For your reading pleasure -- Notes from Zarahemla Political Forum

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, [2], 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 08:50:03 10/23/06 Mon
Author: Chuck in ND
Subject: For your reading pleasure

Here is dh's latest article--it was published in yesterday's paper. He already got 3 hate emails. One called him "Un-patriotic, blasphamos,[sic] [and] narrow minded" Dh laughed and said "Yeah, I guess I'm blasphemous because I said something bad about god Bush."

Another one wrote saying our mistake was we should have just gone in at the beginning and "bombed them back to the stone age" and let God sort them out--proving the point of the column: That we have become a heartless and bloodthirsty nation.

Anyway, here it is: http://www.in-forum.com/articles/index.cfm?id=143541

First lies, now evil unleashed
Ross Nelson, The Forum
Published Sunday, October 22, 2006

What evil have we unleashed in Iraq? The British medical journal Lancet has just published a sequel to a 2004 study by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health comparing Iraqi death rates before and after the latest war. Using a critically accepted methodology, �cluster sampling,� the researchers estimate there are an �excess� 655,000 Iraqi deaths compared to prewar rates.

Of course, even a sound statistical method cannot guarantee perfect accuracy, only a best estimate. But add this best estimate to the half million deaths U.S. sanctions caused in Iraq in the 1990s and suddenly Saddam Hussein�s alleged killing of 290,000 Iraqis begins to pale, if such a thing is possible. (I�ve previously argued that, based on the number of already disinterred victims extrapolated to the number of known mass graves � an admittedly crude but indicative way of figuring � Saddam might have killed fewer than 30,000 over the course of 20 years.)

As if Iraqi lives meant anything to us anyway. Granted, the principle of subsidiarity applies here to life and death as well as to other things. We�re more affected by a death in the family than one in our own town, and by one in our own town than death in another state, and so on until our sympathy is extenuated to near-nothingness by death in a foreign country. Still, what sort of heart of darkness do Americans have to so easily dismiss the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents they are responsible for ending?

We�ve managed, through our leaders� grotesque lying and warmongering and our own indifference and stupidity, to turn a large part of another nation into a living hell for no good reason. The latest National Intelligence Estimate concludes, on behalf of our 16 intelligence and spook agencies (didn�t know we had that many, did you?), that the Iraq war has spread and worsened the threat of terrorism. Small wonder bin Laden calls Iraq the central front of terrorism � having shot its wad on Sept. 11, where else can al-Qaida kill so many Americans, train its own members in war and terror tactics to be used elsewhere and make America look like an anti-Muslim imperial power?

We can be assured that President Bush and company lied us into this needless war. That we fought the war was not just a case of mistaken intelligence. For those who could tear themselves away from the Internet�s sports and porn sites, there were reports all over it before the Iraq war that cast substantial doubt on all of the Bush administration�s assertions.

The uranium yellowcake story, the �centrifuge� tubes that were supposed to be evidence of a nuclear bomb program, the supposed vast stockpiles of biochemical weapons, and other tales Bush told to panic Joe and Jane Sixpack into a headlong flight toward warmongering all had serious problems of veracity, which problems have been abundantly confirmed since.

The original 2002 National Intelligence Estimate contained in footnotes considerable dissent from the administration�s positions but was cleaned up for public consumption. Perhaps Bush�s greatest deception was to portray his lies as solidly backed-up facts, as unscratchable truths about an imminent apocalypse.

The wretched irony of this whole mess is that the same people whose fangs are forever bared and who see foreign policy as �bomb first, think later� tend to be the same as those who will gladly sell their birthrights for a bowl of pottage. They erect a monarch without oversight of any kind in the executive branch, betray their own and their children�s legacy of constitutional rights that took centuries to gain, and call it good.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

And for yours... -- Deborah, 00:03:06 10/24/06 Tue
Ah, c'mon, Charlene -- Deborah, 00:31:00 10/24/06 Tue