How Many Dead Americans is Saddam Worth?
One of the points I try to make about America being caught off-gaurd in Iraq is that even a crazy ex-pat with a B.A. in political science saw the chaos coming. Why didn't they? They are either stupid or evil. Those are your choices. So which is it? Are they so stupid they didn't see it coming? Or, are they evil and had ulterior motives and just didn't care what happened to Iraq or to the American soldiers?
I think this pretty much answers the question.
I think this pretty much answers the question.
posted by Praguetwin at
5:04 PM
9 Comments:
amazing
i think this is a fairly good summation too...
http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html
added you to my blogroll at the new site too. sorry about the delay.
By
Anonymous, at 5:37 PM
Didn't we go over there to find Weapons of Mass Destruction . . . or was it to find Osama Bin Laden? I didn't think Saddam drove any of those planes into buildings, but I could be wrong. After all, I only have a math degree or two, what the hell do I know?
By
Anonymous, at 9:11 PM
We went over there because of WMD, er, because of the Saddam Hussein-bin Laden connection, I mean to establish democracy in the Middle East. Or it was because Hussein gassed his own people; but wait, he did that when he was our ally against Iran.
Who Hijacked Our Country
By
Tom Harper, at 3:23 AM
Michael,
Thanks for the link. I've seen the bushflash piece before. There are some factual problems with it, but the point is well made.
CV,
Welcome. Yeah, what do we know? We should just defer to the experts. That is what democracy is all about!
Tom,
Yes, it all makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
By
Praguetwin, at 10:21 PM
harper,
We fed Saddam some weapons and GPS Info after Khomeini grabbed the American Embassy, Nov 4, 1979.
It's an old strategy. The enemy of
my enemy is my (temporary) friend.
Today, Ahmadinejad enriches U-235 in undergroung facilities, and our people believe we need a military presence in the middle east. If we
cannot trust the Pentagon, Who? reb
www.lazyonebenn.blogspot.com
By
SNAKE HUNTERS, at 1:51 AM
praguetwin, an interesting little tale from your part of the globe:
Writer convicted of murder he described in novel
1:15PM Thursday September 06, 2007
By Peter Popham
LONDON - A Polish author, travel writer and intellectual whose best-selling novel described a grisly murder has been jailed for 25 years for committing the crime he had so vividly portrayed.
The killing of Dariusz Janiszewski in 2000 was notably gruesome.
The victim - a successful, popular professional - was humiliated, starved and tortured, before having his hands bound with a rope that was looped around his neck in a noose.
When fishermen scooped the body out of the river Oder, it was stripped to shirt and underpants and the limbs had been distended and bore marks of torture.
The police had no leads and after six months the search for a culprit was abandoned.
But the murderer could not resist gloating over his cleverness.
During the investigation, anonymous emails were sent from South Korea and Indonesia to Polish television's equivalent of Crimewatch, describing the killing as "the perfect crime".
Those were just straws in the wind.
But fully five years after the killing, the detective in charge of the investigation, Chief Inspector Jacek Wroblewski, received an anonymous call suggesting he take a look at a novel entitled Amok, written by Krystian Bala and published two years earlier.
Chief Inspector Wroblewski read the book several times.
The similarities with the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski were too strong to be ignored.
In the book, a group of bored intellectuals finds distraction from the monotony of their lives in sex, drugs, alcohol n and murder.
Their victim is first tortured, then has her hands and wrists bound with a length of rope that is then passed round her neck.
Details of the Janiszewski murder that were never publicised were duplicated in the novel.
The victim's body was dragged from a river in Wroclaw.
The Oder, where Mr Janiszewski was found, flows through the city.
After Bala's arrest in 2005, friends and supporters launched appeals on the Web, claiming he had been "kidnapped and physically abused" by police and falsely accused of murder.
Amok, they said, was "strong" in language and content, and "there are several metaphors that might be considered against the Catholic Church and Polish tradition."Bala told police his inspiration for the story came from press reports, while the bits not mentioned in the media, which happened to be the most gruesome, came straight from his imagination.
After three days, the author was set free.
In outrage, Bala told his supporters that the detectives "seemed to know my book by heart.
The police were treating the book as if it was a literal autobiography rather than a piece of fiction."Ch Insp Wroblewski and his team of investigators were unconvinced.
Digging further they found new links between the crime and the author.
Bala, an experienced diver, had been on diving trips to South Korea, Indonesia and Japan when the mystery emails describing the murder as "the perfect crime" arrived in Poland .
Investigators found the victim's mobile phone had been sold on the internet four days after his disappearance, from an account in Bala's name.
The author had no answer to that.
Bala acknowledged he used the name Chris when outside Poland - the name of the murderer in Amok.
Judge Lidia Hojenska said Bala was driven to kill Mr Janiszewski because he believed he had had an affair with the novelist's estranged wife.
There was insufficient evidence to prove that Bala carried out the murder himself, she said, but sufficient to prove he "committed the crime of leading the killing ...
He was the initiator of the murder; his role was leading and planning it."
By
Anonymous, at 3:02 PM
Hang on reb.
Am I to interpret your comment as meaning: "We saw the Iranian threat coming and needed a place to deploy so we invaded Iraq?"
I so, that falls into the "stupid" category.
By
Anonymous, at 6:38 PM
To answer the headline question. 135,000. I divided the 405,000 killed in WWII liberating countries from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy by the three aggressor nations. You often correct my math. Am I wrong here?
By
Roger Fraley, at 8:06 PM
Good math.
I just disagree that the U.S. should have to loose 135,000 men every time there is a dictator we don't like.
Currently, I figure we could get rid of all the bad guys for about 2.5 million soldiers at that rate.
How is my math?
By
Praguetwin, at 12:54 AM
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