Skip to main content

civilian casualties...legitimate reason to oppose the war.

How short our memories… Nov 15, 2001… two months after 9-11.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright

Directly connecting 9-11 to Iraq… (remember that next time “the right” is accused of falsely doing so)

“The grim question of how many people have died in Iraq has sparked heated debate over the years. The controversy dates from 1995, when researchers with a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) study in Iraq wrote to The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, asserting that sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children.”

This, before the war… 567,000 children killed by the United States.

It’s bogus and for a variety of reasons. It’s also the main reason for Food for Oil which was immediately diverted to palaces and bank accounts by those who claimed all those children were dying.

Children died of starvation and children died for lack of weapons grade chlorine to purify their water.

Oil wealth meant that regional leaders did not have to take care of the people in their countries.

It really is no more complicated than that.

And 567,000 children… why don’t we remember those charges? Why are the years 1991 to 2000 a complete black-hole?

That number got the press. Later revisions downward didn’t.

“Sanctions opponents place the blame for Iraq’s increased deaths squarely on the United States and the continuing UN sanctions. Certainly the United States bears primary responsibility for the war and unrelenting sanctions.”

But we should have let sanctions work. Remember that. Sanctions were better.

Pointless, but better.

As we know, sanctions put no pressure on Saddam. Sanctions only work if people have a way to hold their government responsible. In an oil financed dictatorship this can not happen. And Saddam got around even direct personal financial impact by selling the children’s deaths to the world and getting Food for Oil out of us bleeding hearts.

War is horrible, but it’s far from the worst possible thing. Not-war is not enough to claim moral righteousness.

Failure to go to war kills people, too.

Comments

Ymarsakar said…
I think the Left prefers us to have the memories of animals. Neither the past nor the future matters nearly as much as gratifying your desires in the present. So long as social security is viable now, what does an animal care for the future?

For human beings that prefer to be more than animals bound by instinct, such a constraint on free will is unconscionable.
1:09 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some times some people.

 
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Not Projection

Take the case of "fascism". When you can see clear as day that the person who is accusing you of fascism is a fascist, they aren't projecting. They're talking about something ELSE. Basically, in the case of fascism, the basic set of fascist government controls are the default assumption of reality for a whole lot of people. The government is supposed to control every part of your life. The government is supposed to make you moral and good and reflect "justice". The government is supposed to do this by picking winners from the good people and losers from the bad people. The government is supposed to control the way people do business, how businesses (and farmers) function and what they produce. And people should be made to cooperate with this control because they are part of society and society is dependent on everyone being in compliance. This is simply the Truth. It's how the world works and how the world is supposed to work. The Socialist Nationalism,
Post a Comment
Read more

What You Know That Isn't So

  The saying goes like this, It's not what you *don't* know that is going to trip you up, it's what you know that isn't so. I believe that the first lady might possibly have been feigning helplessness, just a little bit.  She already had concept art and visuals, so I think she'll be okay.   But someone might truly be so new that they know nothing about science fiction as a genre or how it works in the world.  That person, the truly "new" person, might not realize that the second lady, no matter how assured she seems to be that she's passing on vital Wisdom, is wrong. So lets unwrap her backpack a little (to steal a metaphor). Stories about space pirates are Space Opera, generally.  "Soft" science in science fiction usually refers to sociology or psychology, social "science".  A story about space pirates might be "soft".  But that's picking nits.  The first big boo-boo is this: "not as popular *because* it is women
1 comment
Read more