth he not control all things from the greatest to the smallest? What exactly will happen.
"And how - exactly - will the American withdrawal help or expedite the situation?"
As I have been patiently, clearly, and repetitively explaining to you, the leading direct unintended consequence of the experiment has been the breakdown of Iraqi society. Iraq continues to be wracked by the agony of a societal seizure, that was directly induced by an intervention that has been an incompatible systemic insult. When accountable people carry out an experiment, and the experiment goes catastrophically wrong, accountable people halt the experiment. Irresponsible and insincere people, desperately avoiding inquiries inevitably leading to questions of accountability, often make ridiculous statements of denial, and dance childishly around the subject.
Or, rather, fisk about the subject without providing a clear response to legitimate inquiry with which they'd assuredly rather not deal. Accountable people might well halt an experiment which goes wrong, but if the experiment is doomed to go even wronger once the PI walks out of the lab and flips the light off, then that strikes me as actually even more unaccountable. It's rather like an experiment where someone introduces a few dogs to a room, notices that they immmediately begin savaging one another, and then decides to bugger off to avoid any further suffering on their part. I think you would see that there's going to be suffering even if the researcher in question does leave, and irrespective of what's gone on previously.
"And it behooves the former at least to have suffering and chaos instead of stability and efficient exploitation?"
No again. Unintended consequences remain the aspect of this disaster that you refuse to acknowledge.
Wrong. I do acknowledge it. I merely place the blame evenly, on the appropriate parties for the appropriate reasons.
You have given no reasonable basis for your denial of this reality. I am sensitive to the fact that this denial is essential to your stubborn spin: You are expressing personal investment in the neoconservative project in Iraq.
LMAO - no, hypey, that's ridiculous. Rather, I am simply asking you what the consequences of an American withdrawal will be. This is as relentlessly impersonal as one can get. Tell me - and without falsehood if you can - which reality am I denying? Is it the big one everyone else lives in, or yours? On the contrary, it's you that has a staggering personal investment in this, while I couldn't really care less.
That's fine, but I won't leave you to make facile obfuscations of the basic facts.
LMAO again - which ones?
I'll first offer my estimation of what you are trying to say there: That American troops have been a stabilizing force in Iraq, and beneficial to American energy interests.
Oh, good Lord, man, not at
all. That isn't my point in the slightest. The American presence in Iraq is not stabilizing at all. But what you childishly seem to be avoiding is that it's not them that chooses instability. It's hardly the American preference to be loosing men and materials fighting the latest round of idiots off the short bus from Damascus. But is there any other choice, when IEDs are going off everywhere? I might add that the insurgency's concern for the freedom and welfare of Iraqis is a bit mitigated by the horrendous civilian casualties they cause.
Your repetitious insistence that foreign intervention in Iraq, instigated deceptively by the Bush Wite House, is not the leading political irritant in Iraq is a baseless and ridiculous argument.
Yawn. No, hypey, that's not what I'm saying. It's funny; you almost seem to be proposing a sort of racism based on the idea that the terrorists don't have any range of self-control, or that they must, automaton-like, attack Americans on whatever grounds, as though they were unable to decide for themselves whether or not to commit to terrorism. You do realize that they could - and
should -
not to blow people and things up, but maybe even to help with the reconstruction?
Imagine that: a proto-islamic-political supremacism
not based on the suppression or destruction of the other.
"Wouldn't chaos also make it hard to exploit Iraq?"
(Round and round we go) Obviously. Again, the architects of this war were not anticipating such chaos. They admitted as much in their early pronouncements of their expectations during the mobilization and invasion. I don't think I need to round up the quotes for you, because they are well established in the public record and conscience now. I doubt that you have managed personally to fully repress these memories.
Yawn. I think I'd be more interested in your personal slanders if they were funny, I guess. Anyway: this does not place the blame on the Yanks, I'm sorry to have to tell you. They were not anticipating such chaos: and,
categorically, they did not cause it directly. The direct parties are elsewhere - lest you think Americans are personally running around bombing things.
"...the direct result of the terrorists deciding that a 4:1 civilian:soldier fatality distribution was "deen enough for us"), which does suggest intentionality."
Blah, blah, blah. Also untrue: The fatality rate among Iraqis, relative to US fatalities, is much higher, and the deaths are by no means confined to "terrorists".
Amazing. You have missed the point entirely, because your political predisposition canalizes your focus to imagine that all your opponents must be "Johnny-USA" types, preaching body-bag superiority.
Astounding. The ratio
refers to the civilians, tiny, tiny brain: those civilians that the terrorists are trying to liberate into the Great Hereafter, apparently.
"That's the only way you could ascribe it directly back to the Yanks."
Horse pucky. There is direct correlation between American troops in Iraq and the violence there.
Because the Americans are the ones planting IEDs. The terrorists are merely mindless automatons, incapable of thought, but only response to stimuli, like primitive organisms. No?
"Let us hope. But let us also not delude ourselves."
Oh, bullshit. You can't dumb this down to some inane plot line like a fantasy adventure of 2-dimensional heroes, villains, and foes. This isn't a game of Cowboys and Indians. Try confronting the issues, Geoff. The silly game of denial you're playing is just lame.
I considered your complaints, and frankly it all boils down to this: there is no need for an insurgency, and no need for terrorism. A significant proportion of Iraqis (according to your own poll) want the Americans to leave, but a significant proportion want them to stay for at least a year. The Yanks could be rebuilding all this time, but instead they're forced to deal with terrorism. The terrorism itself engenders the suffering: you might think (and undoubtedly do) that the mere presence of American troops causes terrorism, but it doesn't. That decision is taken every day by the terrorists themselves. A majority of Iraqis wanted Saddam gone, and he is: there is and remains damage from the war that got rid of him, but terrorism is not going to help clean that up. You refuse to answer questions about how much more or less suffering is going to occur once the Yanks leave: frankly, it more seems like you'd be happier once the entire situation is under the radar, no matter what the immediate outcome. This is your choice, but let's be realistic about the facts.
