Should we end the occupation of Iraq?

Yes I think this goes to the heart of it: war was an easy option for those unconcerned by the death, suffering and chaos an armed intervention will inevitably cause. OK so assuming this war was fought for humanitarian reasons (it most certainly was not). What price do you put on getting rid of Saddam? How many ruined lives of British and American troops and families? How many tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualties? How many tens of thousands of killed Iraqi conscripts? How much cancer as a result of DU ammunition? How many children maimed by unexploded cluster munitions? How much civil war? How much increased terrorism in the region? How much anti-Western sentiment and recruitment to al-Qaeda? How much of all this is worth it in your pragmatic case for humanitarian killing?

 

Saddam's regime was already destroying lives! Anyone who spoke out against Saddam risked torture and death. Also the Kurds for one certainly wanted him gone even if it took a war and probably too did the Marsh Arabs. The Iraqi people were also unable to overthrow Saddam's regime themselves due to the vast number of secret police employed by the regime. Any whiff of a coup would have been snuffed out immediatly. The Iraqi people needed outside help to free them.

Depleted Uranium and cluster bombs should never have been used, I agree with that. MPs should have raised the consequences of such weapons in Parliament and got those weapons banned.

 

Yes but you miss my point. The amount of human suffering as a consequence of this war - started by us against Iraq - vastly outweighs the amount of suffering being inflicted by Saddam over the past 12 years. His regime was pretty much crippled. Yes there was political repression, but his atrocities were historical. So purely on the pragmatic basis of causing some suffering to prevent more suffering, your case fails.

For the second time in thirteen years we have wiped out an entire generation of young Iraqi men and caused untold suffering in the name of "liberation"; and we have done so for our own strategic interests, not from humanitarian concern. Your attempt to be an apologist for this atrocity disgusts me.

 

The number of casualties caused by the war itself was relativly small only a few thousand as most Iraqi troops surrendered quickly and the regime collapsed with three weeks.

Most of the casualties in Iraq happened after the war due to insurgents linked to Al Qaeda who for the past 16 months have been bombing and killing people in Iraq. On this point the allies are only guilty of failing to forsee an insurrection by Islamic militants and not send enough troops. But they didn't have the benefit of hindsight of what would happen after the regime collapsed. Therefore the allies Bush and Blair can hardly be held responsible for the death and destruction caused by the insurgents.

 

This is a lie. Even the politicians are not so bold as to utter such a despicable untruth in attempting to justify this atrocity. There were weeks of airstrikes against military units, attacks designed to cause mass casualties among anyone in the vicinity. The UK actually used cluster artillery as well as cluster bombs; all anti-personnel weapons designed to shred the military opposition. The USA used napalm and fuel-air "daisy cutter" bombs, designed to burn people over a wide area and from which there is no escape. So don't tell me only a few thousand Iraqi soldiers were killed. There were not mass surrenders. In the first gulf war the number of Iraqi military casualties was in the hundreds of thousands. Why do you think we have a policy of not counting the enemy death toll? Why do you think American armoured bulldozers created their own mass graves of slain Iraqi conscripts in southern Iraq in the last conflict? Your figure of "only a few thousand" is patently absurd. If we killed ten thousand civilians during the campaign itself - and we werent even trying to kill them - how many more military deaths did we cause with our anti-personnel weapons? The figure is clearly going to be in the tens of thousands at a conservative estimate.

This is utter drivel; revisionism of the most sickeningly cynical and heartless kind. The number of civilians killed during the major conflict itself was well up around 10,000. Plus countless injuries. This was caused by us. There have been a few thousand more in the following 18 months; my guess would be these are equally shared between the insurgency and the coalition troops. The insurgency has IEDs, RPG7s and small arms. We have mounted high calibre machine guns, helicopter gunships and bombs dropped from planes. Which do you imagine causes more indiscriminate carnage?

When it suited the politicians to begin blaming civilian deaths on the insurgency, they began counting the bodies. Before then they just didn't bother. You are doing precisely the same thing as an apologist for Tony Blair; altering the facts to support your case. Why do you feel the need to repeat the lies told to you by politicians? Do you not have a questioning mind?

 

That book is old now..and i am sure you have read the claims Mr Moore makes mostly disregarded as left wing populist slush..(you may not think so?) I can't say i have read it, but have read enough from both sides not to take it as a given the Mr Moore is correct or even slightly correct. I think now he is focusing on letters sent too him by soldiers that are dissolusioned, now i can understand their point of view...but what the hell is he playing at. Another just as valid book could be printed with troops saying the complete opposite...He is acheiving nothing.

Yeah the poor may have it rough and don't vote.. The rich have it better and don' vote, catch 22...i think.

 

Yeah I accepted as much, it is left wing populism. But read the facts in it. Like I said, if he were lying he'd have been sued for libel. And if you don't want to do that, follow the link I gave you....

 

ok i will give it a read for myself..The thing that stopped me reading it i guess, is that it gives you the facts that support his case..no i doubt he would have been taken to court , For the same reason Mr Moore has not tried to take the Bush administration to court ?.

I have read

http://www.moorewatch.com/

http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/

I think its (like is said) you can preach to the converted. I don't realy think he will change my point of view...why should he in anyway, If he did not make a populist left wing film.Balanced things out, taking into consideration the whole world and the things that a couple of my links point out ...and still make a film then i would shake the chap by the hand. Anyone (almost) could of made a film like Mr Moore. But i am probably just being dismisive heck i am being dismisive..just i don't realy want to spend investigating his points when people already have ... Bit lazy i know..

I think it would be brave of him to update his film with issues that have been found to be true or false NOW.

 

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Michael Moore is a genius or a saint by any means. But there's a time and a place for populism. In the same way that Bush plays to the populist right in America, Moore tries to do the same with the left. Personally I'm not swayed by populist arguments most of the time. I'm more drawn to intellectual engagement and debate. But I would not discount Moore's work, I think he's doing a good job....

 

I agree with you ... its just Moore is making lots of cash out of acusations that may or may not be true. Its probaly the reserved brit syndrome ... but i think a decent documentary should be on tv and not marketed as 'the truth' and force fed to the masses ....

 

Of course there were mass surrenders of Iraqi troops! Some Iraqi troops even tried to surrender before the war had actually begun. Sure some nasty weapons were used for the first few days to shock the Iraqis into surrendering, but the casualties were still relatively light. Military opposition to the allied invasion of Iraq quickly fizzled out and the war was fininshed by the 9th of April 2003 having only begun on the 20th of March. I think if you do some research you will find that no more than 3,000 died in the war to oust Saddam on all sides. Your estimate of ten thousand civilian deaths is wrong, if you read official US military reports the casuality figure are far lower. As they were for the first Gulf War, which had tens of thousands of casualties not hundreds of thousands. The figures you quote come from left wing propaganda sources not official military ones.

The ongoing battle with the Islamic insurgents though which started in July 2003 however has lead to massive numbers of casualties especially among Iraqis. But for this I blame the Islamic insurgents themselves who are only hurting their own people and their own country by their war. And lets have no sympathy for these so called insurgents as they have bombed and killed UN and Red Cross staff and murdered people like Ken Bigley who went out to help the Iraqi people and are now threatening to kill a woman who spent 30 years working for an Iraqi charity. They also attack and kill Iraq's own security forces aswell as coalition troops.

 

No you are wrong; there were far fewer surrenders than had been anticipated, and far fewer than in the last gulf war. There were reports of military units dispersing and deserting of their own accord, so desertions and killing account for a far greater proportion the collapse of the Iraqi military than mass surrenders. We have a policy of not counting the enemy death toll, but judging by past conflicts such as the first gulf war, after which the US Defense Intelligence Agency estimated 100,000 Iraqi military deaths, my estimate is far more likely than the figure of "no more than 3,000". What makes you think the casualties were light? This is nothing more than the repetition of political propaganda.

Furthermore your pro-war stance on this issue makes you dismiss anti-personnel weapons such as cluster munitions, napalm and fuel-air bombs as "some nasty weapons" used to "shock the Iraqis into surrendering". This casual attitude to murder is rather telling.

Hahaha! I wonder why! Muppet...

My figures are based on the independent research group Iraq Body Count who were the only people actually counting the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead in Iraq until very recently. The coalition had a policy of not counting the civilians they killed until it became believable for them to blame the deaths on the insurgency. Actions such as the coalition assaults against Fallujah and other major population centres have clearly and without question continued to cause a great deal of death and injury among civilians. We are still causing civilian casualties in Iraq and it is disgusting that you seek to diminish this fact simply because you are a pro-war apologist. Besides which which there would have been no insurgency if there had not been an invasion. Day to day in the north of the country around Baghdad there has been fighting between insurgents and coalition troops for the past 18 months as a direct result of the invasion. This insurgency has spread throughout the country. Wherever there is fighting in populated areas there are civilian casualties. Attempting to state that only the insurgents are responsible for civilian deaths is not only fatuously inaccurate but amounts to the blind adherence to an ideological agenda by means of callous and insupportable revisionism. Why are 50,000 Iraqis taking up arms against the coalition? Because we invaded and now occupy their country as part of a strategic war to further our own interests.


*edit*
The US military's own estimate for Iraqi military casualties in the six weeks of major combat, March-April 2003 is 30,000 dead.

Iraq Body Count's figures for civilian deaths are based on those reported by two or more verified news sources. Their figure to date stands at 14,000 civilian dead. A survey in Iraq suggested the figure was closer to 36,500 during the first eight months of war (to October 2003).

 

Would they be the same military sources who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?