The whole dead kids thing

[nacho]

So I know we're immune to news about Iraq because tropical storm Emily is building, but this did get me this morning.  I expected to see this instead of Tyson's whining about how Yotoc signed him up for the NAMBLA mailing list:


http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/07/13/iraq.main/index.html

27 killed in Baghdad suicide blast
Police: Most of dead were children getting treats from U.S. troops

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle Wednesday near a U.S. military convoy and large group of Iraqi children in Baghdad, killing 27 people, Iraqi police and hospital officials said.

Iraqi police said most of the dead were children. The attack also left 20 people wounded.

The U.S. military said at least seven children and a U.S. soldier died in the attack. Three U.S. soldiers were wounded.

The soldiers were handing out treats to the children when the bomb went off, police said.

The attack -- which happened around 10:50 a.m. (2:50 a.m.ET) in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of al-Jaddeda -- also set a nearby house on fire, police said.

"The car bomber made a deliberate decision to attack one of our vehicles as the soldiers were engaged in a peaceful operation with Iraqi citizens," Maj. Russ Goemaere said in the statement. "The terrorist undoubtedly saw the children around the Humvee as he attacked. The complete disregard for civilian life in this attack is absolutely abhorrent."

Since the start of the war, 1,756 U.S. troops have died in Iraq.

In another suicide attack, a bomber detonated himself late Tuesday inside the al-Kebir Sunni Mosque in the ethnically mixed city of Jalawlah, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Baquba, killing two people and wounding 16 others, police said.

According to a police official, the bomber was wearing an explosives-packed vest.

Jalawlah is a mixed town of Kurds and Arabs.

Insurgents launched three separate attacks on Iraqi police in western Baghdad neighborhoods Wednesday, police said.

One member of the Quick Reaction Team was killed by gunmen in Ameri on his way to work, police said.

About 30 minutes later, a gunmen opened fire on a police patrol in Mansur, wounding one, police said. Later, at about 10 a.m., two police officers and three civilians were wounded in a gunfight in Nafaq al Shurta.

On Tuesday, gunmen killed Ali Younis al-Shama, the head of the International Organization of Iraqi Human Rights, and three others in his office.



And here's the real news version:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4678207.stm

[Tyson]

You're new to America, aren't you? See- we don't care too much for brown people. That's why one missing white girl will get more press coverage than 750,000 dead dead brown people.

I expected to see this instead of Tyson's whining about how Yotoc signed him up for the NAMBLA mailing list:

Oh give it up already. I'm not the only one who does retarded shit after drinking a full glass of Vodka. At least it didn't involve a goat, right?

[nacho]

You're new to America, aren't you? See- we don't care too much for brown people. That's why one missing white girl will get more press coverage than 750,000 dead dead brown people.

(1) Not talking about America, generally.  It's front page news.  Saying I'm surprised it's not up here at GS.  In which case, you implicate yourself with the above.  Ho-ho.  Beat you, Mr. Lawyer!  Where's RC with the outrage, dude?

(2)  Oh my god, kids got bombed, it's disgusting.

(3) Tropical Storm Emily has hit the Windward's!  ARE YOU PREPARED?

[Tyson]

(1) Not talking about America, generally.  It's front page news.  Saying I'm surprised it's not up here at GS.  In which case, you implicate yourself with the above.  Ho-ho.  Beat you, Mr. Lawyer!  Where's RC with the outrage, dude?

I'd bitch about the general situation, but you certainly don't want to hear me rant on and on about the current administration and the fact that the situation in Iraq is getting worse and worse. The problem is that no one wants to hear about it everyday. It's pretty screwed up. People don't want the major news. They want occasional news spaced with conservative punditry and yelling, kooky krazy funny news stories, and feel-good personal stories of the cripple who rolled around the block.

Maybe newspapers and other meda should add a permanent front-page story: "Shit in Iraq Totally Sucks, Man"

My brother gets shipped off to Iraq in March.

[nacho]

See, here's my problem.  A disturbing story, and we launch right away into it's the whole picture.  Forget it.  Useless.  We're all tired of the whole picture.

Hey, come down a bit and just read the story.  I'm tired of the whole picture and the general situation, too.  But if I post an article about 1000 people killed in the next hurricane, will the response be "I hate the coverage of the hurricane season, generally."

[Tyson]

Right, exactly: people are getting tired of looking at the big picture.

I mention that on a story of 27 kids getting blown up because it's part of that big piucture. A puzzle piece. A strut on the ship. Whatever you want to call it.

Anyways:

The U.S. military said at least seven children and a U.S. soldier died in the attack. Three U.S. soldiers were wounded.

The soldiers were handing out treats to the children when the bomb went off, police said.

What I want to know is what the Iraq populace's reaction is to this. There's a lot of sympathizers with the insurgents because of friends and families killed by America. If their mom was killed by America and their son was killed by insurgents, who do they sympathize with?

[nacho]

What I want to know is what the Iraq populace's reaction is to this. There's a lot of sympathizers with the insurgents because of friends and families killed by America. If their mom was killed by America and their son was killed by insurgents, who do they sympathize with?

The careful reader will find articles about the populace which discuss, mainly, fear and d isgust at the insurgency, and no support for it.  The insurgents are rarely Iraqi shi'ites (the dominant group) and more or less foreign-funded IRaqi sunnis.  They're causing more damage than we are.

[Tyson]

I read something somewhere that talks about how a majority of Iraqi's have no allegiance to the U.S. or the insurgents. The others were split evenly between insurgence-allegiance and U.S.-allegiance.

But yeah, I sure hope killing kids isn't improving their image.

[yotoc]

See, here's my problem.  A disturbing story, and we launch right away into it's the whole picture.  Forget it.  Useless.  We're all tired of the whole picture.

Hey, come down a bit and just read the story.  I'm tired of the whole picture and the general situation, too.  But if I post an article about 1000 people killed in the next hurricane, will the response be "I hate the coverage of the hurricane season, generally."

You forgot that the hurricanes are the administrations fault as well.

[nacho]

It does help the argument that much of the turmoil is coming from outside Iraq.  I can't imagine you're going to find too many folks who thought this was a good idea.  So you're fighting for your country's freedom, do you attack a group of your own people's kids?

We're seeing a terror campaign waged against the Iraqi citizens designed to push us out, at which point the sunni-dominated region slams down on Iraq though terror or, if the cards are right, outright military activity.   I don't think we quite understand the Iraq situation.  Wrong or right, I don't think the continuing occupation is something we've studied.  Why does it drag on, why is it so hard, why are these things happening.  I think we leap right away to Bush = Bad, give up and get out.  

But what if we could be, hypothetically, doing the right thing?  And what if the media is painting a picture in the same way they salivate over Tropical Storms and Hurricanes?  No political bias...just simple schadenfreude.

[Tyson]

I have this bad image of America pulling out in a few years, yay mission accomplished, peace and relative quiet for a few years and then. Bam. Vietnam. We lose again.

In a way, what we're doing is a good thing, but was it worth it? I still think there were better ways to do it. One of those ways would have been better planning, especially contingency planning. We shouldn't have rushed in to it or overextended the military.

We should have at least had scrambled the crap out of Al Quaida and, at a minimum, caputred Osama and a majority of the top leaders before sending our military away on other adventures in the sand against enemies we armed.

[Nubbins]

You guys need to watch Voices of Iraq ... basically, documentary film makers begin inserting camcorders into Iraq in the South sometime during this war and instruct the citizens they give them to to just film their everyday lives and pass the cameras on.  What you get is a mosaic of the regular, average, every day Iraqi citizen.  They're NOT building bombs, they're running stores.  They don't ALL hate Americans and, in fact, there are a good number of them who go out of their way to praise American efforts in their country.  

It's a pretty amazing movie, or so I thought.  It is one of several Iraq documentaries I've watched that I really enjoyed.  The others were Control Room and Gunner Palace, but Voices speaks DIRECTLY to this argument about "Is America doing the right thing in Iraq?".

[Tyson]

Ok, let me play the devil's advocate and be antagonistic:

Is it worth a thousand plus U.S. lives so that they can open up a shop?

(I know it's more than that. Duh. Devil's advocate here.)

[Nubbins]

Is it worth a thousand plus U.S. lives so that they can open up a shop?

If it's a shop housed in a country we've made completely devoid of militant, fundamentalist Islamics... then, yes.

[RottingCorpse]

Where's RC with the outrage, dude?

I'm totally numb at this point. Really. I still haven't recovered from teh fact that eight months ago most Americans thought our alcoholic, self-help ideology ridden, child of a president deserved another go at it. Sure, London woke me up for like half a second, but I'm honestly more concerned about the $10 I have riding on Rove keeping his job.

Iraq is a fucking mess. It's going to remain a fucking mess until we either get out and leave it to blow itself up or acrpet bomb the insurgency (and the general population) into submission.

At this point, I think we need to quit fucking around with all this PC "humane warfare" crap and  have a countrywide slaughter to just get the bullshit over with.

Jesus, I really am turning into yotoc.