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Nagoyaguy · Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 425 Location: Aichi, Japan

If you two are referring to the performance of the US ambassador to IRaq in 1990, it is irrelevant. No green light was given. At worst, her remarks could have been interpreted to show lack of interest, NOT compliance.

Try again.

moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

He promises to bow out and stop bothering us with his silly Bush propaganda posts.

He wasn't telling the truth.

Be that as it may, I will make no further response to him.

AsiaTraveller · Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:40 pm Post subject:

He is in a video game.

Time for nagoyaguy to hit the "Bow Out" button once again. Doesn't Dave's have a limit of twice for hitting that button??? Why do they keep coming back and back and back after announcing their retreat and withdrawal???

Nagoyaguy · Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 425 Location: Aichi, Japan

Why? Perhaps a touch of masochism I dont know...

WOuldnt use the words "withdraw" or "retreat". Those imply that one of us is right and the other wrong. Leaves the blowhard lefties triumphantly crowing over their imaginary 'victory' over the forces of evil.

Plus, there is something tasty about having the last word, isnt there?

Shall we let this one die and move on to other issues? How about a nice chat about use of nuclear weapons instead? No more 'talking points', no more cut n pastes, no more 'evidence'. Deal?

AsiaTraveller · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2004 6:40 am Post subject:

He's again trying to "bow out" gracefully... AKA acknowledgement that he simply doesn't have enough ammunition at his fingertips.

Okay, you win.... Bye, Nagoyaguy!

Josh Lyman · Joined: 12 Oct 2004 Posts: 98

Stephen Jones · Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 4124

Josh Lyman · Joined: 12 Oct 2004 Posts: 98

Stephen, do you have any idea of what would actually happen to Iraqi civilians? You would be abandoning them to a religious war and complete chaos. You think they have it bad under the US? Wait until there is an even greater power vacuum. It will get worse for Iraq, not better. I agree with you in principle, but surely you don't want to leave them to a slaughter by the next hardline, fundamentalist regimes grabbing at power?

Stephen Jones · Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 4124

Dear John

Where the hell do you get your ideas from. The "armed foreign groups" pulling up people in the street, or even shooting them dead, are the US and UK soldiers. Remember when Rumsfeld was peddling the lie that most of the insurgents in Falluja were foreigners? At the end of the US take-over they found about 17 of them, out of at least 1,500 dead. The total numbers of dead aren't known because the US refuses to keep a count as its bad publicity, and it never bothered to clear the dead from inside the houses or under the rubble anyway, so that as now, when people are going back to the 30% of houses not destroyed in Falluja, they find the rotting corpses of their relatives being devoured by dogs.

And completely destroying the town, and killing a fair proportiion of its inhabitants, is all that the US can do to "protect" the population. The invasion forces are not preventing a bloodbathj - they have almost zero control over the country - they are merely exacerbating it at best, when they are not actively carrying it out.

Josh Lyman · Joined: 12 Oct 2004 Posts: 98

AsiaTraveller · Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2004 6:31 pm Post subject:

"Insurgents" have an established, legitimate government to fight against. Such is not the case in Iraq.

A "resistance" is a perfectly legal force to resist an illegal occupation.

Let's call those opposed to the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation exactly what they are: the Iraqi resistance.

Just because the corporate media have caved in to the politically correct terms of discourse (insurgents, terrorists) demanded by the Bush administration doesn't mean that English teachers need to do the same.

moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

Absolutely, AT. English teachers should NOT be advocating the use of the language for propaganda and disinformation.

Guy Courchesne · Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 9650 Location: Mexico City

Despite the sadness of the affair, this topic makes for great EFL classwork, particularly when considering the vocabulary choices (insurgents, freedom-fighters, terrorists, heroes, etc).

I ran a class in a TEFL practice session some months back where we took a BBC online report about a battle in Najaf. Part of the class re-wrote the article with strong US bias (bias and point of view being the topics for the day), part re-wrote it with strong anti-US bias, and the last part wrote as objectively as possible. It seems bias was easy to write, objectivity very hard to obtain, even for Mexican students who in my experience are generally objective and impartial to the whole conflict.

Power of words...

moonraven · Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 3094

Bias is especially easy to obtain in the current world climate because all one has to do is throw in a few extremely loaded buzzwords such as:

left-wing
firebrand
liberal
authoritarian
populist
radical

and a relatively short list of etceteras.

Bias plays to emotional, knee-jerk responses to buzzwords. It reinforces itself by endless repetition of them.

Objectivity is very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain--because it implies measured reflection and logical reasoning (paradoxically, not unlike what Wordworth gave as a definition of petry: "The spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY".)

taikibansei · Joined: 14 Sep 2004 Posts: 811 Location: Japan

Interesting article in the November 15 issue of The Nation. This article references a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one which surveyed US ground force personnel in Iraq to find out the extent of civilian casualties inflicted by US troops. While the main point of the study was to examine what happened psychologically to these troops after they realized they'd killed noncombatants, a rough estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians killed by ground forces in the first year of the invasion was 13,881. Of course, as the Nation article notes as well, this figure doesn't include civilians killed by air strikes (it also excludes the Iraqis killed by so-called 'terrorist' attacks)--which means the total number of civilians killed in just one year of US occupation is actually far more than the quoted figure.

Now, for a comparison figure, Hussein--a very bad guy--killed an estimated 300,000 people during his twenty-four-reign, an average of 12,500 a year. In other words, the NEJM survey suggests that US military power may now be more hazardous to the health of Iraqi civilians than the dictatorship it destroyed--which might help explain why over 60% of Iraqis want us to leave the country...now.