This article doesn't really correlate terrorism with the world wars. It links the distribution pattern of casualties of the second world war with the distribution pattern of casualties for terrorism. That is why they said slope. I don't see any significance of slope in this illustration, and I don't see any support for it in the article. Unless the area under the line totals 65 million, then I can't see how this article correlates terrorism with the world wars militarily, politically, or socially. The only correlation I see is purely statistical. It is like saying there must be a link between someone's waste size and their age because the numbers are the same. That doesn't mean that the analysis doesn't have some useful application. I just don't see any for proving the point that the title of the article implies.
i find nothing silly about the fact that the leader of the free world, a "christian" would support torture of children.
do you support this hayes? do you like torture too, just like bush, cheney and rumsfeld? http://www.sundayherald.com/43796 A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that coalition forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib. Witnesses claim that the detainees – some as young as 10 – are also being subjected to rape and torture It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets,” he said in a statement given to investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. “Then, when I heard the screaming I climbed the door … and I saw [the soldier’s name is deleted] who was wearing a military uniform.” Hilas, who was himself threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Graib, then describes in horrific detail how the soldier raped “the little kid”. In another witness statement, passed to the Sunday Herald, former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod said: “[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a US soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young.” It’s not certain exactly how many children are being held by coalition forces in Iraq, but a Sunday Herald investigation suggests there are up to 107. Their names are not known, nor is where they are being kept, how long they will be held or what has happened to them during their detention. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150163,00.html A boy no older than 11 was among the children held by the Army at Iraq's Abu Ghraib (search) prison, the former U.S. commander of the facility told a general investigating abuses at the prison. Military officials have acknowledged that some juvenile prisoners had been held at Abu Ghraib, a massive prison built by Saddam Hussein's government outside Baghdad. But the transcript is the first documented evidence of a child no older than 11 being held prisoner. Military officials have said that no juvenile prisoners were subject to the abuses captured in photographs from Abu Ghraib. But some of the men shown being stripped naked and humiliated had been accused of raping a 14-year-old prisoner. The new documents offer rare details about the children whom the U.S. military has held in Iraq. Karpinski said the Army began holding women and children in a high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 because the facility was better than lockups in Baghdad where the youths had been held. The Pentagon has acknowledged holding up to 100 "ghost detainees," keeping the prisoners off the books and away from humanitarian investigators of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he authorized it because the prisoners were "enemy combatants" not entitled to prisoner of war protections. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/05/AR2005110500410.html Cheney Seeks CIA Exemption to Torture Ban Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session. Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.
It's the glory of an excessively slanted and oligarchic capital-based system that a man who should never have risen above the rank of "bank teller" was hustled into the most powerful political office in the world. GO USA! Paris Hilton for president. We need a genuine representative democracy, or we're going to keep getting incapable figureheads who are dominated by the interests of a cabinet of bureacrats who operate in closed-door sessions solely for the preservation of their power and the benefit of their class. We're being ruled by a group of interests who we didn't elect. And when the boy is away from his handlers, he's going to keep saying stupid things....because he is stupid.
I think you get off on child torture. I have as much evidence for such a statement as you do for your previous statements. SundayHerald is a tabloid similar to the NY Post. That military officials have acknowledged some juveniles being held doesn't mean they were tortured.
That's an unwarranted insult to bank tellers and those who "rank below" them. Unlike the Decider, these hard working people make honest livings.
My wife has a couple of degrees that delve heavily into statistics. She'd have a field day with the article Hayes posted. It's an interesting article, but I really don't see what bearing it has in the "real world." As my wife, and many others would say... you can make statistics say and/or support just about anything. That doesn't make them relevant. Keep D&D Civil.
Certainly you can dispute analysis of statistics, or more appropriately conclusions based on statistics. But that wasn't really the point of my posting the article. The point was that it is not actually that big of a stretch to claim the war on terrorism is WWIII - ie Bush is not the only person doing this - academics and others have made similar statements.
I've been thinking about this and while this might've proved good for establishing security following the initial invasion we still might be dealing with sectarian violence. Consider that the previous Iraqi Army officer corp and elite units were almost all Sunni and would likely resent serving under a government that is mostly Shiite and Kurd sectarian violence might still have broken out with the army turning against the government.
I have no doubt that there would still have been sectarian violence, but I also have no doubt that it would have been considerably delayed (giving the US, and those Iraqis who are cooperating with the US, far more time to set up a government, before the chaos ensued), and also considerably reduced. Truly, how will we ever know to what extent the difference would be? We weren't given the chance to find out. And there can be no question about the influence the continuation of a job and a paycheck for the Iraqi military rank and file would have had on the growth of militias, insurgents, and gang-related crime... hell, crime in general, as well as the preservation of Iraq's ancient artifacts and sites. In my opinion, it was a monumental mistake. Hey, I was against doing this, but if it was going to be done, regardless, it would be difficult to conceive of a more cocked-up plan than what we have watched unfold. Keep D&D Civil.
Well, I think there are a lot of people who would agree with him ... that the best thing he’s ever done is catch a 7.5 lbs perch in his lake. I think he’s done the country a whole lot more good (or less bad as the case may be) sitting on a boat on his lake than he has sitting in the White House.
It is possible that everything would have worked out that way. It is also possible that the highest ranking guy we decided to keep around would have waited for the inevitible US pullout (after all, the Iraqi army would be able to maintain control) would decide that he didn't want a bunch of Shiites and Kurds running the show, and would stage a military coup. Then we have a Sunni dictator in charge of Iraq who is killing dissidents and wiping out Kurds. At that point, we are facing Saddam in the '80s all over again. The current circumstances are better than that.
This is probably the most correct and accurate statement about this issue that I've heard. You hear lots of complaining about the war but you don't really hear any other solutions and any that you do hear aren't necessarily better. I mean, leaving Saddam in charge was a good idea? Lots a people have died during this war but lots of people died under Saddam as well (at least ten times as many if you believe the 200,000 estimate - more if you believe the 2 million people killed estimate). Clearly thing could have been done better (more international support for one) but what were the good alternatives? (And don't say containment! Oil for food showed how good containment was working.)
I would think the utter lack of WMD programs in Iraq was a better gauge to show how well it worked. The oil for food scandal shows that access to money with little oversight begets corruption. Nice lesson, but all I have to do is look at hte Republican congress to see that.
There were plenty of problems with containment - it caused terrorist blowback, it killed a million iraqis - but that's really a moot point. Containment was not going to be a sustainable policy - it was already starting to lose support. As it unraveled it we would have seen a restart of precisely the one thing it was designed and apparently did stop - saddam's weapon program.
