Yeah!!!! Stick it to those mother$%^& and break it off!!!!

[Drake Tungsten]

The Axis of Reason should have made a clear statement by leaving NATO and closing all US bases. But our chickenshits didn't do this. Maybe next time.

[HershOstropoler]

"Hmm, could that be bacause there isn't one?"

I already told you in detail that there is no forum to bring a legal case in the decentralised structure of international law. Could you please stop being a propaganda tool here and keep it for Iraq?

[Dinner]

I suppose you could try introducing a UNSC resolution.

[Mr. Harley]

Oerdin, are you deliberately misreading my posts, or are you so emotionally caught up in them that you truly are incapable of reading them. Even worse, maybe you are hoping that by misrepresenting what I said to get away with ignoring my point, a la Rush Limbaugh. Most Apolytonites don't stoop that far, I hope you aren't.

Oerdin said: You then agreed that was how things should be run but then, perversely, you again contended you shouldn't shoot at people who attempt to run check points.

I NEVER said that. My point concerns you comment, to quote you in full:

If some macho Arab teenager wants to try to run a check point at 90 mph in daddy's car then the soldiers have every right to send that worthless sack of **** to see Satan.

Please note you've not responded to my previous post:

You don't even respond to my, and other posters, comments about the actual civilian casualties at the check points. Instead you stick to you straw man examples, hotheaded teenagers and macho testosterone junkies (which I tried to use, hoping you would see the point). Most of the dead are individuals who just didn't understand the rules, or how they worked, or just panicked. Often children are passengers in those cars, and just as often they are casualties. You don't address that issue at all.

You keep harping on the roadblocks. How they have to work. And then claim that I don't agree. I did, clearly, read my previous posts. My issue is your "...sack of ****." comment. Since I gave you a chance to reply intelligently, now I will comment on your obvious lack of defense, and lack of feeling of remorse, for that kind of dehumanizing comment. I had assumed it was accidently. Obvious, it was not.

Once an individual becomes a "...sack of ****." to someone, that person descends into a moral quagmire. That attitude is the same one taken by bad police, and bad soldiers, when they beat the information out of a someone in their custody. That's the best case. When a individual in uniform takes it to the extreme, they become candidates for the sonderkommando. If you don't know the history, I suggest you look it up, including the interviews with the members, and how they justified what they did to the dirty..., or is that "...sack of ****."

I am sad you are going over there to represent our country. The man I spoke about already has to have been rotated out, though if you aren't too mentally lazy you could check on it yourself. However, as it is more likely you will have the opportunity and will not have to put yourself out - talk to the guards who have shot and killed the "...sack of ****." Some, unfortunately, will be like you. Maybe you will listen to the ones that talk about the dead children, and realize that they are always the losers in war. Then when you are not on duty at the roadblock, you won't strengthen Al Quaeda. Out of curiosity, have you been studying Arabic for you deployment. With that you might save the life of one "...sack of ****." Oh, I forgot, us Americans don't bother to learn the language of "...sack of ****."

[HershOstropoler]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I suppose you could try introducing a UNSC resolution.

Which does not qualify as bringing a legal case, and not just because the defendants have a veto on the verdict.

[Drake Tungsten]

I am sad you are going over there to represent our country.

Don't listen to this jagoff, Oerdin. I'm proud of you and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Here's hoping you help grease some of those sacks of **** and come home in one piece.

[Dinner]

shawnmmcc: Now all you are doing is playing symantics. I responded fully to post about civilian causualties and I elaberated upon it by giving you a scenerio. Sorry if you don't like it but if we are to discuse things then it helps to have a situation to illistraite it so everyone can see it clearly. That's not harping that's just setting the frame of the debate.

You keep going back to one comment where I called an person who willfully runs a military check point in a war zone a "stupid sack of ****" and you try to read a whole dictionary into three words. Well, I stand by that if someone is dumb enough to do something like that at a military check point in a war zone then they are a stupid sack of ****. You can read what ever you want into that comment but I contend that people see what they want to see and you clearly are doing just that.

BTW aren't you a quick one to judge? That wouldn't be to bad except you've spent so much time demonizing me based upon three words so I find it funny. I guess we all have our blind spots.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

I am sad you are going over there to represent our country.

Don't listen to this jagoff, Oerdin. I'm proud of you and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Here's hoping you help grease some of those sacks of **** and come home in one piece.

Thanks drake.

[Ned]

MtG, once more the tank has fared well in urban combat. I hope you will eventually concede the point I made prior to the run to downtown Baghdad. I said that we should go downtown immediately with our armor. You said that we had to wait for the infantry. Well the tank seem to be the decisive weapon in urban combat.

I wonder if the new stryker vehicles could have done so well as an Abrahms in the firefight we had today?

Also, looking back, it was a mistake in disbanding the Iraqi army. No only did it cause unemployment, but it added manpower to the Iraqi resistance.

Calling the whole army back, right now, might be good idea.

[Dinner]

Ned: The Abrams is a great Tank but to be most effective it needs room to manuveur. I wonder how built up the area where these attacks occured is. BTW the Stryker hasn't been deployed to Iraq, they're being held in Kuwait, because the Army is afraid of their new weapon system getting creamed on its first outing. The armor is so thin a RPG can pierce it so the Army is trying a crash redevelopment program to add reactive armor to the stryker.

Of course that makes the Styker to heavy to air lift which was the main point of replacing the Bradley with the Stryker but such little facts don't bother the Army.

[East Street Trader]

Two sets of complete strangers fight each other causing injury, death and the sort of anger exhibited in the thread title.

The sort of anger which paves the way for some more groups of strangers to do the same.

Who gains?

Well, a few armchair strategists get to indulge their taste for military analysis. And a few other folk who like to cheer their side on get to make a lot of noise.

But these are tastes capable of being indulged in a game of Civ or at a football game. At a rather lower cost. Such folk would readily give up their minor pleasures if to do so meant that the deaths and injuries were avoided.

The big winner would not so agree. He has much more at stake.

Time after time the same method is used. Focus attention on an external enemy and demonise that enemy. Result? Subjects who stop being a pest about imprisonment without trial, about assassination as a vehicle of the state, indeed about all and any of the tools necessary to the oppressor.

Show me a political leader - King, Fuerer, President or Prime Minister - who sets his people to kill and be killed by strangers, imprisons without trial and convinces those he "leads" to kill individuals at his behest and I will show you a tyrant.

I am not sure which is harder to understand, the thirst to oppress which drives the King/Fuerer/President/Prime Minister or the folly of the rest of us, time after time being duped into handing over to him the power to oppress us.

[Urban Ranger]

Hello stranger.

Have you been away or just lurking about?

[East Street Trader]

Didn't visit for a while, UR, then tried Civ3 so thought I'd look in.

Lots of familiar names in OT. Not quite so many in the strat forums.

[DanS]

Lots of different accounts of this battle coming out. I'm not sure what to believe.

Some eyewitnesses say that some men who were minding their own business joined the fight because the Americans rolled into the center of town and started shooting indiscriminately. This doesn't seem credible, although the skill of the attackers seems low. Some reports are that there were more civilian casualties, mainly women and children, which does seem credible given the location and the amount of ordinance thrown around. Still others saying that Iranian pilgrims were caught in the crossfire, which might be right--could the Fedayeen uniforms actually have been pilgrim attire? NPR reported quite a bit of damage in downtown Samarah.

[HershOstropoler]

What do Fedayeen "uniforms" look like?

The most likely thing is that the US troops were attacked, fired indiscriminately at everything, and god knows whom and how many they really killed.

As for the political side, the story is going down very well with local Iraqis for sure...

[Thorgal]

Some eyewitnesses say that some men who were minding their own business joined the fight because the Americans rolled into the center of town and started shooting indiscriminately. This doesn't seem credible

Why not? US soldiers are so scared... It would not be strange at all.

[Cruddy]

Last BBC radio broadcast I heard, the local hospitals were reporting 8 civilians dead and dozens injured.

So not a TOTAL success in the hearts and minds war - although it will boost the morale of coalition troops.

Incidentally Ted Stryker, we had a thread on RPG effectiveness versus the Abrahms several months ago. Now let's see if I can dig out the URL... Nope, but here's a piccie;



So, although RPG's are USUALLY ineffective... never say never!

[DanS]

US soldiers are so scared... It would not be strange at all.

I don't have the experience or training in this, so how can I venture an opinion on the actions of the soldiers? The part I didn't find credible was people minding their own business taking part in the fighting after being outraged at the soldiers' actions.

What do Fedayeen "uniforms" look like?

They are all black. Don't know how distinctive the uniforms are, though.

[HershOstropoler]

I read that the US nr of 46 dead was not based on a body count, but on interviews with soldiers. If correct, my, we all know how well methods like these worked in another war...

Or it's moral boosting time, so they needed another Lynch story.

[techumseh]

Speaking of ducks.....

CARL HIAASEN
Iraq becomes Operation Sitting Duck
Sun, Nov. 30, 2003 - Miami Herald

A few days ago, two American soldiers in Iraq were shot, dragged from a truck and viciously beaten with concrete blocks. Their bodies were left on a dusty street in Mosul, a city once considered one of the safest for U.S. forces.

The murder and mutilation was carried out not by hardened operatives of al Qaeda, but by a gang of Iraqi teenagers, the very generation for whom we've been battling to ''liberate'' the country.

For any civilians to act so barbarously shows a depth of hatred that is chilling. As the months drag on, and the flag-draped coffins of fallen Americans keep arriving at Dover Air Force Base, the mission in Iraq makes less sense than ever.

What are we doing there? Who are we fighting? How do we get out? The only question that now seems hollow is why we ever invaded in the first place.

The search for the phantom weapons of mass destruction has been reduced to a nightly punchline in Jay Leno's monologue. No nukes, no anthrax and no nerve gas have been found; nothing to justify President Bush's pre-war declaration that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to global security.

So far, the most dangerous weapons uncovered are decidely low-tech -- pistols, rifles, homemade bombs, land mines and RPGs fired from donkey-drawn wagons. Unfortunately, they're doing a bang-up job of maiming and killing Americans.

The atmosphere in Iraq remains so perilous that on Thanksgiving Day, Bush had to sneak into Baghdad on a darkened Air Force One.

Whether the war was launched on false pretenses or merely faulty intelligence will be argued endlessly. The grim fact is that we're there now, and we're stuck.

In Afghanistan the mission was so clear. We were responding to a brazen attack against Americans on American soil. We knew who did it, and where they were hiding. The international community was virtually united behind us.

Iraq is another story. Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant, but not even the White House claims that he played a direct role in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Picked off by snipers

The hijackers themselves weren't Iraqis, nor were those who planned the crime. The man who approved it, Osama bin Laden, was known to detest Saddam.

Yet here we are mired in Iraq, our troops getting picked off by snipers, sappers and roadside rocket jockeys. Call it Operation Sitting Duck.

The hawks in the administration gripe that the media is focusing only on the bad news out of Baghdad, but where's the good news?

Last week, U.S. Col. William Darley told reporters that attacks by Iraqi insurgents against U.S. forces had declined from a high of 40 per day in mid-November to about 30 per day now.

It hardly makes you want to pop the champagne, knowing that our troops are coming under fire more than once an hour.

This holiday weekend concludes the bloodiest month for U.S. forces since the so-called end of major combat. More than 60 U.S. soldiers have been killed by hostile fire in November.

As of Thanksgiving Day, a total of 183 had died since the president triumphantly jet-landed on that aircraft carrier May 1.

Technically, though, the White House was correct. Major combat in the conventional sense ended in Iraq. These days our soldiers are dying by ambush and assassination.

GI murders in Mosul

Despite somewhat muted media coverage -- Michael Jackson's arrest received more attention than the GI murders in Mosul -- polls show that the war is increasingly a political liability for the White House. Efforts are accelerating to put a new Iraqi government in place.

Bringing the troops home, however, will be a long time in coming. As long as Saddam Hussein remains at large, Bush will keep a sizeable fighting force on the ground.

His insistence that occupying Iraq is central to the war on terrorism grows more preposterous by the day. Saddam has disappeared, but the much larger evil of al Qaeda has been lethally busy in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan.

Meanwhile, bin Laden himself is still alive and making dire threats. He's certainly not in Iraq, and nothing that happens in Iraq will bring us closer to catching him.

The grisly scene in Mosul last week recalled that infamous horror in Mogadishu a decade ago, when a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down and the mangled remains of U.S. servicemen were dragged through the streets by a celebratory mob.

An unseen enemy

It was a demoralizing episode for this country, but at least the soldiers in Somalia went down fighting. In Iraq the enemy is often unseen, indistinguishable from friendly civilians, and the shots and grenades come out of nowhere.

Troops who were trained to wage war are now courageously trying to wage peace. In such a role they must be visible and ubiquitous in a land where they aren't universally welcome.

The results have been deadly though not unanticipated. The question for Bush is how long before the American people decide that the best exit plan is to elect a president with an exit plan.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by HershOstropoler
"Hmm, could that be bacause there isn't one?"

I already told you in detail that there is no forum to bring a legal case in the decentralised structure of international law. Could you please stop being a propaganda tool here and keep it for Iraq?

This coming from a man whose topical posts, every single one of them, is critical of US policy. A poster whose replies are 100% one-sided is as much a "propoganda" tool as his opponents whose posts are opposite of his beliefs, don't you think?

[DinoDoc]

JohnT: What happened to Hersh being a thoughtful, knowledgable and well-reasoned poster on page 2?

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Zylka


Not at all. One involved a vehicle rampaging down the street spraying bullets at civilians, the other a tank deciding it's high time those factory workers start... **** I don't know. It's just obvious that American forces looooove that Thanksgiving civilian hunt.

American troops in humvees are shown on video firing machine guns as they drive down a street in a shopping district. Now maybe they took out some enemy combatants, but the video also shows a civilian is killed. But hey, the Yanks are taking down the Iraqi thugs and all the wannabe Americans cheer.

A reporter is on the scene and reports that an American tank fired on workers leaving a factory, but hey, its the Iraqis fault, according to the wannabe American.



And we got all these armchair cheerleaders go Hoorah, we kicked Iraqi butt today.

Yeah, the American troops fought off an ambush and killed the attackers, but civilians also died. And yeah, that's war, but it ain't a football game. There's no point in cheering another bloody day in Iraq.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
JohnT: What happened to Hersh being a thoughtful, knowledgable and well-reasoned poster on page 2?

He is also 100% consistently against US policy in any shape or form, he's just thoughtful, knowledgable, and well-reasoned about it.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Tingkai
A reporter is on the scene and reports that an American tank fired on workers leaving a factory, but hey, its the Iraqis fault, according to the wannabe American.

What reporter on the scene?

[Skyjack666]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
What reporter on the scene?

Yeah, Dino...they can rarely back up their bashing.

[HershOstropoler]

Originally posted by JohnT


He is also 100% consistently against US policy in any shape or form, he's just thoughtful, knowledgable, and well-reasoned about it.

And "thoughtful, knowledgable, and well-reasoned" perfectly explains the "100% consistently against US policy".

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by HershOstropoler
I read that the ....

Where?

[SlowwHand]

Who cares what Hershey thinks?
Does it really matter in the big scheme of things?

[JohnT]

Originally posted by HershOstropoler


And "thoughtful, knowledgable, and well-reasoned" perfectly explains the "100% consistently against US policy".

Then again, maybe Asimov* was right.

*"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"