14 more today. 43 US Soldiers killed in Last 10 Days in Iraq

As vet of the 1st gulf war I support our troops 110%. What I don't support is young Americans being asked lay down their lives for an unjust war!

That said, I’m not for an immediate withdrawal or for a timetable for the withdrawal. We must fix this mess we started and those responsible for this disaster must be accountable for their actions and for their incompetence.

We hold the people who plan military actions that go wrong responsible for their mistakes. Eisenhower had a letter claiming that it was HIS fault if the D-Day landings had gone wrong. Can you imagine anyone in this administration taking responsibility for something gone wrong? They show little respect for the troops that they sent and are sending into harms way.

 

I second everything you just said, and I know a Marine who WAS in fact involved in the initial invasion of Iraq (this current ongoing war, not Desert Storm) who shares your view on this.

The problem is T_J and a few other pro-war chickenhawks whom have nothing to lose in supporting this war (if they work in the oil industry, then everything to gain) is that they TRULEY don't understand that when Bush took our troops into war with Iraq he basically selected an "unnecessary" war to put the troops in harm's way, and now the MAJORITY of the American people are starting to see that and thus turn against not just the war, but in a recent poll MOST Americans said that Bush "lied" to get us into war.

Look, I wish the best for the IRaqis, and deep inside I don't think a withdrawal in the short-run would be a good idea to leave Iraqis to slaughter each other like there is no tomorrow, but when I look at 2-3 years down the line, I honestly don't see much improvement over the current existing situation in Iraq. We keep training Iraqi forces/police to battle the insurgents and succeed, however, in the absolute majority of the cases whenever they are confronted with danger, they leave their posts (police stations for example) to the insurgents and run away, which forces our troops to go back in and secure the town. When they leave to go battle elsewhere in Iraq, the insurgents return to that town again and cause problems once again; it's an endless cycle.

THIS is the reason why I don't think it's worth it to "stay the course" in Iraq anymore, because I don't see ANY real, felt improvement overtime. All I see happening is the undeniable fact that Iraq is an endless conflict that has already drained over $300 billion dollars in tax payers' funds -- with billions in dollars unaccounted for/stolen -- and an increasing death toll of our troops.

I really do believe that the ONLY way the Iraqis will fight back is when they are FORCED to do it, meaning them waking up one day to find out that the coalition forces are completely gone, and that the only thing standing between them and Zarqawi ruling their country is to stand up, sacrifice, and fight, only this time they are NOT helping the "invadors" to stabilize the country, but helping themselves build something decent if not for themselves at least for their kids and grandkids.

On the other hand, I would be strongly opposed to any withdrawal from Afghanistan anytime soon, I think that is where the threat was legitimate and justified, and I would love nothing more than to sustain the Afghani government there and help them build a half-decent society for themselves, which undoubtedly will take a long time to do.

I don't think our allies in Europe and elsewhere are "punks" for opposing the Iraq war from the outset, and as the French once said, "Sometimes a friend has the duty to tell you when you are wrong and headed in the wrong direction". I couldn't agree more...

 

How many years after the Korean War did we stay there? How many years after WWII did we stay in Japan and Germany? Oh yeah, we are still there in all three cases. I see no reason to believe that we will not have a permanent military presence in Iraq, just like we maintain elsewhere.

 

Except that we didn't stay in Japan, SK, or Germany to see them become stable democracies. They were fairly stable within weeks of occupation not years. Further we never fought a guerilla war in those countries either.

 

I'd swear by some of their posts that T_J and bigtexxx work for the Bush administration. Their posts sound like the same propaganda that comes out of the mouths of Cheney, Rumsfield and Rice.

 

Stable in a matter of weeks? I doubt that considering it took months to figure out who was in charge of what. Generally the 'occupation' is considered to have ended when a Constitution (in Japan at least) was put into place and control reverted in the main to the new government. In that context the 'occupation' in Iraq has already ended.

In the question of whether the US stayed in Japan et al for 'democratic' motives, I think that's an obvious 'yes.' Japan, Germany, and Korea - to cover the examples already listed - certainly had the Soviets and Chinese as threats to their democracies. In fact, half of Germany - East Germany, and half of Korea - North Korea DIDN'T have democratic reform. On the other hand plenty of US sponsored states have transitioned to democracies including most of Latin America, Taiwan, and South Korea.

 

I don't know which history book you read, or just figured it out by yourself. Mind you, at the time the alies defeated Japan, Germany. China wasn't red communist China, it was a US supported "democratic" China. After 8 years of Japanese invasion, 30 million lost lives, China was barely regrouping, and in no position to threat that HOLLY DEMOCRACY in Japan. After Japan was defeated, as exchange for American's interest in far east - DEMOCRACY, in your words, the Japanese Emperor was removed from the war criminal list. It wasn't hard to figure out who was in charge of what in Japan. The Emperor stayed as emperor, the government consisted of old members except for those on the war criminal list, of course under American supervision. In Germany and Japan, the war ended right after the government surrendered; in Korea, the war ended when Korean, American, Chinese sat down at the table to talk. There was NO guerilla was at all. You can't compare them to the situation in Iraq.

 

Vietnam reincarnated. However, my opinion here is not the same as my opinion with respect to Vietnam, and it's sad that my opinion is not the same.
Vietnam was definitely a pullout situation towards the end because it was an enemy that was not a threat to America or the American way of life. A pullout in Vietnam would have ended the suffering there. That would be the end of it. By this, don't think that I am discounting the effect of Vietnam on us. Vietnam was by far the largest foreign policy mistake we ever made. It seemed as if everyone you knew at that time lost a loved one or a friend there. And all for nothing. Compared to Vietnam, Iraq is a picnic.

Iraq was not a threat when we went in, but it is definitely a threat now. Terrorism is more of a threat today than ever and Iraqi terrorism is now a legitimate threat unlike prior to this war. Since we are in this and since we sunk our head in feces, we better go all the way and finish this. If we pull out now, those lives lost will be in vain. America would not be safer, but rather more dangerous.

 

I agree with the concept that leaving Iraq is a mess is a bad move. I'm torn on what to do with the troops though. My first inclination is to stay in there and fix the problems. But it seems like they are still in Iraq and NOT fixing the problems.

I think the problems need to be fixed, I am just not sure we have a sufficient plan, or numbers of troops to fix the job. If we are just going to stay there and not stabilize Iraq, then we can not stabilize it with our troops elsewhere.

But at the same time it would be shameful to pull out having created a huge mess and then backing out. I think what we need is a new plan and a willingness to carry it out. I am not sure what the specifics of the plan should be, but I know that what we have now isn't working.

 

To be totally fair...Germany never attacked us, but we were there because one of their allies did.

 

Man, that is so sad.

 

Hayes, you really can't compare the aftermath of Japan's and Germany's surrenders to what is happening in Iraq today, and what may happen there in the future. The cultures of Japan and Germany couldn't be more different from that gumbo that exists in Iraq. You had a homogeneous population in both countries. Iraq is a chaotic mixture of faiths and ethnic groups, all vying for power and independence, or a degree of it. Germany and Japan had a very long history of respect for governmental authority. Iraq had a colonial past that gave it borders imposed without regard for rationality, and a fear of the authority imposed upon it. One could go on at length about the differences... they are immense.

Your post reminds me of a story my late uncle told me, a WWII veteran. He had served on a submarine tender and, after the treaty was signed, served in Japan for awhile right after the armistice. He was assigned to a patrol craft on a Japanese river, and at that early time they fully expected armed Japanese resistance to the occupation. Given the ferocity with which Japan fought, any other response seemed unthinkable. One night they heard some thrashing around on the river bank and unloaded on what they thought was a group of insurgents. Several hundred rounds later (these were Navy guys from a sub tender, remember? ), they came to the shore to check it out. They discovered a rather large cow, blasted into steaks and chops, as he put it.

The reason I mentioned the story, besides just feeling like telling it, is to show just how unexpected and amazing the lack of resistance was. MacArthur was a genius, proven by his design for post-war Japan. As I said, Iraq couldn't be any more different than Japan or Germany and, unlike the superb leaders we had back then, I have absolutely no faith in the Bush Administration's ability to make a functional, stable, and peaceful democratic Iraq. It's not about our military. They are doing a fantastic job, and that doesn't surprise me a bit. The problem is that they are being given an impossible task, with incompetent leadership at the highest levels at home. Not a good combination and any comparison, by anyone, to WWII is, no offense, just ludicrous.



Keep D&D Civil!!

 

[All in my area. One is an alumnus. Really sad.]

Five local Marines killed

http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050804/NEWS01/308040006/1077/CINCI

Thursday, August 4, 2005

Five Greater Cincinnati men were among the 14 Marines from an Ohio Reserve unit who were killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Although the Marines had not yet confirmed the names of the dead, relatives and friends Wednesday were mourning the loss of these men:

• Lance Cpl. Michael Cifuentes, 25, of Oxford, a graduate of St. Xavier High School and Miami University, and a graduate student at Miami before he went on active duty in February.

• Lance Cpl. Timothy Michael Bell Jr., 22, of West Chester, a Lakota East High School graduate.

• Lance Cpl. Christopher Jenkins Dyer, 19, of Evendale, a Princeton High School graduate.

• Lance Cpl. Brett Wightman, who grew up in Sabina and enlisted as a reservist before graduating from East Clinton High School in 2002.

• Cpl. David Kreuter, a 1997 graduate of St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati and a native of Miami Township in Hamilton County. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 2004 with a degree in criminal justice.

The 14 Marines were killed Wednesday when a huge bomb destroyed their lightly armored vehicle, hurling it into the air in a giant fireball.

A Marine officer, said the attack occurred as troops were traveling in an armored amphibious vehicle to assault insurgent positions around a village near the Haditha dam, a longtime way station for foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq from Syria.

The fighting was along the volatile Euphrates Valley of western Iraq. It was the deadliest roadside bombing suffered by American forces in the Iraq war.

The Marines killed Wednesday were assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines based in Brook Park, a Cleveland suburb.

President Bush lamented the deaths of the 14, calling the attack a “grim reminder” America is still at war.

“These terrorists and insurgents will use brutal tactics because they’re trying to shake the will of the United States of America. They want us to retreat,” Bush told 2,000 lawmakers, business leaders and public policy experts in Grapevine, Texas.

Marines have been fighting for months in a string of towns along the Euphrates to try to seal a major infiltration route for foreign fighters slipping into Iraq from Syria.

The victims were from the same Ohio-based Reserve unit as five of six members of a Marine sniper team killed on Monday in an ambush claimed by the Islamic extremist Ansar al-Sunnah Army. Military officials initially said all six were from the unit.

Isolde Zierk, 59, coordinator of Lima Company’s family support group, found an answering machine full of messages from worried families when she got to her Columbus home after work Wednesday evening. Her phone rang 14 times the first 30 minutes she was home, and a neighbor stopped by to see if she’d heard anything about her own son, Sgt. Guy Zierk, 29, who serves in Lima Company. She hadn’t.

“My stomach’s in knots,” she said, choking back tears.

Grief and anger shook the Brook Park battalion’s working-class hometown Wednesday as families anxiously awaited answers.

“You never know who it could be. It could be your best friend. It could be your husband – it could be anyone from here,” Eleanor Matelski, 69, said as she angrily tore up a paper cup that held her morning coffee at a doughnut shop down the street from the battalion’s headquarters.

“Tell (President) Bush to get our soldiers out of there now before any more of our soldiers die. This is getting to be ridiculous,” she said.

A few steps away, near the gates of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, residents piled red roses, American flags, handwritten notes of condolences and white crosses – one each to symbolize the six reservists.

At the doughnut shop, nearly everyone seated at the counter said they knew someone connected to the battalion. “Those boys come in here,” said shop manager Pat Wilsox.

Wilsox threw her hand over her heart when she heard the news that the battalion had suffered more losses. “Oh my God,” she said softly. “I’m all for protection but this is getting a little bit ridiculous.”

The risk that the same geographical area will suffer multiple casualties has been heightened in Iraq because reserve troops train and fight together – unlike in Vietnam, which was fought largely by active-duty troops who were replaced by individual soldiers from around the nation.

Cifuentes, who was engaged to be married, graduated from St. Xavier High, where he was involved in band and music and in advanced classes, according to Ralph Nardini, the vice president of development for the school.

“I remember him as a very nice young man,” Nardini said. “He was truly one of those young men who was a leader of other people. Others looked up to him and admired him.”

His mother, Carolyn Cifuentes, is the business manager in the student affairs division at Miami and learned of her son’s death at work Wednesday when her husband, Gregory, a Fairfield firefighter, came to tell her.

Tom Fennell, 20, president of the Miami University chapter of Acacia Fraternity, said Cifuentes served as fraternity ’s chapter adviser and lived in the house with the brothers last year. Fennell said the best word to describe Cifuentes was “committed.”

“He was committed to his fiancée, and he was committed to the Marines,” he said.

He said he corresponded with the Marine just weeks ago and said his friend was in good spirits, even joking about mortar fire in the background and being thankful that those firing were bad shots.

Bell had wanted to be a Marine since he was 6 years old.

“My son was the last of the John Waynes, but tougher,” said Timothy Michael Bell Sr., who last talked to his 22-year-old son two weeks ago.

The younger Bell, a Lakota East High School graduate, was a black belt in judo and was hoping to buy a motorcycle when he returned to his West Chester home in September, his father said.

Always protective of his three younger sisters, Bell applied that same ethic to joining the military, his father said.

“It’s very important for me that everybody knows that he did this for them,” the elder Bell said.

At his Evendale home Wednesday night, John Dyer said his son “became a Marine but not because he was poor or without options.
He was a Marine out of duty and a desire to be among the best.’’

He graduated from Princeton High with honors in 2004, where he played the viola in the school orchestra and was a member of the varsity dive team. He planned to enroll at Ohio State University, where he wanted to major in finance starting in January.

“Chris was an exceptionally intelligent and athletic child with enormous potential ahead of him,” his father said. “The Marines gave him focus and resolve to achieve his potential.”

The 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, was first activated on May 1, 1943, and fought in several battles in World War II. It helped capture a key airfield at the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific. Before this week’s dead, the unit’s Web site listed 25 of its Marines had been killed this year.

 

Some good discussion going on here, rather enjoyable to read.

 

Since we are discussing the Iraqi conflict, this former ambassador to Afghanistan urges officials to leak documents that would expose what the administration did in the lead up to the Iraq war. Do you think this is justifiable? Whom do you think our government officials should be loyal to: their employer (Bush, CIA heads, FBI heads, whomever), or should they have a "higher duty" to reveal the truth if they know for a fact that certain government officials are lying?

BTW, that other article that I mentioned in another thread (the Washington Post article detailing US intel analysis of Iran's nuclear weapons, concluding Iran was no less than 10 years away from developing nukes) WAS a leaked document to the press. Do you think the person who leaked it did a service/disservice to his/her country by warning the public about similar tactics used against Iraq being used to pave the road for an attack against Iran? Should the media be used as a tool by disgruntled government employees/officials to express their displeasure/disapproval of any action the government takes?

Former Ambassador Urges U.S. Officials To Leak More Memos

By Nathan Diebenow
Associate Editor

AUSTIN — The former ambassador to Afghanistan, Ann Wright, called on U.S. federal employees to leak more secret memos on the lead-up to the war in Iraq like Downing Street memos uncovered by the British press this last May.

“It seems like the British government is leaking like a sieve. We need to get our own U.S. government colleagues to be leaking like a sieve,” said Wright, who gave up her career in the foreign service because she disagreed with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “We need more documents — certainly not documents that are really going to jeopardize the security of the United States — but documents that show the sequence of events within our own government.”

Wright said that many federal employees disagree with the policies of the current administration but stay involved for a host of reasons, one of which more often than not is that they have mouths to feed. A closer look of the major U.S. newspapers, however, shows that those discouraged officials inside the government are sending signals of hope to the American people, she said.

“It’s important that we encourage our colleagues in the U.S. federal government to think really seriously about the future of our country and to inform their conscience and look to see if they can find the equivalent memos that we have in our United States government,” said Wright. “So if you have any colleagues, cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, sons or daughters that are working in whatever level of government, talk to them. Just casually mention it. You never can tell.”

Wright’s remarks were made at a house party sponsored by CodePink Austin, one of over 300 events on the July 23-24 weekend that marked the third anniversary of the Downing Street Memos’ existence. During her talk in Austin, Wright also answered questions about the effects of depleted uranium on humans, her opinion on whether Sept. 11 was an “inside job”, as well as the CIA’s involvement in Afghan opium production and distribution since the Taliban fell.

Moving through Texas prior to the Veterans for Peace Conference in Dallas in August, she also spent Saturday, July 23, with about 225 people at a teach-in at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Houston.

“Once you make a trip from Hawaii, you want to do as many things as possible,” Wright said, adding that she gave a brief oral testimony on the Downing Street Memos at hearings held by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) on June 16.

The Downing Street memos interest Wright because they describe what was going on behind-the-scenes between the British and U.S. governments while she served as a diplomat in Afghanistan from December 2001 to March 2003. Wright was one of three who ended up resigning from the diplomatic corps in March 2003. She resigned as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Mongolia in protest over the Bush administration’s decision to enter war in Iraq, the lack of effort to resolve the situations in Israel and North Korea, the unnecessary curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S., and the reduction in
resources from Afghanistan to a territory unrelated to the attacks in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001.

“My whole resignation at that time was based on gut feelings, and now it turns out that we have memos from the British government which kind of confirm a lot of the feelings I had internalized,” she said. “There were a lot of issues going on, and in fact as the memos have come out, it turns out that while I was in Afghanistan in March of 2002, Tony Blair’s gang was already starting to work with George Bush’s gang on Iraq, and the Britons in those memos said they were taken aback really about how far the U.S. was moving forward on this. They were really concerned about the legal basis on which war could happen.”

Wright has since aligned herself with peace activist groups, like Women in
Black, Veterans for Peace, and CodePink, because, as she said, she gave up her career in the foreign service over the war in Iraq.

“Although years ago I wouldn’t have agreed with some of them, I’ve seen more of their rationale of why they oppose certain things of the U.S. government,” Wright said. “And many of them bring up to me, ‘So why did it take you so long to resign? There were so many things the U.S. government was involved in and that you were involved in!’ But this one for me was just so far over the top that I wasn’t about to be associated with it.”

As a federal employee working with seven presidents, Wright said, she found plenty of policies she personally did not agree with and chose to not work toward. “I was able to rationalize that I was able to do good work for the American people because I could get away from those policies. That’s the way most people rationalize working for the government because there are so
many ups and downs with every administration,” she said.

However, Wright admitted she should have resigned over her work in Nicaragua in the 1980s when she was in charge of all civic action and humanitarian systems projects for Central and South American. At the time, the projects were repaying the Hondurans for the Hondurans letting the U.S. train the Contras on their territory, she said.

“But sometimes, you let yourself get wound up in something that is exciting like that, and you don’t really look clearly look at all the aspects of it, and there were horrible things that the Nicaraguans were doing to themselves — the Nicaraguans who were fighting the Sandinistas, not that I agreed with everything the Sandinistas did, by any means,” she said. “But that was the U.S. creating a military force to implement its will, to get ride of revolutionaries who had overthrown a U.S. friend who was a very brutal, brutal dictator.”

Wright, who served in the military for 29 years and reached the rank of colonel, said that the leaders in the U.S. military are doing what they can to fight the policies of the Bush administration, which are illegal in nature. The military leaders under other U.S. presidents also pushed back against certain policy wranglers, like President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who wanted to send troops into the Balkins and Rwanda, she noted.
“The military is the least happy about going to war. Some people in the military are (happy about going to war), but most people who have done anything, say ‘Let’s hope those diplomats succeed,’” she said. “Military pressure is good, but when you have really to go to war, oh no, that’s nasty stuff. In many cases, for good reason, it drags its heels. The civilian politicians, many of whom have never been in the military, are ready to use them at the drop of a hat without even considering the types of things that always go on during war, the things that go on in prisons, the aftermath, civil reconstruction.”

Wright also criticized former Secretary of State Colin Powell for being more loyal to the Bush administration than to the American people: “There was nothing legal to say that you could go to war in Iraq in March 2002 and March 2003.”

“I think (Powell) really was more loyal to the Bush family, who had gotten his fourth star for him in the military and who had appointed him National Security Advisor and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then Bush II comes back and appoints him the first African-American Secretary of State,” she said. “Miserably he failed the institution he loved the most — the military — when the Army Chief of Staff was telling the world that the operations plans that Rumsfeld and crew were forcing down the throat of the military were short by some 200,000 troops, the troops that would have prevented the looting that took place after we went into Baghdad, to seal the borders, to provide a good security plan.”

Wright said that Powell should have resigned on principle so that it would have caused attention to the lack of proper planning for the war, if not to stop the illegal war from even happening. Instead, Powell presented to the United Nations the United States’ case for war in Iraq based on trumped charges that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, “which he now in private admits was pretty pitiful and will weigh on his conscience forever,” she said.

“I have little sympathy — in fact, no sympathy — for Colin Powell,” Wright added. “I think he’s a very unprofessional person. At the Department of Defense, he did okay as a military guy. On the major leadership responsibilities at the State Department, he failed us because sometimes the only time you can win is by resigning and making a stink out of something. He chose to be Bush toady and go along with it. I think his karma — he’s going to come back as a rat.”

The goal of the July 23-24 events is to tell more Americans about the Downing Street memos, these infamous British intelligence minutes that state that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” to justify the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

“It’s unbelievable that millions of Americans still don’t know about the existence of the Downing Street Memo, despite the fact that its contents are so controversial that they could provide grounds for the impeachment of the President of the United States,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Global Exchange and CodePink: Women for Peace, two groups that are involved with the After Downing Street Coalition, which spurred the organization of the July 23 events.

The events were also a push for a Congressional resolution of inquiry — the first step in the presidential impeachment process — into the Downing Street memos. According to a recent Zogby poll, 42 percent of voters polled said they would support impeaching President Bush if it were established that he lied about his reasons for the Iraq war.

According to David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org, hundreds of people were turned away at the larger DSM anniversary events, which brought such members of Congress as John Conyers (D-MI), Maurice Hinchley (D- NY), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jim McDermott (D-WA) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) to standing-room-only town hall meetings in their home districts of Detroit, New York City, Oakland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. The Progressive Democrats of America also helped bring a number of smaller events into creation.

 

Good for Ann Wright. Of course we need to expose corruption and wrong doing in our govt. It shouldn't have happened in the first place, but if it did we need to know about it, so that we can take safeguards that it won't happen again.

 

Red China was fighting the UN five years after the Japanese surrender, and the Soviets were pressing before the end of WWII (see 'how North Korea was formed'). Back to school for you, lol.

Not saying that the two situations are the same, just responding to Sishir's quip about democratic motivations re: troops deployments in Germany and Japan. However, while there are stark differences, I do think Stupid Moniker makes a good point that even in situations of unconditional surrender and no guerilla war (like Germany and Japan) you may have a protracted period of resolution.

 

I don't know what school you are suggesting You said Americans stayed in Japan after WWII to protect Japan's democracy. I told you that after WWII, the Chinese government was supported by US, and China was recovering from 8 years long Japanese invasion and great loss in human lives. How could they threat Japanese "democracy"? Now you are telling me the Red China fought US five years later in Korea. What's your point? You mean Americans predicted that 5 years ago, that China would turn into different color, and "threat" the democracy in Japan 5 years later? So Americans just predicted future and prepared for that 5 years ago? I would be interested in that kind of school for that kind of logic.

By the way, how did China ever threat Japanese democracy? What made you think so? What history event or logic, the ones taught in your school drew that conclusion? Just because Japanese invaded China, killed and raped million of Chinese? So all of a sudden the victims are the really dangerous one? If that's the case, those two bombs should have dropped in China instead of in Japan.

 

Well real_egal, I can tell you propaganda and brainwash are not the political mechanisms only used by communist regimes exclusively. You and I have the luxury of experiencing "the best" of two worlds, but not many people in U.S. (or Canada) are as "fortunate" as we are. To put things into perspective, this is just a basketball forum after all.