34 Dead as Baghdad Bombers Hit Red Cross, Police

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


If you're a policy maker willing to send other people to die to do a job you found it "inconvenient" to your personal plans to do when it was your time, and you give more credence to advice from similar non-serving ideologues who also found their personal ambitions too precious to risk getting their balls shot off, while giving short shrift to advice from professionals who've had their lives on the line, then you are a chickenhawk.

I would point out that Paul Wolfowitz has been under enemy fire twice now - once on 9/11 at the Pentagon, and now in Baghdad. That beats quite a large number of the folk who wore the uniform.

[Ned]

Che, I agree that turning the matter over to the UN will lessen Arab hostility to the occupation. However, Saddam would still fight to get back into power. I have no confidence that the UN could win the war without the US military.

Now this is where I get queasy about a UN solution. I do not trust turning over the US military to UN command. Can you imagine Kofi Annan being in charge of whether US troops live or die? Can you agree to give the UN carte blanc over how much the US taxpayer has to spend in Iraq? What if, for example, Annan wanted to raise the troop levels to 500,000 or more and could command US units to move from the United States to Iraq?

[Ned]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Ned, are you assuming that Nixon didn't run, and thus didn't sabotage the Paris Peace talks in 1968? Then all MtG had to do was withdraw. The war would have been over for us.

Che, every time you raised this issue I have asked you what was the NV offer on the table at the time that was purportedly rejected by SV?

[Ned]

LoTM, I have a hard time understanding MtG because he seems to be inconsistent. I still would like to understand why he thinks building up the SV or Iraqi military and withdrawing US troops was or is a bad policy.

[lord of the mark]

Salaam Pax (an Iraqi blogger)


"This is another thing I would like people to pay some respect to. Iraqi Police kick major ass. Much respect. Wherever you go now and open up that subject you will see a lot of sympathy with those brave men and women and a total incomprehension to what this so called resistance is doing. They are killing Iraqis now. They say Jihad against the Infidel Occupier and they go kill those Iraqi police men. The Baghdad Hotel, the Turkish embassy and many more. It is not the Infidel the attackers are killing but Iraqis and this just might be good because the general sentiment now is “what the **** do the Jihadis think they are doing?”. I wrote or said some time ago that most Iraqis are just sitting on the fence, well the last couple of attacks are tipping the balance against the Jihadis because they are killing all those Iraqis, they are putting bombs in streets and in front of schools, threatening to bomb banks where Iraqis are standing in line waiting to get their new Iraqi Dinars. So as we say here [biha saleh – something good will come out of it] maybe the people who are dying in those attacks are helping us understand that what those saboteurs are doing is just pure evil, telling people they are Muslim Jihadis doesn’t cut it anymore because they are killing civilians indiscriminately. "

[SlowwHand]

Iraq Hit by String of Deadly Explosions
Thu Oct 30,12:54 PM ET

By SLOBODAN LEKIC, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq (news - web sites) was hit by a string of explosions Thursday that set a freight train on fire, killed a U.S. soldier in a military convoy and ripped through Baghdad's Old Quarter. Another blast injured two U.S. soldiers on a military police patrol.

(snip)

The escalating violence has unnerved many of Baghdad's 5 million people. Many parents are not sending their children to school for fear of further bombings.

"Today most of my friends did not come to school," said 18-year-old Duha Khalid at the Al-Khalisa girl's high school, located near a police station. "We heard rumors about big bombs that will go off at the start of next week."

There also was an apparent assassination attempt Wednesday night against an aide to Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani.

The cleric, Abdel Mehdi al Karbali, suffered head wounds in the explosion of a hand grenade thrown at him and his bodyguards.

The Iraqi Governing Council, meanwhile, called on neighboring nations to crack down on infiltrators crossing into Iraq and provide Iraqi authorities with information about former regime figures who may be hiding on their soil.

"There are more than 300 terrorists arrested thus far who have (foreign) nationalities," said Mouwafak al-Rabii, a governing council member. "We do our part to protect our borders and we hope our neighbors do their part."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20031030/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_56

[Q Classic]

****.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned


Che, every time you raised this issue I have asked you what was the NV offer on the table at the time that was purportedly rejected by SV?

And I've told you. The exact same settlement that was reached in 1973.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Now this is where I get queasy about a UN solution. I do not trust turning over the US military to UN command. Can you imagine Kofi Annan being in charge of whether US troops live or die? Can you agree to give the UN carte blanc over how much the US taxpayer has to spend in Iraq? What if, for example, Annan wanted to raise the troop levels to 500,000 or more and could command US units to move from the United States to Iraq?

How would it be any different than other places where U.S. troops operate under a U.N. flag? Most likely, the Security Council would designate an American as the commander. Kofi Annan has nothing to do with the UNSC, really.

[Ned]

Che, if this is true, I have no idea why SV walked? What better deal could they have gotten?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Che, if this is true, I have no idea why SV walked? What better deal could they have gotten?

I don't know. Let's look up the Paris Peace Accords and see?

[Ned]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


How would it be any different than other places where U.S. troops operate under a U.N. flag? Most likely, the Security Council would designate an American as the commander. Kofi Annan has nothing to do with the UNSC, really.

Then, what in the world is everyone complaining about? We (the Authority) are already operating under an UN mandate that ends when the Iraqi's elect their own government. The UN has imposed a timetable and has required the Iraqi's to submit their new constitution to UN security council. The only thing left is to turn the US military command over to the UN.

[Chemical Ollie]

Iraq is not Germany. It is not Korea, Vietnam or even Somalia. The closest comparison would be Afghanistan - Sovjet's invasion, that is. An easy victory, followed by a long occupation and a slow, grinding guerilla war where the occupation forces got new coffins to send home every day, until they eventually decided to leave.

[Ned]

Just as an aside, Che, the SK's did not want to accept the truce we negotiated with NK and China. Why? They wanted to continue the fight to take all of Korea - at the cost, of course, of the US treasury and manpower. I hope Nixon did not offer SV all of Vietnam.

[chequita guevara]

http://vietnam.vassar.edu/doc16.html

This is the best I could find.

Check out Chapter V, Article 15.
The reunification of Viet-Nam shall be carried out step by step through peaceful means on the basis of discussions and agreements between North and South Viet-Nam, without coercion or annexation by either party, and without foreign interference.

The South didn't want to unify (hell, that's what caused the war in the 1st place), since the bulk of the population was in the North, and any fair election would have resulted in Communist victory, and the election probably wouldn't have been fair.