So you just pulled that out of your hat? I wish I could say I love this week's NewYorker's Stand on the Issues, but it's hard for me to keep track. Now you spout that FB wants failure in Iraq. What bull****. FB recognizes that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is already a failure. He recognizes the obvious... he just recognized it sooner than some around here. Now you pull the basso method of slander to address an issue in a debate. How special. D&D. Impeach Bush and Cheney.
Except that many people are calling it ethnic cleansing. Iraq blast called 'ethnic cleansing'Iraq blast called 'ethnic ...Aug. 16 - Another car bombing in Baghdad is being blamed for nine deaths while in northern Iraq, rescuers continue the search for more victims of ... usatodaytv.feedroom.com/?fr_story=FRsupt210831 - Similar pages IRAQ Ethnic cleansing first against Yazidis, soon against ...The death toll from anti-Yazidi attacks in northern Iraq is rising and might reach 500. Sources warn AsiaNews that Christian villages in the Nineveh Plain ... www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=10079&size=A - 24k - Cached - Similar pages 30 August 2007 12:27 Home > News > World > Middle East Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale. By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq Published: 20 May 2006 The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family. Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin. The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats. In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last week ordered people off a bus, separated the men from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been paid. The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely reported but the provinces around the capital are now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were slaughtering each other in his home province. "Whoever is in a minority runs," he said. "If forces are more equal they fight it out." It was impossible to travel to Baquba, the capital of Diyala, from Baghdad without extreme danger of being killed on the road. But I thought that if I took the road from Kurdistan leading south, kept close to the Iranian border and stayed in Kurdish-controlled territory I could reach Khanaqin, a town of 75,000 people in eastern Diyala. If what the army captain said about the killings and mass flight was true then there were bound to be refugees who had reached there. I thought it was too dangerous to go beyond the town into the Arab part of Diyala province, once famous for its fruit, since it is largely under insurgent control. But, as I had hoped, it was possible to talk to Kurds who had sought refuge in Khanaqin over the past month. Salam Hussein Rostam, a police lieutenant in charge of registering and investigating people arriving in terror from all over Iraq, gestured to an enormous file of paper beside him. "I've received 200 families recently, most of them in the last week," he said. This means that about one thousand people have sought refuge in one small town. Lt Rostam said that the refugees were coming from all over Iraq. In some cases they had left not because they were threatened with death but because they were fired from their jobs for belonging to the wrong community. "I know of two health workers from Baghdad who were sacked simply because they were Kurds and not Shia," he said. This was probably because the Health Ministry in Baghdad is controlled by the party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric. The flight of the middle class started about six months after the invasion in 2003 as it became clear Iraq was becoming more, not less, violent. They moved to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The suicide bombing campaign was largely directed against Shias who only began to retaliate after they had taken over the government in May last year. Interior Ministry forces arrested, tortured and killed Sunnis. But a decisive step towards sectarian civil war took place when the Shia Al-Askari shrine in Samarra was blown up on 22 February this year. Some 1,300 Sunni were killed in retaliation. Kadm Darwish Ali, a policeman from Baquba and now also a refugee, said: " Everything got worse after Samarra. I had been threatened with death before but now I felt every time I appeared in the street I was likely to die." Every community has its atrocity stories. The cousin of a friend was a Sunni Arab who worked in the wholly Shia district of Qadamiyah in west Baghdad. One day last month he disappeared. Three days later his body was discovered on a rubbish dump in another Shia district. "His face was so badly mutilated," said my friend, that "we only knew it was him from a wart on his arm." Since the destruction of the mosque in Samarra sectarian warfare has broken out in every Iraqi city where there is a mixed population. In many cases the minority is too small to stand and fight. Sunnis have been fleeing Basra after a series of killings. Christians are being eliminated in Mosul in the north. Shias are being killed or driven out of cities and towns north of Baghdad such as Baquba or Samarra itself. Dujail, 40 miles north of Baghdad, is the Shia village where Saddam Hussein is accused of carrying out a judicial massacre, killing 148 people after an attempt to assassinate him in 1982. He is on trial for the killings. The villagers are now paying a terrible price for giving evidence at his trial. In the past few months Sunni insurgents have been stopping them at an improvised checkpoint on the road to Baghdad. Masked gunmen glance at their identity cards and if under place of birth is written "Dujail" they kill them. So far 20 villagers have been murdered and 20 have disappeared. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article548945.ece
There may be sporadic instances of ethnic cleansing, but I don't think there's evidence of a cohesive policy by any faction of clearing land of minorities with the national ambitions of creating a ethnically pure land - ethnic cleansing really is a PC way of saying genocide. What you have is minorities leaving because they realize that they will be safer in regions that are more similar to themselves - the authority is not killing mass numbers in order to make the flee. And it's on religious basis, not ethnicity. I mean, if you call this ethnic cleansing, then you could argue that any civil war is basically ethnic cleansing. So ethnic cleansing is a misnomer on two counts. This redistribution of the population may be inevitable and perhaps should be facilitated so that the country can be partitioned and end the strife.
Seems today's leaked GAO report touched some nerves. -- Bush aides hit back at bleak Iraq report http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070830/pl_afp/uscongressiraqunrest Pentagon Disputing Some of Congressional Auditors' Negative Conclusions About Iraq's Progress http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2007/08/pentagon_disputes_parts_of_ira.php
Of course, the unintended irony of your post is that you weren't smart enough to know that I was quoting words written by Ray Wiley Hubbard. As to "yellow," what is this, a 1950's western? Just please don't call me a "mangy varmint." Being such a delicate flower, I would be seized by the vapors should one aim such imprecations my way. Oh, and say hello to Betty Lou Thelma Liz.
No, you were reasonably clear that you were calling me cowardly. I was so upset by the truth of this charge, that it took me a bit of time to muster up the courage to respond. That, or else I was off doing something only fraidy cats do: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/952/ Hard to remember after 12 days of sleeping on the ground. Anyway, let me spell it out for you: M is for the mud flaps you give me fer my pickup truck O is for the Oil I put on my hair T is fer T-bird H is fer Haggard E is fer eggs, and R is fer REDNECK! What's that spell? Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA!
What drivel. Of course it's ethnic cleansing. And really: Do you not understand that you pretty much cratered your whole argument with your own words? Safer? What you really mean is "not as likely to get killed by their own." As to the "mass numbers," have you read anything over the last two years? Huge numbers of deaths in Iraq... many for the express purpose of driving "others" out. You also have a very limited definition of "ethnic." We are talking the sociological definition, not the human genome definition.
i love it when people talk about a word and what is that word but don't even know the definition. look it up. figure it out. By your definition, gentrification is ethnic cleanings. People moving out of a neighborhood with a high crime rate is ethnic cleansing. You're talking non-sense.
OK, I'll look it up. Here you go... Dictionary.com definition: Merriam-Webster: Gentrification? Are you nuts? Last time I looked, rich people weren't killing poor people in San Francisco, downtown Atlanta, or DC to make way for lofts. They're just buying up properties, driving up the values, and driving up the taxes.
I like how you looked up "ethnic" instead of "ethnic cleansing" didn't support your argument. Or maybe you couldn't find that in the dictionary? I don't know. Nice try but no cigar. Last time I checked, no one is wiping out one population in Iraq in order to create a land for another race. Ethnic cleansing was invented for Bosnia to allow western countries not to use the word "genocide" which would have obligated them to take action. Thus, calling it "ethnic cleansing" was a joke. To say genocide is going on Iraq is a gross exaggeration of the truth - and you're sensationalising what's going on.
I was responding to your comment... ... and showing that "ethnic" can indeed include religious practices. That's why I bolded the words "religion" and "religious" in the definitions. As to "ethnic cleansing," why, let's look it up... M-W: Dictionary.com: WordNet: Pretty much sums it up eh?
Ok, so ethnic can include religion, I'll give you that. But ethnic cleansing isn't any of those definitions. You're not considering the history of the word - which is political in nature and no one really knows exactly what it means. But even by the definition you provide, that's not what is happening in Iraq. What's happening is sectarian violence that's not systematic. That's the qualifier for genocide. It has to be systematic.
Err, so maybe it's not working. Or maybe it is. Who really knows. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20594604/ Experts doubt drop in violence in Iraq Military statistics called into question The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends. Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease. Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq. Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. Picking different numbers, outcomes The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal." "Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti." Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree." Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels. The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation. Testifying with Petraeus next week, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker is expected to report that top Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders agreed last month to work together on key legislation demanded by Congress. If all goes as U.S. officials hope, Crocker will also be able to point to a visit today to the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province by ministers in the Shiite-dominated government -- perhaps including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar's governor $70 million in new development funds, the official said. But most of the administration's case will rest on security data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who would not speak on the record before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush's new strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has produced enough results to merit more time. 'Underreporting of violence' Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base." The report concluded that "good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military's findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005. The GAO report found that "average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007," a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August. Juan R.I. Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan who is critical of U.S. policy, said that most independent counts "do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths." In a letter last week to the leadership of both parties, a group of influential academics and former Clinton administration officials called on Congress to examine "the exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions that sectarian violence is down." The controversy centers as much on what is counted -- attacks on civilians vs. attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, numbers of attacks vs. numbers of casualties, sectarian vs. intra-sect battles, daily numbers vs. monthly averages -- as on the numbers themselves. The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, "exact monthly figures cannot be provided" for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. "MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and sectarian deaths," the spokesman wrote. "However, there is not one central place for data or information. . . . This means there can be variations when different organizations examine this information." In a follow-up message yesterday, the spokesman said that the non-release policy had been changed this week but that the numbers were still being put "in the right context." Counting 'sectarian' attacks Attacks labeled "sectarian" are among the few statistics the military has consistently published in recent years, although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of monthly "sectarian murders and incidents" in the last six months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report published in June, was substantially higher each month than in the Pentagon's March report. MNF-I said that "reports from un-reported/not-yet-reported past incidences as well as clarification/corrections on reports already received" are "likely to contribute to changes." When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent "since last year," the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that "last year" referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600. By March, however -- before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush's strategy -- the number had dropped to 600, only slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May "but trending back down in June-July." Petraeus's spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in the interview with the Australian paper, which did not publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the White House fact sheet. When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new sentence was added to the final version, noting that "overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks." A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it "odd" that "marginal" security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony. The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the "new information" did not change the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast." Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report © 2007 The Washington Post Company
It's apparent that the positive changes were indeed a fact of a change in tactics versus an actual increase in troops and that the surge has had limited impact. Iraq remains a mess and it seems to me that there's not much to lead credence to a successful outcome. I think we need to develop an exit strategy that includes beginning to plan for partition of the country. But we should leave in a way that doesn't leave the country errupting in massive chaos. That would be dangerous since it could easily spread into a wider war invoving Iran and other countries.
NewYorker: I know you are too scaredy cat to read my posts anymore (maybe someone would like to quote this so NY can read it), but I can only presume you will apply the same BS standard to yourself here that you did to other reasonable people who pointed out that the strategy was NOT working. In other words, I expect you will own up to holding this opinion only because of your partisan hatred for Bush which makes it impossible for you to maintain an open mind about anything. While I'm here I might as well paste this hilarious bit from kos: "The terrorists and the Baathists loyal to the old regime will fail because America and our allies have a strategy, and our strategy is working." President Bush November 1, 2003 "Our strategy is working." Vice President Cheney September 28, 2004 "That's our strategy. And it is working and it is going to work, for the good of the country." President Bush June 24, 2005 "Our strategy is working." White House's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" November 30, 2005 "This approach is working." President Bush December 7, 2005 "It is a concrete example of how our strategy is working." Frm. White House spokesman Scott McClellan March 20, 2006 "It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working." President Bush March 20, 2006
