There's no civil war war in Iraq

[shrike]

Just murders.

Yet the BBC keeps talking of 'insurgents'.

When a wedding-party is blown to bloody pieces that's not civil war or 'insurgency'.

The BBC used to be renowned for it's objectivity.

The sad fact is that many people around the world still think Auntie's voice is trustworthy.



Regards,

shrike.







PS The British still have to pay a 'license' fee to the BBC. Even if they never watch or listen to it. If you don't pay it they threaten you with imprisonment.

[Patsy Warnick]

Shrike

You need to go to the thread " Anti-War Protester".

That'll let you know where everyone stands

Patsy

[Clint]

Patsy Warnick;522519 wrote: Shrike

You need to go to the thread " Anti-War Protester".

That'll let you know where everyone stands

Patsy


Stands?

[shrike]

Patsy Warnick;522519 wrote: Shrike

You need to go to the thread " Anti-War Protester".

That'll let you know where everyone stands

Patsy






Thanks, Patsy, but I don't care where 'people' stand. Whatever that means.

Where people 'stand' or don't 'stand' is irrelevant.

It's not a civil war. It's just murders.



Regards,

shrike.

[Patsy Warnick]

We " (ALL)" F G know where you stand.

Patsy

[Clint]

Some take a stand... others fall for anything.

[shrike]

Clint;522639 wrote: Some take a stand... others fall for anything.




Very gnomic, Clint.

I'm impressed.





Regards,

shrike.









________________________________________________

'You're tears say much more than real evidence ever could.'

[Clint]

:yh_bye

[shrike]

Clint;522704 wrote: :yh_bye






James Thurber?

Never heard of him.



Perelman?

Now that guy was something else!





Regards,

shrike.

[Patsy Warnick]

Scrat

Why would you want to encourage this guy to respond? You are a trouble maker.:sneaky:

I mean that in good humor - go ahead take him on..



Patsy

[Lulu2]

The best way I'd know how, too!

Well done, Diuretic!

[Galbally]

Coming from an island where there was a very real civil war for about 30 years, is Iraq a civil war?



Yep it is, it just happens to be a lot of wars at once.

[Galbally]

Just an update, yesterday at least 100 people were blown to bits in car bombs, and twenty American servicemen were killed over the weekend, I don't know how many people died today I am sure a few are dead at this stage, so if this is not a civil war, an nationalist insurgency, and a jihaddists' wet dream rolled into one, what is?

[shrike]

Galbally;528149 wrote: Just an update, yesterday at least 100 people were blown to bits in car bombs, and twenty American servicemen were killed over the weekend, I don't know how many people died today I am sure a few are dead at this stage, so if this is not a civil war, an nationalist insurgency, and a jihaddists' wet dream rolled into one, what is?




I've told you already.

It's bloody murder, not civil war.



You appear to idolise that tedious drunkard, George Best, so I assume you remember the 'civil war' in Northern Ireland which consisted of paramiltary terrorists blowing up unarmed people going about their daily business of shopping etc.



Were those acts 'military operations' or sheer bloody murder?





Regards,

shrike.

[Galbally]

shrike;531698 wrote: I've told you already.

It's bloody murder, not civil war.



You appear to idolise that tedious drunkard, George Best, so I assume you remember the 'civil war' in Northern Ireland which consisted of paramiltary terrorists blowing up unarmed people going about their daily business of shopping etc.



Were those acts 'military operations' or sheer bloody murder?





Regards,

shrike.




Sorry shrike, not taking the bait, Best played football thats all, he wasn't a politican, anyway, I am a villa fan. :wah:

[Galbally]

PS, when it come to Northern Ireland, you haven't got a fricking clue mate, and you are better off that way, trust me.

[shrike]

Galbally;531700 wrote: Sorry shrike, not taking the bait, Best played football thats all, he wasn't a politican, anyway, I am a villa fan. :wah:


The fact that you confess to being an Aston Villa fan says it all, Galbally.

For any American readers of this post Aston Villa is a pathetically underacheiving soccer club. It has a glorious history but a very sad present.

And an even gloomier future: a relegation battle looms.



Regards,

shrike.



PS Oh, yes! I almost forgot. You're a twat. Galbally. And what kind of name is that, anyway? It's a non-name.

[Galbally]

shrike;531706 wrote: The fact that you confess to being a Aston Villa fan says it all, Galbally.

For any American readers of this post Aston Villa is a pathetically underacheiving soccer club. It has a glorious history but a very sad present.

And an even gloomier future: a relegation battle looms.



Regards,

shrike.



PS Oh, yes1 I almost forgot. You're a twat.




Classy shrike. :rolleyes:

Whats wrong, no one to fight with, bored are you? :wah:

[shrike]

Galbally;531707 wrote: Classy shrike. :rolleyes:

Whats wrong, no one to fight with, bored are you? :wah:




Not at all. I was merely stating the obvious in the language any English viewers would understand.

Some of them wouldn't have known that you were a twat just because you supported Aston Villa.

Even people who aren't twats support the Villa. 'Deadly Ron', for instance.





Regards,

shrike.

[Galbally]

:rolleyes: Shrike.

[shrike]

Galbally;531702 wrote: PS, when it come to Northern Ireland, you haven't got a fricking clue mate, and you are better off that way, trust me.






If it'd been up to me I'd've seen you kill each other till only the 'winner' was left in charge of the miserable, cold streets of Ulster. That was what you seemed to want to do.

The 'war', of course, is only in abeyance. The undying hatred remains...intact.



Regards,

shrike.

[Galbally]

shrike;531775 wrote: If it'd been up to me I'd've seen you kill each other till only the 'winner' was left in charge of the miserable, cold streets of Ulster. That was what you seemed to want to do.

The 'war', of course, is only in abeyance. The undying hatred remains...intact.



Regards,

shrike.


Thanks, I love being patronized about my own country, I really do.

I think your people had quite a lot of fun killing people up there (and down here as) well, (naughty, naughty), it used to be a hobby of theirs, but now of course its strictly a minority interest. Not brought up much any more as its a bit of an embarrassment no? Well, lets hope that that particular episode of difficulty is over for now, the British government seem tired and bored of it all, and that the people who actually live here will be left more or less alone to work out how they would like to do that themselves at some stage eh?

Yes, Ireland, its a good lesson in what happens when powerful people decide to "civilize" your country for you by conquering it, treating the natives like animals, and running it like a zoo for a couple of hundred years, then send a load of people to live there who despise the natives even more than you do, put them close together, remove the natives from their own land thats been theirs for thousands of years, annihilate their culture, give their appropriated land to the newer crowd, make sure they have different religions, and loyalties, give both a massive sense of grievance (i.e. dying in large numbers), divide the country up based on these differences that you introduced in the first place, and then you have the cheek to complain in indignant tones because the people this effects fight a lot, and fight you as well, and as if you had nothing to do with it, how perfectly "British".

Thanks for the nice buildings though, and the useful language. Nothing has happened in Ireland for the last couple of centuries that your "crowd" didn't make happen themselves, so drop the high moral tone and don't make me laugh. :wah: We are used to it though, getting lectures in morality from people who have spent most of our history being particularly nasty to us and treating us like untermenschen, and then continually banging on about the beastly Germans, and the awful EU, and expecting us to agree, without seeing the irony, its quite amusing really.

Again, if you can refrain from the schoolboy insults, I will talk to you about anything you want, if you can't I will not, I've had a hard enough week, without getting randomly insulted off the internet as well. Fortunately most of your country-men and women are much better mannered than you are shrike, and what your issues are I don't know and don't particularly care. If you want to have adult conversations fine, if not, then thats fine as well, but I am not very interested.

[Galbally]

Diuretic;532029 wrote: :yh_rotfl :yh_rotfl :yh_rotfl

And "Ulster", unless I'm wrong, consists of Northern Ireland and some counties from the Republic no?


Yes Ulster is not Northern Ireland, which is made up of 6 of the counties of Ulster. The ones in the Republic are Monaghan, Donegal, and Cavan, and fine counties they are as well.

[Specfiction]

I know I'm going to get beat up for this but..... I'd love for someone with Christ or Religious in their profile, and preferably from the US, to articulate a "peace" opinion. When I say peace, I mean our (US) stand on the issue. If people in some part of the world, equally well armed, want to fight-it-out, why is that our business? History shows that this kind of intervention can only lead to more violence. When are we going to understand that you cannot "force" people to be a certain way at the point of a gun. Christ knew this when he told Barabous to put the sword down, even though Barabous told him that it "was" for Christ. Why did Christ understand this, but many Christians don't?

[ANGRYWOLF]

I believe the thought is that peace in the world is a good thing for everybody. The world is a much smaller place now.If there are wars going on in far off places then you have the risk that people aligned with one side or another, even Americans of that heritage or ethnic group will provide material support , money, guns, etc to one side, example Irish Americans raising money for the IRA, or the other or actually carry out attacks against people from the opposing ethnic group who live here in the US, example Muslims attacking synagogs/jewish temples. You have the risk that it could spread like what happened in Yugoslavia, from Bosnia and Croatia to Kosovo to Albania, and perhaps to Macedonia and Greece. That was the fear.

In Iraq the thought is that a failure there will give a base to AL QUIDA in the Sunni part of the country with war between the Sunni and Shiite parts of the country, with Iran controlling the Shiite part of the country and the fear Turkey would invade the Kurdish part out of fear the Kurds there would support militarily the Kurds who want independence in Turkey.

The USA invading Iraq was a neocon's dream, the belief they could have all that oil, more than what is in Saudi Arabia, under US control and get rid of Saddam because Bush had a personal grudge against him.It was never about terrorism or wmd. What has happened there was easily forseeable/predicatable and is the worst foreign police blunder since Vietnam as Senator Hagel has so eloquently pointed out.

[BTS]

shrike;531698 wrote: I've told you already.



It's bloody murder, not civil war.





You appear to idolise that tedious drunkard, George Best, so I assume you remember the 'civil war' in Northern Ireland which consisted of paramiltary terrorists blowing up unarmed people going about their daily business of shopping etc.





Were those acts 'military operations' or sheer bloody murder?











Regards,

shrike.


HMMMMMM...shrike...U say MURDER????

How many murders would have been at Saddams hand if we would not have stopped him?

Lets see......... FACTS do not lie.



In 1979, when Saddam became president, violence in Iraq escalated dramatically. The regime committed both individual murders and mass murder. The former category eliminated individuals suspected of anti-regime (or just anti-Saddam) sentiments or activities. This included Saddam's personal and factional enemies in the party, disloyal (or insufficiently obsequious) military officers, active or suspected dissidents in Iraq's general population, and many others whose only sin was being a friend or relative of such persons. In 1989, Amnesty International reported hundreds of such executions per year, stretching back over a decade. Some years, these murders reached into the thousands. Of course, any numbers derived from these killings do not include many thousands of cases of torture, rape, amputation, branding, and other atrocities committed by Saddam's regime that stopped short of death.



Its rate of killing was far higher when the regime targeted entire communities. Shia Muslims, ethnic Kurds, and smaller ethnic and religious minorities were constantly subject to violence from the regime (as well as many other forms of repression). In his first dozen years in power, Saddam assaulted at least one of these groups with truly massive violence on average every three years. After Iran's Shia revolution, Saddam became concerned that Iraq's own Shias might try to follow suit. In 1980, Iraq attacked Iran, at which point Saddam wanted also to ensure that Iraqi Shias would not assist their Shia brethren. To these ends, the regime murdered thousands--quite possibly 50,000, according to Human Rights Watch--including Shia clerics.



The Iran-Iraq war put large strains on Iraq's economy, military, and regime. Saddam dealt with the resulting problems in characteristic fashion. Just as with Stalin during World War II, large amounts of blood were shed not only on the military front, but also behind it. Shias were not the only targets. In a single episode in the mid-1980s, the regime rounded up and killed around 10,000 Kurds. Even before the war ended, the regime launched a much more ambitious program to wipe out entire Kurdish communities. It was in this military campaign--named Operation Anfal--that the regime used chemical weapons against several Kurdish towns, killing thousands. Human Rights Watch estimated that Anfal killed "more than 100,000" Kurds, and that Kurdish victims of the regime's campaigns between 1983 and 1993 reached "well into six figures."



Kurdish groups estimate Anfal's victims were even higher, up to 180,000. Whatever the exact number, Human Rights Watch concluded that "the Iraqi regime committed the crime of genocide." Anfal's intense phase lasted three months in the spring of 1988. If we estimate its victims at 100,000, the regime was killing Kurds alone at a rate of around 30,000 each month, or a thousand a day.



The collapse of most of Saddam's army in the first Gulf War inspired an uprising or intifada within the military and among the Kurds and Shia. The regime responded with the largest killing spree in its history.

Unfortunately, little information is available about the violence directed against Shias, who are believed to have suffered the worst of this backlash. Initial reports conservatively estimated at least 50,000 Shia victims. More horrifying--but believable--reports have come from Iraqi state security officials who fled Saddam's fickle wrath after 1991. One defecting officer reported that he supervised the killing and burial of approximately 4,000 Shias at one site in one morning alone--this, in an operation that lasted weeks. The U.S. report "Life Under Saddam Hussein" states that "Iraqi officials themselves have privately acknowledged that the regime slaughtered as many as 200,000 Shia" or even more in 1991.



The number of Kurds who died in 1991--killed by Saddam's forces or fleeing them--is estimated at 50,000 to 80,000. This range would have been much higher, except that the Gulf War Allies intervened in Iraq's north in response to the massive flow of desperate Kurdish refugees escaping the regime's onslaught. While it was allowed to proceed, the regime killed Kurds at a rate of tens of thousands a month. The regime also killed an unknown number of people living in Iraq's southern marshes in military campaigns stretching into 1992.



This means that for a time in the early spring of 1991, Saddam's regime was killing Shias and Kurds combined at a rate of tens of thousands per week, and would have gone on doing so in the north for much longer had the Americans, British, and French not created a "safe haven" for Kurds inside northern Iraq, which Saddam's forces were basically barred from entering.

In the 1990s, Saddam's regime continued to commit individual political murder. Victims included people suspected of anti-Saddam activity, others who were friends and relatives of the suspected subversives, as well as people caught up in the mafia-like violence of Uday Hussein and other regime figures. Throughout these years, Amnesty International catalogued credible reports of hundreds of killings every year, and quite possibly thousands in several years.



From 1997 to 1999, the regime "cleansed" its prisons, executing up to 2,500 people. Around the same time, the regime began a new campaign against selected Shia. Prominent Shia clerics were assassinated, prompting public demonstrations, which were savagely suppressed with an unknown number of victims. And a new military offensive was launched against groups in the southern marshes in 1998. In the decade leading up to the Coalition invasion, political murder also extended deeper into the regime's ranks than ever before. Thousands in the military died in periodic purges, and killing extended even into Sunni tribes and Saddam's own family.



Four months before Saddam's fall, Human Rights Watch estimated that up to 290,000 people had "disappeared" since the late 1970s and were presumed dead. The Coalition Provisional Authority's human rights office estimates that 300,000 bodies are contained in the numerous mass graves. "And that's the lower end of the estimates," said one CPA spokesperson. In fact, the accumulated credible reports make the likely number at least 400,000 to 450,000. So, by a conservative estimate, the regime was killing civilians at an average rate of at least 16,000 a year between 1979 and March 2003.



OK

HAD SADDAM REMAINED IN POWER ,

individual political murders would have continued, and might well have accelerated given the tensions and fears caused by his regime's high-wire confrontation with the Coalition countries. This would have meant several thousand deaths. What of murders committed en masse? Between 1991 and March 2003, the regime carried out no exterminations on the scale of Anfal. Had the leopard changed its spots? Hardly. The few years leading up to the invasion suggest events might well have been building to another round of mass murder. Some totalitarian regimes kill so many of their opponents and smash civil society so completely that eventually no group has the resources to threaten the regime in any way. This explains why the Soviet Union killed fewer people after Stalin. Saddam's regime never achieved this goal. To the very end, Iraq contained large groups that Saddam was prepared to target with massive violence.

How many Iraqis were saved by the use of force against Saddam can be counted in several ways. At a bare minimum, several thousand Iraqis were saved from being killed in individual political murders. This includes political prisoners (including children) who poured from Saddam's dungeons at liberation, Shia activists, other dissenters, and military men suspected of disloyalty. Toppling Saddam also saved several thousand more at dire risk from his gradually rising violence against the Shia. If the Shia or Kurds were targeted with wholesale murder, as seemed increasingly likely, the regime could easily have resumed killing at its historic rate of 15,000 to 20,000 deaths a year. Specifically, the West's already existing threat to use force inside Iraq to protect Kurdistan--a threat whose credibility might well have collapsed if the Coalition had crumbled last year--saved tens of thousands more from certain death every year it was in place.

U.N. economic sanctions were also killing civilians. Critics regularly claimed sanctions caused 4,000 to 5,000 Iraqi children to die per month from poor nutrition and health care. UNICEF attributed some 500,000 unnecessary deaths to the sanctions in the 1990s. The sanctions remained in place as long as Saddam's regime refused to comply with international requirements. Liberation made it possible to lift the sanctions almost immediately--thus saving approximately 60,000 lives a year, if we use UNICEF's numbers.

At some point in the past year, the number of Iraqi civilians who would have been killed by Saddam's continuing rule surpassed the number who died because of the war. We will never know for sure when that moment occurred, whether earlier or later than the six-week mark guessed at by the New York Times's John Burns. But it has long since passed. And that margin will grow with each passing year that Iraqis are free from Saddam. People genuinely motivated by a concern for Iraqi civilians have much to be grateful for. Terrorist bombings inside Iraq since liberation show just how little Baathists value Iraqi civilian lives, and just how ready they would be to resume mass murder if the world let them.

[Clint]

Specfiction;532330 wrote: I know I'm going to get beat up for this but..... I'd love for someone with Christ or Religious in their profile, and preferably from the US, to articulate a "peace" opinion. When I say peace, I mean our (US) stand on the issue. If people in some part of the world, equally well armed, want to fight-it-out, why is that our business? History shows that this kind of intervention can only lead to more violence. When are we going to understand that you cannot "force" people to be a certain way at the point of a gun. Christ knew this when he told Barabous to put the sword down, even though Barabous told him that it "was" for Christ. Why did Christ understand this, but many Christians don't?


John 18:36

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place."

Jesus says here that if his kingdom was of this world his servants would fight.

That's the way it is here until the Kingdom of Heaven comes.

[Specfiction]

What happens here is up to us. We can choose to be "real" Christians or we can ignore our responsiblity to promote real peace.

[BTS]

Scrat;533003 wrote: What crap, this is pure spectulation. Last year, due to the lack of STABILITY (which the management of this affair is solely responsible for) 34000 Iraqis died in various ways. No one can do worse.




Where do you get that figure? (34000)

Try this Newsweek link as it seems more precise: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11861155/site/newsweek/

The Human Toll



More than three years into the war in Iraq, the Coalition death toll has topped 3,200 and estimated civilian fatalities stand at more than 55,000

[Specfiction]

Fraid not. The John Hopkins’s study sets an Iraqi death toll for the war at as much as 650,000. The current official Iraqi estimate is 150,000 and rising. In the 80's, when Sadam was a US ally, there are pictures of Sadam hugging Rumsfeld. The US gave Iraq "logistical" support as Iraqis killed more than 1 million Iranians, some by poison gas.

Let's be real Christians, let's finally decide to stop partaking in useless wars that create more war with no benefit and at great loss to all involved (with the exception of companies selling guns and war supplies on no-bid contracts).