quote:

Originally posted by electric dragon:
There is absolutely no logical connection between political affiliations and death counts. People die in Iraq because Bush sent our military there. The physical manifestations of warfare do not distinguish targets by ideology. When bombs explode they affect everything within their radius. When rifles are shot they will pass through any flesh in their path.

This is another don't-know kind of week in Iraq. The result of Saturday's national referendum won't be known before Thursday but it appears a new constitution has been endorsed. Not that it's going to make much difference.

It will give hope to American diehards who will claim the process and the document are proof of democracy at work. But, sadly, the reverse is the case. This is a Clayton's constitution - a conflicted, contradictory unity bill for a country tearing itself apart, accepted in a vote dictated by the fault lines of Iraqi history.

Here are some of the elements of the constitution that mock notions of national unity and invite civil war.

The regions (read Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni) are to have their own military forces; existing oilfields will be managed federally but all new fields are to be controlled by the regions; the built-in religious conflict is a time bomb - Islam is to be a basic "source" of legislation; and no law "may contradict the established provisions of Islam".

The Kurds have negotiated to have themselves put beyond the reach of the Iraqi Supreme Court; women in the north will have different rights to those in the south; and issues of divorce and inheritance are to be a religious and geographic lucky dip.

Laid out in its separate parts, this is a document that denies the very notion of Iraqi citizenship.

As the Sunnis continue to have difficulty accepting what it means to be a minority in the land they have ruled for decades, there is a growing view among analysts that the Kurds and the Shiites are humouring the Americans by going through this process. At the same time they are very clear about the power that is theirs.

And despite US claims that the insurgency is in its death throes, the Bush performance seems to draw more on a script written by a University of Michigan academic, Juan Cole: "[his] Administration is pretty helpless in Iraq."

Hence Mr Bush's new efforts to conduct a point-by-point media debate with Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi; and the President's desperate plea to a key Shiite powerbroker for a compromise on the terms of the constitution - when all the advice should have been that he would be rebuffed, which he was, and therefore should not have made the call.

In the same phone call, Mr Bush made a plea for the constitutional rights of women - just two days after he had publicly congratulated the drafters on a "democratic constitution that honours women's rights".

The warring sides in Iraq are wrestling for control of three vital hearts-and-minds centres of gravity: the Iraqi people, the American people and the US military. To win this war the US must capture and hold all three, but public support in the US and in Iraq is fading.

In the wake of the 2003 invasion, the Americans insisted on a timetable of rapid-fire elections in the new Iraq, each staged six months or a year after each other and the next - a national election on December 15 - only weeks after Saturday's vote.

Even in a peaceable community new to democracy, that's not enough time between outings for sensible debate. So the forces that are pulling the country apart become the default electoral mind sets - religious, ethnic and tribal.

The risk this week is that as Iraq's former Sunni overlords sit back to contemplate, as they will see it, how they have been dudded by democracy, more might turn to an insurgency that shows no sign of going away despite repeated US claims of "victory".

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Originally posted by Liberals Are Losers:
You guys are Blind, sad and full of shit.
It's a shame you all hate America so much.

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Originally posted by Splitcoil:
Right, but you hate everything that's not entertainment.

And which doesn't have at least 23 kilos of hair and 14 square meters of spandex...

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Maybe so, but maybe if the terrorist a saw united front they might not be as bold.

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There is absolutely no reason to support Bush. He is more dangerous to America than any outside enemy could ever hope to be.

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Originally posted by electric dragon:
There is absolutely no reason to support Bush. He is more dangerous to America than any outside enemy could ever hope to be.

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"He should have gotten to college like he planned. He should have gotten to watch his daughters grow up," said Lee Carver, Gibbs' mother-in-law. "He should have gotten to paint that house yellow."

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Originally posted by Liberals Are Losers:
So, who is really in favor of having more soldiers Die?

(Here is a Hint, It's not the Bush camp!)

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Asked of General Joseph P Hoar (ret.)

General, let's talk about the war plan. One fellow we talked to said, "We could have gone in there with 50,000 or less, decapitated the regime; it would have been over in nothing flat." The reason I'm quoting him is this is what the secretary of defense read and said, "Send this guy down to CENTCOM to talk to the other generals sitting around the table." That was in January of 2002. What do you think Gen. [Tommy] Franks' answer to that was, and what do you think of the idea?

I know what my answer would have been. I can't say it on public television. You can't get there from here. This is a labor-intensive business. If you're going to go in and change a country of 25 million people, you've got to have boots on the ground. The way you minimize casualties is you fight aggressively and with overwhelming strength. And so when you start up the road to Baghdad, you've got to have enough guys to protect your supply lines so hapless guys driving tanker trucks and supply trucks don't get shot and get captured. When you get into the big city, you have enough people to flood that city, that city that's second only in size to New York City in terms of how big it is. It's 6.5 million people.

Fifty thousand people -- where would they go in Baghdad? What would they secure? Even if they were successful, how would you manage all of that? What would be the next step? I think it's absolutely impractical. And 50,000 people would have meant more casualties, because there would have been more of them caught on the roads. There would have been more of them that would have been killed in these small firefights around the city. It's just not workable.

The people that are making decisions in the military, the guys that are in uniform, think very seriously about having one American soldier or Marine killed.

And the way you minimize casualties is you fight aggressively and with overwhelming strength.

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Originally posted by Anabel:
Have YOU joined up, yet?

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3 words for ya all

"All Volunteer Military"

(try saying that 5 times really fast)

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Originally posted by Splitcoil:
And which doesn't have at least 23 kilos of hair

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Originally posted by Crash:

quote:

3 words for ya all

"All Volunteer Military"

(try saying that 5 times really fast)

US Unemployment percentage: 5.5 percent

US Population: 297,513,776

Number of unemployed : 16,363,257

US Enlisted (broad occuption): 1,152,297

So you have 16+ million unemployed and 1 million of those enlisted in the forces that don't require special training.

Hey, it's a paying job and usually people enroll before an actual conflict. I mean, what's a high-school graduate to do in a country with 5.5 percent unemployment? Starbucks?

quote:

Originally posted by Crash:
It was listed as (est. 2004) so I can see how it would be off (was that the last date of a sensus)?

Still...and unemployment rate of 5.1%