Wouldn't surprise me a bit. Here in Texas, sunfish (particularly redear) are also colloquially called perch. State record's a tad under 3 lbs. http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/fishboat/fish/programs/fishrecords/freshwater/fwrr.phtml Nile perch - artificially introduced into 3 Texas lakes in the late 70's early 80's - grow a lot bigger (12lb. state record). Check out "Darwin's Nightmare" - good documentary on the ecological disaster of the introduced Nile Perch in Lake Victoria, Africa.
Only so long as we remained in the country. I think there would have been tremendous pressure to leave very early on if there was a fully trained standing army waiting there. Now we are training troops that are more representative of the population, such that they are well served by the democratic process, which should reduce the chance of a coup when we leave.
I'm far from an avid fisherman, and I knew immediately when I read the statement about 7 pounds that he was out of his mind. It's the equivalent of saying you own a 50 pound Chihahua.
Why not wait until that time comes, and deal with those circumstances? The Bush administration wants to fix everything RIGHT NOW! They need to identify priorities that are based in reality and manage situations that don't require intervention. We don't have the resources to fix every problem and threat in the world. I can guarantee that circumstances would be different when that milestone was reached. Saddam could have died of a heart attack. Like the original subject of the thread, part of the reason that Bush considers this WWIII is that he sees problems around the world and immediately jumps to the conclusion that he can fix them. He can't. He's like the Anti-Hitler. Sometimes the best thing to do in foreign policy is maintain the status quo. Don't let it get worse. Protect yourself. Create an environment that is conducive to positive change. Politics in the Middle East move at a glacial pace.
If you are really interested in my opinion, I'll give it to you. I actually respect you a lot so I'll take the time to write it out. Remember Bush started out as the decidedly anti-interventionist. Then 9/11 happened. Sure, the leftist have now made a mockery catch phrase out of 'everything changed with 9/11,' but IMO there is a major strain of truth in it. 9/11 made it obvious that we could not just sit back and practice foreign policy as usual. The occasional tomahawk strikes on terrorist camps didn't stop the worst attack in our history. At that time a confluence of interests merged (confluence of events is the way I think of it anyway): neoconservatives adavanced the idea that democratization of the middle east would stem terrorism - since it is widely accepted - and not just in neoconservative circles - that the oppressive nature of middle eastern regimes coupled with their nasty habit of directing dissent into anti-americanism leads to terrorism against the West (particularly us - the US). The realist contingent recognized that containment was not only on the verge of failing (other countries calling for a revocation of sanctions) but that the blowback from sanctions was falling square on our (the US's) shoulders as typified by 9/11 (remember osama's original beef was about US troops in Saudi Arabia), the USS Cole, and the Embassy bombings. The two threads merge and the solution is to remove Saddam while simultaneously supporting democratization in the other regimes in the Middle East (which we've seen in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon - not to assert they have full blown democracies but it is, IMO, hard to dispute there is a move toward democracy as a result of US pressure). Combine those issues with the left over feeling that we'd abandoned people who really did want to be free of Saddam and deserved (as we claim our own highest ideals support) self determination of their own government (not that it was necessarily our fault in Iraq as the arab coalition in '91 was decidedly AGAINST going to bagdad and removing saddam), and that IF sanctions were lifted we could very likely face the exact same threat from Saddam five or ten years down the line....well there you have it. That's why we intervened and why we should have - IMO. You can't guarantee that at all. Saddam could have NOT died from a heart attack (ala Castro). Or in that event his two sons could have retained control and pursued the same policies (ala Kim in NK). I think 9/11 belies your assumption that the status quo was ok to pursue. And it ignores the plight of those affected. By that standard we would have abandoned the Bosnians to Serb genocide and we were right to abandon the Rwandans to genocide. I disagree. By that standard we should not try to stop countries form obtaining WMD, and that I disagree with - even if its inevitable - the less the better. I think the whole criticism of Bush for tying the concept of WWIII to terrorism is terribly misguided. He may be wrong - I certainly leave room for that - but it is not so outlandish to claim such. With sovereignty degrading, and wars between states happening less and less, the next great challenge very well could be supranational organizations untied to nation states, organizations capable of killing thousands or in the worst case millions of people at a time for religious or political gain.
I will agree the numbers are skewed somewhat but so are the numbers you're using. If we look at containment vs. intervention you have to throw out the numbers prior to the start of imposing no-fly zones since containment or invasion wasn't even an issue then. So as you say the larger numbers in the 80's and early 90's are larger. One huge problem in regard to assessing what damage sanctions were doing versus invasion is that there are no reliable records regarding the death toll among Iraqis. The one thing we do know for sure is that under 12 years of sanctions there very few deaths of US and coalition forces while under invasion there have been as you cite around 3,000.
Not exactly. The Iraqi army is still very fractious and most reports indicate that they have fairly shallow loyalty to the Iraqi government as opposed to individual ethnic groups. On top of that the best trained and organized Iraqi fighting forces are militias like Pesh Merga and Badr Brigade who still resist being integrated into the Iraqi army.
Did anyone see the ABC Nightly News Story on I believe Friday. The Pentagon screwed up and had the camera men there for a mass graduation of Iraqi Sunni troops lined up in nice columns by the hundreds in front of the beaming US officers in or near near Fallujah. . Apparently the Sunni troops found out they were to be assigned to a non Sunni zone, they started ripping off their brand new uniforms by the dozens if not hundreds in front of the cameras. The US officers that were interviewed seemed pretty disgusted by the whole affair.
If there are a bunch of different units each loyal to different people, then there is very little chance of a coup with one military leader taking over control of the country. The odds of a civil war breaking out are increased, but having many units whose loyalty breaks on ethnic lines is not likely to lead to another dictator anytime soon. At worst, it will end up like parts of Africa with warlords controlling what areas they can, either that, or the three main groups would fight it out in a massive three sided war with whoever comes out on top ruling the remains of Iraq. At best the civilian representatives of each ethnic group can convince the military representatives of same to keep the peace and eventually the democratic process can work for them. At least, that is the way I see it.
Yes but no matter which variable on Iraqi deaths you use, the far left or the far right - you still get a net gain with the intervention as long as you use the same set of numbers - or the medians.
And as I state in another thread that is a far worse situation than having one dictator. But as I said, there are no good solutions to Iraq.
There still is the matter of the roughly 3,000 dead and 10,000 + injured coalition troops. Also whose to say that one set of statistics are right? The sad truth is that we don't have reliable figures for number of Iraqi deaths. It very well could be that the low number under sanctions is right and the high number under occupation is right. What we can say for a fact is that far more Iraqis have died directly as a result of combat under occupation than sanctions and that far more US soldiers have died under occupation than sanctions. So there is a more obvious attributable cause to Iraqi deaths being directly related to occupation whereas deaths under sanctions require more inference.
how many deaths and injuries, american, iraqi, and coalition have the iraq war in the last 3 years produced? as compared to saddam's last 3 years pre iraq war?
No, you can include those. Or the high number under sanction and low number from the intervention could be right. In which case the numbers come out HEAVILY in favor of the intervention. Sure, but even the figures that have come out 'from the intervention' like the Lancet paper don't count just death by bullet/bomb.
man, i can't believe all those idiotic countries didn't want to join us in starting WWWIII. i mean, it's for humanitarian reasons.
Well, that's the debate SC and I are having. If you use one set of numbers you get one accounting, if you use another - then you get another number. If you use the oft quoted sanction figure of 1 million over ten years then that's 100,000 per year (although some say as high as 1.4 million). 300,000 for the 3 years pre-intervention. The low end numbers put direct deaths from Saddam at 10,000 a year - or 30,000. Add those together and you get 330,000. Since those numbers come from the left to provide balance we can use the Lancet numbers of 100,000 since the intervention, plus add another third post the Lancet paper's publishing. That's 150,000 plus the 3,000 coalition troops. That's 153,000. Substract 153,000 from 330,000 and you get a net 177,000 people with the intervention. Obviously those calculations are not scientific, but as I said - that's what we're arguing about. I think the statement was that the war on terrorism is wwiii, not the intervention in iraq.
One thing I find extremely scary is that we've reduced this debate to sheer numbers and a comparison of body counts. More worrisome is the fact that this process numbs us to the sheer reality of what is happening in iraq. The fact that people are dying in such numbers and in such a destructive fashion, the fact that the country is literally falling apart in certain areas all gets reduced to a single number of people and in the process numbs us to the reality of violence and war and almost justifies warfare for the sake of body count comparisons. Considering we are attempting to justify the Iraq war by adding and subtracting the number of people who died seems really really troublesome to me. To me this seems like the worst form of justification that one can come up with. You may be right or wrong, I don't know enough about the numbers to say one thing or another, but I personally don't feel comfortable to applying accounting principles to death tolls.
Good post. There is nothing wrong with your discomfort. Perfectly reasonable. However the sad reality is that numbers make up a large part of our decisionmaking - look at 'genocide' - while there isn't a threshold by the numbers for the concept - the bigger the numbers the more urgent the cries for action. That doesn't disprove or deny your point at all, just a sad reality.
Hayes I'm curious and this is not a judgment or indictment. But how many deaths does it take before it becomes more than a statistic for you? Before you start to feel uncomfortable with what is happening in a given situation?
And including those probably less than 50 coalition troops had died in Iraq during sanction so from the coalition standpoint the costs of invasion and occupation has been much much higher. We can slice and dice figures all you want but the fact is that much more deaths on both sides can be directly attributed to invasion vs sanctions.
