These casualty figures are still real and they are still not concocted by the media. By my reckoning if we have 300 casualties by the eighth of October we are on course for 1162 casualties by halloween. Your comments did not go to refuting the numbers but to explaining them away. Well and good, that is debate. Do you really want a debate? The question is not facetious because there is nothing in which you have written anywhere that indicates he will tolerate contrary opinion. Why you feel it necessary to abuse someone for putting up numbers when they are real is beyond me.
In attempting to explain away the data posted by the mainstream media, in this case the Washington Post, you make much of the fact that these casualties occurred every year in Ramadan and have to do in the end more with aggressive operations. In your words: "But again, our worst months are during Ramadan and our offensive operations."
Let's see, what did the treacherous mainstream media Washington Post have to say in this regard in this article? Here it is:
"The Baghdad security plan and the general spiral of operations is driving us to be more active than we have been in recent months," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "We have more people on patrols and out of base, so we get more people hurt and killed in firefights," he said, explaining that U.S. military offensives — more than other factors such as shifting enemy tactics — tend to drive the number of American casualties.
Maybe you would like to retract your comments, at least about the casualties.
Of course the point of all this is not whether we have more or less casualties this month or last, or whether that's because of Ramadan , or because we are conducting offensive operations in Baghdad, the point of this is that there is no assurance that three years hence we will not be fighting during Ramadan and justifying this year's casualties because we sustained an equal amount in previous years! My God, is that our justification for the status quo of this war?
If you look at my original post you will note that the very first sentence reports that I'm pinging MNjonnie as an expert on the casualty situation in Iraq so that he can comment on the report. You may choose to think that I'm naïve in quoting, or God knows, for even reading, the mainstream media. I put up these numbers so that people like MNjonnie who are knowledgeable can comment upon them. You might contrast this approach, with its intellectual honesty, with your approach which is almost prescriptive and nearly demands a prior restraint against reading anything published by the mainstream media. I will stick with the free marketplace of ideas, thank you.
2. "That a police unit had to be disbanded for treachery is a fact."
The statement was true when quoted in my post and it remains just as true today. Again, you have not attacked the statement as a matter of fact, you've merely tried to explain it away, to minimize it. Great, that's what we are supposed to do in debate. In rebuttal, it might be noted that the police in Iraq are notorious and many articles have come out, one of the most recent of which, describes their murders in Iraqi hospitals. I will post it if I can find it.
In the meantime let's analyze your rebuttal. You say, "The difference between corrupt police in Louisiana and corrupt police in Iraq is that in Iraq the government officials actually choose to do something about it." By way of sur rebuttal, I would observe that the actual difference between corrupt police in Louisiana and corrupt police in Iraq is the difference between venality and treason. The police brigade was not disbanded, after all, for fixing parking tickets. Now, the issue has been engaged, let the reader judge. You would have a greater point in your castigation of the established media and of me for quoting it if I hadn't taken care to be scrupulously honest in my original post. I fairly and cleanly distinguished between sourced quotes and anonymous quotes. I deliberately drew the reader's attention to this distinction. I didn't fudge a damn thing, I did not conflate, I left the reader to judge sourced and unsourced facts for himself and it was fairly done because everything was honestly labeled.
3. "It is true "In March, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that Iraqi forces — not U.S. troops — would deal with a civil war in Iraq "to the extent one were to occur." Here is his actual quote..."The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur it is, from the security standpoint, to have the Iraqi security forces deal with it to the extent they are able to do it." Why do you suppose the quote as you presented it was edited as it was? His actual quote was understandable enough. And your implication seems to be that Iraq is currently immersed in a civil war. That simply is not true, despite the MSM effort to force feed that idea to the American public.
It is clear to me that the author of the article has a point of view and that is that Iraqi forces are just flat not up to the job. Therefore, I agree with you, it is surprising that she omitted the phrase about Iraqi security forces, "to the extent they are able to do it." It seems to me the incorporation of that phrase would have emphasized her point that the Iraqi forces are in fact not "able to do it."
Then you accuse me, somehow I suppose based upon this quote, as follows: "And your implication seems to be that Iraq is currently immersed in a civil war." In this quote this is the only way in which I mentioned a civil war, "There is no doubt the general Abizaid regards the situation as precarious and near civil war because he so testified under oath in public." I supplied a quote for Abizaid in coroboration. I did mention civil war in my original post but equally no fair-minded reader can find in "implication" that Iraq is in Civil War. In fact, I explicitly set the issue aside:
Without arguing whether or not we are now in the midst of a civil war or even whether these recent Baghdad operations which produced the spike in casualties constitute a civil war, the facts on the ground are contrary to Rumsfeld's prediction, it is US forces -- not Iraqi troops -- who are dealing with the strife.
For the record, I'm not particularly much interested if Iraq is" civil war" or bloody insurgency or whatever you want to call it. The label "civil war" is probably important only in so far as it affects domestic opinion here at home and is probably not a useful term to throw around.
"More, the article asserts that commanders calls for 3000 Iraqi forces have yielded only a few hundred. This even though we have trained up 300,000 Iraqi forces."
This statement too remains true. I agree with you that the reporter should have made the context clear that there are already other Iraqi forces fighting in Baghdad. Then the argument would have been, how is it that reluctance of soldiers to serve somewhere else in their own country can outweigh the need to pacify Baghdad? Why have Rumsfeld's prediction or policy to use Iraqi troops in these circumstances been put to naught for such trivial reasons? Most importantly, what does this have the say about our whole policy in Iraq, which is to train up Iraqis so we can stand down ? This is all fair fodder for debate.
Incidentally, I note you quoted Maj Gen Thurman. Did you read his quote in the mainstream media? how do you know he actually said it? How do you know what you claim you know and have asserted in your comments? Did any of your "facts" come from the mainstream media? Surely you're not going to try to convince FReepers that only you are competent to distinguish what is trustworthy in the mainstream media. They won't stand for that.
At the end of the day it comes down to humility. Either we trust our fellow citizens, especially our fellow FReepers, to have the discernment to separate the spin from fact, or we arrogantly censure them and keep them ignorant. Seems to me, in presenting our viewpoints or in quoting these questionable media sources, our job is to be intellectually honest, to point out was sourced and what was not sourced, not to conflate one with the other. By any measure, I have done that in these series of posts.
