Dancing in the streets, part Deux!

[MarkG]

Rumsfeld: Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things

could we have some of that freedom in the US please?!?!

[Spiffor]

I'm not American, yet I don't know what thumbs up means when done by an Arab. Can anyone enlighten me ?

Edit : and for your post MTG. The whole celebration for the "liberation" of Baghdad should stop until we see something like a true liberation. I hardly call the fall into anarchy a "liberation".

[MarkG]

i'm this close of making that rumsfeld quote a t-shirt

[GePap]

Wait, so Saddam was a free person? I mean, he commited crimes and made mistakes and was bad...

Saddam, Saddam, Saddam! Our role model for the free individual!

Thanks Rummy

[Spiffor]

Ge

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
I choose to take the most convenient meaning.

Can you explain the bit with the shoes though?

They like that - that way, they can give the gesture the meaning they intend, and get a laugh at how the infidels don't have a clue.

The shoes thing goes back to tribal roots as herdsmen. Just like the whole cutting off the right hand bit, which predated Islam. Traditionally, you ate with the right hand, and in the glorious days before toilet paper, you took care of the other end with your left hand. (Scrape it off in sand afterwards, but better than using the plants you might find in the desert.) Gifts are given and received with the right hand, or both hands (otherwise, you're saying "I wipe my ass with this."). Amputation of the right hand makes a convicted thief a permanent social outcast.

The shoes bit has to do with the fact that outside you wear shoes while attending your herds of goats, horses and camels, etc. Indoors, you remove your shoes as a sign of respect, otherwise, you're saying in effect "I step in goat**** and camel**** all day, but this is no different, so I won't bother taking off my shoes." Hitting something with shoes is just symbolically stepping on it.

[MarkG]

more rummy

"I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it," he said. "I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny - 'The sky is falling'. I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot - one thing after another. It's just unbelievable ..."

"The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?' "

[Urban Ranger]

Why didn't the US forces in Baghdad stop looting and maintain order? The looters even target hospitals (What the bloody hell?) and ordinary people are afraid.

[GePap]

I guess Irony is something Rummy never learned about.

he and the Iraqi information minsiter should get a duo act going.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by GePap
he and the Iraqi information minsiter should get a duo act going.

That would be the funniest duo on Earth

[GePap]

One question relating this to Poly practice: so right now the Iraqi flag stands for a free people, does it not? So, does that mean all those people currently with the Iraqi flag are showing thier support of freedom? will any of the people "dancing" in this thread change thier flags to that of Iraq to show their support for this new bastion of liberty?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by GePap
MtG: I agree with you that all these people dancing in this thread are doing it more for themselves, as a form of self-congratulation for "oh how much they trully care about the dmeocracy of some far away brown folks", but at the same time they have a minor point: the situation as of yet is not bad enough to start pilling on on them. There has been widespread looting, but if by next week it has been put down, then we can move on with the more important matters.

To me, looting is just a secondary symptom. What I'm really concerned about, and pissed off about, because it was entirely predictable and would have been largely curable with minimal delay, is the degradation of water supplies, or the lack of water supplies.

From the WHO:

The second most common cause of child deaths is diarrhoea, estimated to be responsible for 12 % of the child deaths under five years of age in developing countries - and a total of 1.3 million deaths each year. Diarrhoea may result from a variety of different causes. It is frequently a result of the child consuming pathogens or toxins from dirty hands or through contaminated water or food.

Virtually every city the coalition has passed through has acute failures in their water supply systems, and many of those were pretty bad to begin with. The Tigris/Euphrates/Shatt al-Hillah/Saddam Canal water system is abysmal - under the best of conditions, it's like drinking Mississippi river water, plus the normal third-world pollution and war detritus on top of that.

Medical treatment is the second issue. A lot of wounded are going to be losing limbs or dying due to otherwise treatable infections, simply due to limited supplies and staff.

Then you get to looting, and then food supplies.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Why didn't the US forces in Baghdad stop looting and maintain order? The looters even target hospitals (What the bloody hell?) and ordinary people are afraid.

There aren't enough of them. If they go in small dispersed groups, they're susceptible to ambush. If they are in combat-capable force, they're too concentrated for effective policing. Plus it's a bit dicey deciding when it's permissible to shoot looters.

There's a real fine line that has to be walked.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Why didn't the US forces in Baghdad stop looting and maintain order? The looters even target hospitals (What the bloody hell?) and ordinary people are afraid.

The explanation offered by the forces themselves is that they lack manpower to prevent all looting, so they only stop looting of arms depots and try to prevent hospital robbery. What would they do, threaten to shoot the looters? They'd get in deep **** for knowingly opening fire on unarmed civilians because they were stealing some furniture or something. The Kurdish militias seem to be instilling discipline now, which is better than nothing.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Spiffor

That would be the funniest duo on Earth

Especially if you dressed them up like Velma and Roxie in Chicago