Are Your Views Changed?

[Dis]

check this out.

they aren't too happy at americans killing their own people

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1085007,00.html

Although I think it is just a show. They aren't going to publically support the removal of Saddam until Saddam is actually gone.

[Dis]

I actually am losing support for the war. I did not expect this much resistance. I guess the Iraqi people like Hussein in charge. go figure.

[Tiamat]

Diss~ I don't think it's that so much as they are scared ****eless If I was in their shoes I'd probably say I loved him to until the all clear was given.

[Dis]

exactly.

until Saddam is actually gone they won't say anything bad about the current regime.

I just had to put that up there to show that not all news is good.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dissident
I actually am losing support for the war. I did not expect this much resistance. I guess the Iraqi people like Hussein in charge. go figure.

My take is they don't like Hussein, but they like invaders even less. That's something I said long ago, but it seems to be true.

[Spiffor]

It is fairly possible many Iraqis are nationalists or believe fighting a jihad against the US. On the French TV today, there was a big case made about these est. 3000 people who came back from Jordan to Iraq, despite having no Saddamite pressure in Jordan.

Don't forget, you are liberators to some, but you are invaders to others, and you are the Great Satan to others as well. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant part of the population would resist, even though they have everything to lose if Saddam stay in power.
I expect most people will cheer the US if there are not too many civilian deaths. But should the war take a very bad turn, the cheerings will become very very rare

[Dis]

I don't see that many civilians taking up arms. They haven't so far.

But using them as human shields by the Iraqis isn't going to be easy for U.S. troops. Baghdad is going to be very tough.

[Zero]

I dont support this war and I dont "support the troops".... but I sure am enjoying the drama.

Oh and I have nothign agst the people who are under active duty, they are merely doing their job.


Just a friendly reminder that there are **** heads like me who have no morals.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Calc II
I dont support this war and I dont "support the troops".... but I sure am enjoying the drama.

drama queen?

[Tingkai]

I read an interesting article in The Guardian written by an Iraqi living in Britain. It is one explanation about why Iraqis have not welcomed the US-Anglo invasion.

"It is now clear to everyone that ordinary Iraqis are resisting this military aggression with their lives and souls. Commentators and politicians in Britain and America seem taken aback: how come the Iraqis are putting up such a fight? Why do they so passionately resist this attempt to liberate them from the brutal dictator, Saddam? But Iraqis aren't surprised at all.
...
"Iraqis may wish for the current regime to change, but anyone who understands our culture will know that in this war Iraqis will fight and die, not to save President Saddam Hussein, but to protect their home, land, dignity and self-respect from a new world order alien to their way of life. We are an enormously proud people."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,921197,00.html

[Urban Ranger]

Westerners don't understand this kind of thinking.

[Dis]

well we do understand that as it applies to ourselves, but we seem to disregard it when talking about other people's.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Re: Are Your Views Changed?

Originally posted by Seeker
I must confess I am at heart a setimentalist and romantic....

At heart, I think I'm a cynic and somewhere between a mix of Marcus Aurelius and Macchiavelli in my sentiments.

Yes, my views have changed radically in two directions.

Initially, I thought this war was not too bad an idea, if done at the right time with the right forces - i.e. more forces, more international and arab world support.

I wasn't particularly concerned with the fate of the Iraqi people, although the US has it's hands dirty in that regard. We had and have bigger fish to fry, and there are a lot of people in a lot of ****ty countries ruled by evil bastards.

Now that the war has started, we have no choice but to finish it decisively, so I support bringing it to a rapid, decisive conclusion, consistent with minimizing casualties.

That said, I support an extremity of aggressive action against the IRG and SRG and fedayeen forces - I'm not particularly interested in whether any of those last long enough to become prisoners. Iraq has had a long history of thugs, and the only way out of that is to wipe out the enforcers.

On the flip side, I'm more and more incensed at the chickenhawks - there have been unnecessary delays and casualties due to the insufficiency of force and insistence on adhering to an unrealistic timeline. We could have "given inspections more time" while using that excuse to get sufficient forces in place.

But that didn't matter, because a lot of this, and a lot of dead on both sides, are about some ball-less right wing ideologues like Wolfowitz, Perle and Armitage. They are of course too precious to serve in the military themselves, but such experts that they ignore the advice of spectacularly accomplished career professional soldiers and decide from reading a book they all liked that war is all different now, and there's a new style of fighting and all those naysayers are dinosaurs and know-nothings. Hello, honeybuns, there hasn't been a new way of fighthing ever. It all comes down to the same principles. So some chicken****s are going to cause unnecessary casualties trying to prove their philosophical points. And they've already lost, but they'll never admit it.

Personally, when this is done, I'd like to see Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Armitage dismissed from their posts. Actually, one advantage to Saddam's style of rule is that we could take these *******s and put 'em up against a wall and solve the problem that way.

Another thing that has changed in my view is that now that we've stepped into this mess (and we will kick Saddam's ass, in the end), we owe it to the Iraqi people to do it right. I've been reading about how US companies such as Halliburton (gee, what a coincidence) are being awarded contracts for various things in Iraq, but we're going to pay for them with Iraqi oil. WTFH???

We're going to invade you, break stuff in your country getting rid of that ******* ruler, kill some of you, but we're going to fix everything up for you. By awarding contracts to our companies and paying them with your resources. If the Iraqis have to pay for rebuilding with their oil, then let an Iraqi interim government let those contracts to whoever they want - if it's the French, Russians and Chinese, so be it, if they're paying for it.

If we're going to give those contracts to American companies and give the Iraqis no say in it, then we should suck up the cost. We're going to spend 75 billion at least just on the military side of things, what's a few billion more - and it's not like the Iraqis won't need their oil revenue, they've been in a hole for two decades, owe reparations to Kuwait under UNSCRs, and owe a lot of foreign debt to boot. Once we decided to step in and dictate the outcome, our moral debt to the Iraqi people increased immensely.

So although I strongly support a war to which I was initially opposed (at least for the time being), I have a far lower regard for our civilian "leadership" than before.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


My take is they don't like Hussein, but they like invaders even less. That's something I said long ago, but it seems to be true.

They're used to invaders. It's got to be one of the two or three most invaded pieces of turf on the planet.

There's a couple of really big problems here - the US is not involving Iraqi expatriates, exiles and opposition figures to any degree at all, and we have completely failed to spell out in advance a vision for what we want to achieve in Iraq and the conditions under which we'll leave. Unfortunately, the US administration has a colonial view of the whole enterprise.

Most of the Iraqis are opposing us mostly out of fear, because they believe (and they're partly right, although the rebel leaders hosed us as well) that we hung them out to dry when they tried to get rid of Hussein 12 years ago. Tens of thousands of them paid with their lives, and their family members lives, and they remember well the lessons they were taught by Qusay Hussein and Taha Yahhin Ramadan. The simple fact is they fear us less, and they've been ruled by fear for decades. National pride can be addressed by working with the exile community and articulating a fair vision and an exit point from a future Iraq, but the only way we can address the fear issue is to break the Saddamites control of the country.

[KrazyHorse]

Actually, I'm in near-total agreement with MtG, with two big exceptions:

First, I don't think that it was just the timing that was off on Iraq. I don't know if there was a worthwhile way to do this (I do know, however, that it hasn't been found by the Bush admin)

Secondly, I'll start to support the war once enough of the total cost has been paid (talking in terms of lives, since I really couldn't give a **** how many US dollars are wasted by their government's stupidity) that the remainder is less painful than leaving Saddam in would be. That's a while away, in my book. The diplomatic price has already been paid, in my opinion (the situation in the ME has been ****ed up beyond it's normal state already, and it's just a matter of time till we start to see it).