First off, the customary show of honor.
I'll be back to respond to the rest of your post. You make some excellent points that really make me think, although I may not always be suitably appreciative in my replies. But I happen to be fresh out of time.
As do you. I was at a loss for a minute or two on a few points, I'll confess. But I'll remember this, as this debate continues. This thread proves that, with a few exceptions, two entirely different people can have a debate, and keep it quite civil.
And now... *draws sword*
You're the one doing the misrepresentation here. rccar postulated that the security situation was improving. I showed you why this wasn't the case. And now you wander off talking about establishing democracy. Democracy is all well and good, but we were talking about the security situation, and you still haven't explained to me what makes you think the security situation is improving. You've seen this pic before and you'll undoubtedly see it again. (
http://users.rcn.com/rostmd/winace/pics/shifting_goalposts.jpg)
OK. This is a little off of an answer, but I found this while googling, you may find it interesting. It seems that we are drawing terrorists in from other nations. We've dug a hole, and the water that is terrorism is flowing in.
From the Boston Globe:
Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq
War radicalized most, probes find
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | July 17, 2005
WASHINGTON -- New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.
The studies, which together constitute the most detailed picture available of foreign fighters, cast serious doubt on President Bush's claim that those responsible for some of the worst violence are terrorists who seized on the opportunity to make Iraq the ''central front" in a battle against the United States.
''The terrorists know that the outcome will leave them emboldened or defeated," Bush said in his nationally televised address on the war at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month. ''So they are waging a campaign of murder and destruction." The US military is fighting the terrorists in Iraq, he repeated this month, ''so we do not have to face them here at home."
However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.
A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."
''Only a few were involved in past Islamic insurgencies in Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Chechnya," the Israeli study says. Out of the 154 fighters analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism, including six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said the report, compiled by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel.
American intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, and terrorism specialists paint a similar portrait of the suicide bombers wreaking havoc in Iraq: Prior to the Iraq war, they were not Islamic extremists seeking to attack the United States, as Al Qaeda did four years ago, but are part of a new generation of terrorists responding to calls to defend their fellow Muslims from ''crusaders" and ''infidels."
''The president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created," said Peter Bergen, a terrorism specialist at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a Washington think tank.
Foreign militants make up only a small percentage of the insurgents fighting in Iraq, as little as 10 percent, according to US military and intelligence officials. The top general in Iraq said late last month that about 600 foreign fighters have been captured or killed by coalition forces since the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. The wider insurgency, numbering in the tens of thousands, is believed to consist of former Iraqi soldiers, Saddam Hussein loyalists, and members of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
But the impact of the foreign fighters has been enormous. They are blamed for the almost daily suicide attacks against US and Iraqi forces and have killed thousands of civilians, mostly members of Iraq's Shia Muslim majority. Their exploits have been responsible for much of the headline-grabbing carnage recently, contributing to the slide in American public support for the war.
There have been nearly 500 car bombings since the US-led coalition handed over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government one year ago, US military statistics indicate. In the last two months, car bombs and suicide attacks have killed nearly 1,400 people, according to the Associated Press.
Bush has cited foreign fighters as a reason for continued US military operations in Iraq. His argument, repeated often, is that ''the world's terrorists" have chosen to make their stand in Iraq.
''Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror," Bush said in a radio address last month.
Foreign fighters were found to be like Saud Bin Muhammad Bin Saud Al-Fuhaid, according to Obaid's research, to be published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington this summer. Described as in his early 20s, Fuhaid blew himself up March 24, three days after he entered Iraq from Syria, according to newspaper accounts and interviews with his family.
Obaid found little evidence Fuhaid was an extremist before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Like many of the young men from Saudi Arabia who make up the majority of the foreign fighters, the student at Imam University in western Riyadh was not initially a radical jihadist, according to information gleaned from Saudi newspaper accounts and intelligence operations. In fact, he apparently almost changed his mind.
Fuhaid is believed to have traveled through Syria to fight in Iraq, but once he arrived told his family he would be coming home instead, according to a death notice published in Saudi newspapers and posted on the Internet. ''However, during that time he met some friends of his who were going to Iraq and told him they were going to declare Jihad with their brothers in Iraq," the celebratory announcement said. ''It was at that moment that our martyr changed his mind and told them that he will go back to Iraq with them and called his parents to tell him he won't be going home."
Obaid said in an interview from London that his Saudi study found that ''the largest group is young kids who saw the images [of the war] on TV and are reading the stuff on the Internet. Or they see the name of a cousin on the list or a guy who belongs to their tribe, and they feel a responsibility to go."
Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families, according to the two investigations. ''The vast majority of them had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. ''I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world."
Case studies of foreign fighters indicated they considered the Iraq war an attack on the Muslim religion and Arab culture, Paz said.
For example, while the unprovoked attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were largely condemned by clerics as violations of Muslim law, many religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have promulgated fatwas, or religious edicts, saying that waging jihad in Iraq is justified by the Koran because it is defensive in nature. Last October, 26 clerics in Saudi Arabia said it was the duty of every Muslim to go and fight in Iraq.
''These are people who did not get training in Pakistan or Chechnya, [and they] ended up going to Iraq because they considered defending Iraq a must for every Muslim to go and fight," said Rita Katz, director of the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute in Washington and an Iraq native.
One indication that a heightened degree of Arab solidarity is a leading factor is that they are almost entirely Arabs and not Muslims from other countries, such as those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. Another motivation, the studies and analysts contend, is the centuries-old struggle between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. All the foreign fighters are Sunnis, according to the analyses, and many of their targets are Iraq's majority Shia Muslims, who have gained political power in Baghdad for the first time in hundreds of years.
Ali Alyami, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, said he believes the deep-seated Sunni-Shia rift among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims -- about 1 billion of them Sunni -- best explains the foreign-fighter phenomenon. He noted in an interview that US policy makers do not seem to grasp the historic conflicts within Islam that are playing out in the war in Iraq.
''To say we must fight them in Baghdad so we don't have to fight them in Boston implies there is a finite number of people, and if you pen them up in Iraq you can kill them all," said Bergen. ''The truth is we increased the pool by what we did in Iraq."
Intelligence officials worry that some of ''Iraq alumni" will use the relationships they build on the battlefields of Iraq and return to their home countries as hardened Islamic terrorists.
The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier this year that ''Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
Source (
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/07/17/study_cites_seeds_of_terror_in_iraq?mode=PF)
This article assists both of our arguments, in it's own special way. Indeed, the security can't be good like this, BUT... this is a good way to accomplish two goals at once: We can, as I've said, set up a govt. in Iraq, AND we can defeat a large number of new, and some old, insurgents (that's right, I dared to say it. In this case, they are rebelling against their govts.) that are coming in. Now, we need not pull out of Iraq, and go into another nation, one at a time. They are coming to us. Indeed, this is our fault now, but we got what we wanted, in a way: The chance to engage the Middle East's terrorists. Now, we are doing that.
I don't have a current body count of terrorists, but...
[i]From the Washington Post:
In January [2005], Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. officer in Iraq, said U.S. and Iraqi forces had killed or captured 15,000 people last year. In May, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned the killing of 250 of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" as evidence of progress in Iraq.
That's the second page of the article I got the numbers from. I am still looking for an up-to-date number. I'll let you know. (
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/23/AR2005102301273_2.html)
OK. I'm cool with that.
Good. :) Civility makes for a good debate. And I love a good debate.
That's not what I was saying. In fact I was saying the exact opposite: I said that politicians dismiss legitimate statistics out of hand when they are inconvenient because the newsies have bought into the lie that statistics can be easily twisted and falsified by their political opponents at need. And the reporters are too damn stupid to call them on it.
Ah. That changes about 40%. Indeed, politicians dismiss truth in favor of good politicking. But the converse is occasionally true: Sometimes politicians are fed facts that lack the name "FACT", and they believe it. That was my point. Of course, that doesn't mean that politicians have clean hands, either.
But of course you have a point as well. Certainly politicians do use manipulative statistics. What I call for is that people, when confronted with such tactics, point out where and how the books are cooked rather than resorting to glib, smartass oneliners about the uselessness of statistics.
OK, I'm not going to comment on the one-liner thing. But indeed, their needs to be accountability. Was that last line directed at me? If so, I'll correct myself in the future.
You argued that security means kicking the enemy's butt. Well, if butt-kicking is the best measure of success in a peacekeeping operation, then you did win in Vietnam. American casualites were minor compared to VK and NVA casualties.
It isn't the best measure by any means. The best measure, IMO, is determining whether we achieved what we set out to do. We have not done so in Iraq, and the original issue was proven to be false. However, we cannot pull out of Iraq until it is safe for all parties to do so. Butt-kicking is a measure of the war, but far from the top. It is a good thing that the enemy is dying, though, no?
Indeed. The question is whether you are succeeding in removing your enemies. Killing them off represents only one collumn on the balance sheet; if you want to use insurgent casualties to prove that you are reducing their numbers, you'll have to compare the casualty number to the number of recruits. Since their recruiting data isn't publicly available, you can't do that. Which brings us back to why the number of American dead is or isn't the best available measure of security.
Indeed. We cannot know that, it's not like there is an al-queda.com site we can go to. Because of this, the only measure of progress we have is how much we do for our side. So we'd better do our best. We don't have the hand we'd like, but we have our aces in the hole, and we have no intention of folding and running until we have beaten down as many terrorists as we can.
Funny that, I can think of ten or twenty newsies who are ready to argue differently. According to the Danish newsies there are several documented instances where coalition forces attacked virtually at random - including not a few where blue-on-blue fire was reported as having killed insurgents. So the postulated and alledged stuff stands.
It is still preferred that you know who the target is. I am of course, not ruling out that sometimes you can't know until you act. That isn't in question; believe it or not, I am sane.
Hmm... Try taping the next news broadcast. Find all the passages where the anchor is blatantly partisan, where the sources are blatantly partisan, or simply irrelevant.
As I do everything, I take the Fox Stories with a grain of salt. Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. Admittedly, a few things I take with a few cups of salt, particularly evolutionary talk, but that's for another thread. I see a trend with these anchors:
1) They report the story, fair and balanced for the most part.
2) They question a reporter.
3) The questions get injected with bias.
I usually pay attention only to #1 - or get the story on my home page.
'You' as in 'America.'
I guess that negates the 'I sit here in my bathrobe...' comment I made. :lol:
Indeed, and we could have said the same thing on 9/11/01. Except that we couldn't, because the media frenzy would have torn anybody who did apart.
My point is that the unlikely does happen. Actually, it seems that it could have been predicted:
From Time Magazine:
By last summer, many of those in the know—the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries—were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
If you have a lot of time (no pun intended) on your hands, you can read the entire article here. (
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020812/story.html)
The risk of being murdered by terrorism is negligible. Even if they hit the city you live in - of which there is a chance of less than one in a hundred, there is less than one chance in thousand that you'll be among the affected. When taking a stroll in downtown New York on 9/11 you were in greater risk from air pollution than from airplanes.
Well, just to clarify, if my town were wiped off the face of the Earth, you would be the only one to notice, and only because I couldn't reply, being dead! Kidding, except that it is true that my town is only about 1,000 people tops. So the chance of attack in good ol' Amity is about nil.
As for the greater risk from air pollution - True, but it still happened. You can make predictions, but not all the time will they be true, and correct, regardless of the odds. However, if you read the Time article all the way through, well...
I'm not on their 'side.' I just want people to be consistent in their standards and terminology.
Fair enough. But it won't be often that I call the Islamo-Fascists insurgents. In the case that they truly are, fine.
The problem is that they aren't trained for more. They are trained for something different. And if you're in any doubt on that point, try comparing and contrasting police and military approaches to crowd control.
Indeed. But the police should be trained to do police work, the Army should do it's work, etc. And since there really isn't a stable Army of Iraqi's yet, the police of Iraq may need a little different training before they can go to normal police functions.
I didn't. I was merely refering the virtually unanimous conclusion of every analyst on the planet. But I'll concede that I could have stated it more clearly and in a less inflammatory way.
Concession accepted. And I happen to agree; I was incensed, however, and didn't want to agree with flame. But, yeah, you and the journalists I agree with.
No. Not with that added qualifier. I must confess that part of me was trolling when I made that particular reply. I kinda figured you'd forgotten some sort of qualifier. But it was late and I was tired.
Reply to bolded part: Heh. Did you see the timestamp on my last post? It clearly reads "10:59 PM". So you aren't the only one.
Reply to the rest: Indeed, I forgot an important qualifier. But I can be forgiven for that, I suppose, my reasoning for that covered directly above.
*sheathes sword*
It's been an interesting match. I truly should have started using sources before. It would have saved much time. I have used sources wherever I can in this post. Until the reply to the rest of my posting... adieu, ShadowTemplar.
*spins 180є, draws sword again* Ah, Riceplant. I see I have another match to play. This should prove interesting.
I don't think anyone has answered this, although I could be wrong. My answer to this is that this 45% are not refering to 9/11, but to the attacks on US forces in Iraq (the word forces gives this away). Just because they agree that the US deserves to be forced out of Iraq, they will attack you once you leave? Isn't it more likely that they will attack you for not doing what they want, rather than attacking you for doing what they want?
Of course they will. At first, anyway. But, as my first source above stated, there are enemies trying to get into Iraq to perform their own part of a Jihad. If we leave as more come in, they will inflame hatred of the US in general, and will use Iraq and eventually neighboring countries to launch another attack. To justify my position, put yourself in the mind of a terrorist/insurgent:
The nation of Iraq is battered by a long, drawn-out war. The US has left the country prematurely, and the government is unstable. The Army is not yet developed enough to hold it's own, and the police capability is negligible, at best. The nation overall is weak. It is the perfect chance to take over, and use Iraq as a base to store weapons, people, supplies. After all, the US citizens didn't want to have the war continue; they certainly won't want to go back.
This would make the ideal situation for Al-Queda to do it's dirty work. So, I'm all for leaving - after the nation can protect itself.
In my opinion, Iraq wasn't our problem, sure Saddam mistreated his people horrendously, but we should have minded our own bloody business. Now, however, Iraq is our business, and we have about as much right to pull out as we had to invade in the first place. Incidentally, I think that we (the British public) should be left out of this debate, as we didn't want to go to war in the first place. Going to war was never popular here, and although now many are opposed to pulling out, only a tiny minority were ever in favour of going to war in the first place.
To bolded part: Agreed, we cannot pull out, for reasons stated above.
To the rest: I am not a citizen of the UK, and cannot comment on the general sentiment of it's people without sources of some kind. Heck, I can't even comment on the US without a source, unless it's general knowledge.
*sheathes sword for the second time*
This has been quite interesting thus far. I cannot wait to see the next arguements. Until then...
-StaffSaberist