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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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 Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:01 am Post subject: |
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| Spencer Ackerman took down Stephen Peltere |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:08 am Post subject: |
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Ersatz wrote:
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| The Saddam regime operated from its own statist logic and included Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. |
One could point out that Christians especially would have reason to prefer the former state of affairs in Iraq to the current one...
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Long an integral part of Baghdad's diverse ethnic and religious communities, Christians have lived side by side with their Muslim neighbors for generations, said Abdullah al-Naufali, head of Iraq's Christians Endowment.
But as Iraq's violence flared after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, churches and Christian homes were targeted, al-Naufali said. Ten of Baghdad's 80 Christian churches have closed, and more than half of Baghdad's Christian population has fled, he said.
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The flight of Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslims from their homes under threat of violence has earned much attention. But Iraq's Christian community has also been targeted and is steadily dwindling as well.
Although they make up only about 5% of Iraq's population, Christians make up nearly 40% of the refugees fleeing Iraq, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Other Iraqis who are forced from their homes often relocate to another city or neighborhood, but Iraqi Christians who have to flee often leave the country, said Dana Graber, an Amman-based officer with the International Organization for Migration. "They feel even more vulnerable because they have few, if any, safe communities to where they can escape," she said.
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Bombs and targeted killings are not the only threats facing Iraqi Christians. They also have to succumb to Islamic traditions enforced in parts of the country.
Zaid Frangoul said his wife is forced to wear a hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, each time they leave their Baghdad home for fear they'll be targeted by militants. They will leave Iraq as soon as his wife, who is pregnant, gives birth, he said.
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I don't know if the shoe-thrower had Christians in mind when he made his recent remarks, but their plight would certainly support the overall thrust of those remarks.
USA Today |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:13 am Post subject: |
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| Kurds and Shia =80% of Iraq's population. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:22 am Post subject: |
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| ersatzredux wrote: |
| If relations then were as bad as people seem to think here, why were they not segregated to begin with? |
Becuase a great number of Shi'a leaders had taken refugee across the Iranian border for a decade or more before the invasion, dating indeed to the Iran-Iraq war.
Inclusion and exclusion? As Joo has alluded to, Saddam violently suppressed Iraq's majority population groups. I can think of no more powerful recent statement on this than Saddam's likely executing Muhammad al-Sadr in 1999.
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Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Al-Sadr, age 66, was killed in February 1999. The killings was part of an organized attack by the Iraqi Government against the independent leadership of the Shi'a community. The Government has not responded to Van Der Stoel's inquiries. In the aftermath of these killings, Saddam's Government increased repressive activities in the south and in other predominantly Shi'a areas to prevent mourning observances and popular demonstrations. In April 1999, the Government executed four Shi'a men for the al-Sadr slaying after a closed trial. Shi'a religious authorities and opposition groups objected to the trial process and contend that the four executed men were innocent. At least one of the four, Sheikh Abdul Hassan Abbas Kufi, a prayer leader in Najaf, reportedly was in prison at the time of the killing. The Shi'a press reported in January 1999 that he had been arrested on December 24, 1998. The three others executed with Kufi were Islamic scholar Ahmad Mustapha Hassan Ardabily, Ali Kathim Mahjan, and Haider Ali Hussain.
Although a funeral for al-Sadr was prohibited, spontaneous gatherings of mourners took place in the days after his death. Government security forces used excessive force in breaking up these illegal religious gatherings... |
GlobalSecurity.org |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 8:40 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Kurds and Shia =80% of Iraq's population. |
But isn't there some overlap between Kurds and Sunnis? According to Reader's Digest, Sunni Kurds are 20% of the total Iraqi population of Iraq. And the Digest doesn't even mention Shiite Kurds, so I'm guessing that there numbers must be fairly small.
link |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 9:26 pm Post subject: |
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While we are defending Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy re: the Shi'a-Sunni divide, let us take a moment to praise his speechmaking as well, his ability to coin a phrase destined to echo into the ages.
I just finished Rory Stewart's Prince of the Marshes, an excellent read on occupied Iraq. It deals with these very tensions in the provinces. Stewart travelled into the Emerald City from time to time, once seeing this Arabic inscription etched in large print on the Republican Palace's marble walls:
"Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country." -- Saddam Hussein
I imagine that is one wall Saddam never expected the outside world to see... |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 9:37 pm Post subject: Re: Why I threw the shoe |
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| ersatzredux wrote: |
This was a searing cry from the heart from a man driven past the point of endurance by all the pain and suffering he witnessed and the rank injustice of it all. How can others read it and miss that? |
The guy threw his shoes. It would've been better if he had continued his reporting on the failures of the occupation. Instead, he threw his shoes and was rightly jailed for assault.
Not battery though, because he couldn't even hit the President at close range.
He threw his shoes. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 9:50 pm Post subject: |
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Here is the Bush apologist Robert Fisk
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Within a year, the first work began, massive walls and dams of pre-stressed concrete, initially in secret and then � once the first satellite pictures revealed what Saddam was doing � in public. After the 1991 Gulf War, and Iraq's retreat from Kuwait, American journalists were taken to see the northern ramparts of what was described as an "irrigation" project. They were banned from the crusted lake-beds further south.
For it was here that Saddam had been betrayed again. In the aftermath of the "mother of all battles", two great uprisings were staged against the Baathist regime: by the Shias of the south and the Kurds of the north. The Kurds he knew how to deal with. The Marsh Arabs were more difficult. For the insurgents fled back into the wetlands across a triangle of Iraq linking Basra, Nassariya and Amara, returning at night to assault army convoys and police posts. Three years later, deserting soldiers were still robbing night-time motorists on the road to Basra.
As usual in the Arab world, everyone knew what was happening and no one said a thing. The British and American pilots flying the pointless southern "no-fly" zone � allegedly to protect Iraq's minorities � could clearly see the receding waters of the Marsh. The Arab regimes remained silent. Neither Mubarak nor Arafat nor Assad nor Fahd uttered the mildest word of criticism, any more than they did when the Kurds were gassed.
The Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya has drawn attention to an incendiary article in the Baath party's Al-Thawra newspaper in April 1991 while Saddam's army was still trying to crush the southern rebellion. The author attacked the Marsh Arabs for their poverty, backwardness and immorality, referring to them as vicious, slatternly and dirty. "One often hears stories of perversion that would make your mouth drop," the paper said.
So the Marsh Arabs were bestialised before their culture was destroyed. Saddam had dried up another corner of Iraq, put the people and the birds to flight, made sure that there were no more little islands unto themselves. |
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert--fisk-their-lagoons-and-reedbeds-gone-the-marsh-arabs-have-no-refuge-685223.html |
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Captain Corea
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 4:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Summer Wine wrote: |
| Should he have been arrested and assulted in prison? No! |
Arrested - yes.
Assaulted - no. |
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TheUrbanMyth
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Location: Retired
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| Posted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:45 pm Post subject: Re: Why I threw the shoe |
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| ersatzredux wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| Because I'm a lackluster journalist who would find the attention useful to my career. |
and this assessment is based on....?
Did I read the same article as others critiquing here have? His main point seems clear enough and no one has tried to refute it. And until the civil war (which took quite a few horrific bombings to get going), relations between the sects in Iraq were generally very much as he states here.
Only that is not true. Peace was ENFORCED by Saddam. In the chaos which followed the invasion both sects took the opportunity to restart a bloody war. If relations among the sects were as peaceful as he claims, then the mass killings on either side would not have happened.
The Saddam regime operated from its own statist logic and included Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. They were an equal opportunity oppresser and did not act from motives of religious sectarianism but Arab nationalism.
As well, it was indeed the fact of mixed marriages and mixed neighbourhoods that made the civil war so bloody. If relations then were as bad as people seem to think here, why were they not segregated to begin with?
Saddam's secret police being one reason and perhaps the most salient.
This was a searing cry from the heart from a man driven past the point of endurance by all the pain and suffering he witnessed and the rank injustice of it all. How can others read it and miss that? Thanks for posting it, Big Bird. |
Only it's not. Peace between sects doesn't break down because of an invasion by a foreign power. People from both sects were just biding their time. Once the grip of Saddam was relaxed, they went right back at each other. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:00 am Post subject: Re: Why I threw the shoe |
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| TheUrbanMyth wrote: |
| ersatzredux wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| Because I'm a lackluster journalist who would find the attention useful to my career. |
and this assessment is based on....?
Did I read the same article as others critiquing here have? His main point seems clear enough and no one has tried to refute it. And until the civil war (which took quite a few horrific bombings to get going), relations between the sects in Iraq were generally very much as he states here.
Only that is not true. Peace was ENFORCED by Saddam. In the chaos which followed the invasion both sects took the opportunity to restart a bloody war. If relations among the sects were as peaceful as he claims, then the mass killings on either side would not have happened.
The Saddam regime operated from its own statist logic and included Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. They were an equal opportunity oppresser and did not act from motives of religious sectarianism but Arab nationalism.
As well, it was indeed the fact of mixed marriages and mixed neighbourhoods that made the civil war so bloody. If relations then were as bad as people seem to think here, why were they not segregated to begin with?
Saddam's secret police being one reason and perhaps the most salient.
This was a searing cry from the heart from a man driven past the point of endurance by all the pain and suffering he witnessed and the rank injustice of it all. How can others read it and miss that? Thanks for posting it, Big Bird. |
Only it's not. Peace between sects doesn't break down because of an invasion by a foreign power. People from both sects were just biding their time. Once the grip of Saddam was relaxed, they went right back at each other. |
The majority of either sect would not have 'gone right back at each other' and had no wish to do so. If only your incompetent leaders had not gone about creating a dangerous power vacuum by disbanding the entire military and police force, the power hungry extremists who spearhead these dreadful civil wars would not likely have thrived as they did. Strategists from both Britain and America looked on incredulous as the nutty ideologues running your country at that time (that I rather suspect you voted for) went ahead and did exactly that, against all sane and expert advice.
I remember having dinner with a Libyan diplomat a few years ago, and we got onto the topic. He said that they'd expected the US to go in and take out Saddam, but leave the infrastructure intact. He said everyone was amazed by what the Bush administration did. It had devastating results, and gave the thugs and extremists an extraordinary opportunity they would not have had otherwise. But I guess Bush had greater things on his mind...like fighting a holy war against Gog and Magog. What a loon. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:40 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| While we are defending Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy re: the Shi'a-Sunni divide, let us take a moment to praise his speechmaking as well, his ability to coin a phrase destined to echo into the ages. |
Um OK, Gopher. Please show me how we are defending 'Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy?' It is possible to despise both Saddam, and the rash and foolish actions of the Bush administration at once. And if it really was all about saving the lovely Iraqi people from the evil (and so he was) Saddam Hussain, we could have done it a hell of a lot better than we did. Many Iraqis originally welcomed the US. Then it turned to bitterness and hatred. Why? Because it was an utter balls up. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, died needlessly. I'm now thinking of a conversation I had with an Iraqi student I took a class with. He hated Saddam. But in the end, he came to hate the British and the Americans more. Living under Saddam was no paradise. But living with misery and hell that Bush's invasion brought was far far worse. He worked with the Americans and the British, btw, and came to deeply resent both armies. Our combined forces have killed so many people he was acquainted with, and created an environment where savagery thrives and extremism blights the lives of every day folk. And then there were the horrific crimes we committed against Iraq. Falluja comes to mind. He is a gentle educated family man. But he feels nothing but bitterness for the occupiers of his country. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:34 am Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
| While we are defending Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy re: the Shi'a-Sunni divide, let us take a moment to praise his speechmaking as well, his ability to coin a phrase destined to echo into the ages. |
Um OK, Gopher. Please show me how we are defending 'Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy?' It is possible to despise both Saddam, and the rash and foolish actions of the Bush administration at once. And if it really was all about saving the lovely Iraqi people from the evil (and so he was) Saddam Hussain, we could have done it a hell of a lot better than we did. Many Iraqis originally welcomed the US. Then it turned to bitterness and hatred. Why? Because it was an utter balls up. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, died needlessly. I'm now thinking of a conversation I had with an Iraqi student I took a class with. He hated Saddam. But in the end, he came to hate the British and the Americans more. Living under Saddam was no paradise. But living with misery and hell that Bush's invasion brought was far far worse. He worked with the Americans and the British, btw, and came to deeply resent both armies. Our combined forces have killed so many people he was acquainted with, and created an environment where savagery thrives and extremism blights the lives of every day folk. And then there were the horrific crimes we committed against Iraq. Falluja comes to mind. He is a gentle educated family man. But he feels nothing but bitterness for the occupiers of his country. |
ask the Shia and the Kurds since they are 80% of Iraqs population. The other answers would just be speculation./ opinion / propaganda.
It would be great to see a poll of just their opinions
that would be a great way to get an answer.
I am pretty sure what the answer would be though.
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:43 am Post subject: |
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| Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Gopher wrote: |
| While we are defending Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy re: the Shi'a-Sunni divide, let us take a moment to praise his speechmaking as well, his ability to coin a phrase destined to echo into the ages. |
Um OK, Gopher. Please show me how we are defending 'Saddam's enlightened and evenhanded policy?' It is possible to despise both Saddam, and the rash and foolish actions of the Bush administration at once. And if it really was all about saving the lovely Iraqi people from the evil (and so he was) Saddam Hussain, we could have done it a hell of a lot better than we did. Many Iraqis originally welcomed the US. Then it turned to bitterness and hatred. Why? Because it was an utter balls up. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, died needlessly. I'm now thinking of a conversation I had with an Iraqi student I took a class with. He hated Saddam. But in the end, he came to hate the British and the Americans more. Living under Saddam was no paradise. But living with misery and hell that Bush's invasion brought was far far worse. He worked with the Americans and the British, btw, and came to deeply resent both armies. Our combined forces have killed so many people he was acquainted with, and created an environment where savagery thrives and extremism blights the lives of every day folk. And then there were the horrific crimes we committed against Iraq. Falluja comes to mind. He is a gentle educated family man. But he feels nothing but bitterness for the occupiers of his country. |
ask the Shia and the Kurds since they are 80% of Iraqs population. The other answers would just be speculation./ opinion / propaganda.
It would be great to see a poll of just their opinions
that would be a great way to get an answer.
I am pretty sure what the answer would be though.
. |
My classmate is Shia. I also had a friend who was an Iraqi Kurd. She has since returned to Iraq because of family, but detests what the Americans have done to Iraq. I also know a handful (or two) of sunni Iraqis...but apparantly their opinions don't count.  Oh, and I should point out that several (possibly most?) of the Iraqis I know are in mixed marriages. Sunnis married to Shia. Kurds married to Sunni. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:25 am Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| ...what the Americans have done to Iraq. |
People should be careful when constructing their baselines to support claims about this, Big_Bird. This represents "the critics'" most common fallacy in American foreign relations. In their overzealousness to condemn, they romanticize "the before" in order to strengthen their indictment re: "what the Americans did." They revise the historical record, even. Very Orwellian. Shame, shame, shame. All we need are the top hats...
That is my point, then. I see this thinking all over your heroic shoeman's self-justificatory, self-righteous, self-congratulatory defense of his puerile, violent outburst. And you may take it or leave it.
Meanwhile, I will cite another. Your should-not-be-a-pitcher also faults W. Bush "for plundering my country's wealth." I agree that D. Rumsfeld's plan was entirely unsat. The invasion plan, that is. His postinvasion plan was virtually nonexistent because he foolishly based it upon the best-case-scenario -- that all Iraqis would respond to Saddam's fall in an orderly, pro-democratic fashion. This meant insufficient security means in Bagdhad and elsewhere, even at the Central Bank, which was destroyed.
On the other hand, who exactly did the pillaging and looting again? And why does shoeman fail to recognize this...? |
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