I'm horrified by the Insurgency in Iraq

and that's an excellent reason for getting the fuck out. I suspect a lot of the motivation behind the insurgency is to humiliate the US, and they could care less how much havoc they sew, or how many Iraqi civilians they kill in order to do so. The Iraqis would have a much better chance of cutting off the insurgents if we weren't there.

Today in Basra a suicide bomber walked into a home for the elderly and blew himself up, killing 2 residents and injuring several more. I can't even fathom the evil behind such an act.

I'm pretty sure I'd never blow myself up either, but then again I've never lived in a country that was invaded by a foreign power for NO reason, dropping 2000-pound bombs into the middle of a crowded city at night...

Redstone

reason. 9-11 was rather unprovoked. What sickens me is that so many Americans can remember the horror of that day, and not understand that we did EXACTLY the same thing to Iraq, a hundred times over.

Who knows what we'd all become if we were occupied by a nation whose definition of freedom was so diametrically opposed to ours.

to that of the nation.

"What sickens me is that so many Americans can remember the horror of that day, and not understand that we did EXACTLY the same thing to Iraq, a hundred times over."

Well said.

Redstone

Well said indeed

:hi:

to the general population. People can take occupation only for so long. It might not happen in the near future, but I think if we are still there in 5 years or so, the Iraqis are going to get completely fed up with the violence, lack of electricity, etc. When that happens, they'll put their differences such as religion (sunni v. shi'ite) behind them and unite against a common enemy (us). It will be bad, when it happens b/c our troops will probably be caught with their pants down.

this BS about Al-Qaida shipping thousands of foreign fighters to Iraq is just that Bull Shit.

they want us out now. what a vicious cycle of death, FU *

Redstone

I'm aware that most of the insurgency is drawn from the population of Iraq, and that part of it is sectarian violence. I'm also aware that most Iraqis don't support the killing of their fellow countrymen and women and children.

goon squad doing it. The longer Iraq is unstable the longer we can use that to stay. It seems funny to me (funny, strange not funny ha ha) that we're supposedly there to provide the Iraqis security until they can stand on their own but all these attacks keep happening to the public and we're seemingly nowhere in site. Maybe I've read too many comics in my day but it feels like the "Clark Kent and Superman are never in the same room together" act to me.

getting their country back. Preventing us from looting the place? Revenge for all the dead since Shock and awe?

how does walking into a home for the elderly and detonating a bomb advance the cause of getting their country back. How about bombing Mosques, restaurants, and marketplaces? It's part civil war and part an attempt to humiliate the US.

eom

as well.

all the violence there now, we own.

because if we do it, it's legitimate for the insurgents to kill Iraqi citizens. Great logic. So the US is occupied and the foreign force bombs a hospital in your town, is your reaction going to be that you'll go to the store and kill some fellow Americans?

Why do you think every violent act in the country is tied together? Is every murder in the United States behind a united political cause?

for the aged is insane barbarity.

You're confusing humiliation with revenge. And you said nothing about a civil war in you're first post, only made the inane remark that this is all about humiliation.

Think Hatfields and McCoys.

They are most certainly closely connected with each other in many, many ways, and with things and people being in their proper order. Honor, respect, revenge, prestige, rank, dignity, control, power, hierarchy, religion ... divvying them up is a difficult thing, and very, very culture specific.

look stupid.

It makes our "budding Democracy" in Iraq look like a pack of lies.
It makes the Faux News and Tony Snow report on how well things are going sound ludicrous...

That's fairly clear; they were killed as sheep would be killed.

Just because it doesn't fit how we would do it and a goal that we would have doesn't mean that it's not a possible goal.

You read the pronouncements, and it's not just about defeat. It's about humiliation and defeat. And sometimes it's hard to tell which the speaker thinks is more important. We are not submitting properly, and therefore we need to be humiliated. We have not shown them proper honor, and have dishonored them; one way of regaining honor is through humiliating the other party, to balance things out.

The idea of honor is weak or gone among some American subcultures; not among others.

We have this idealistic belief or assumption that we can maintain our honor and dignity in spite of what people say and do to us; to act dishonorably is to be dishonorable. We respect those that hew to their ethics and values and carry on honorably in the face of insult and humiliating treatment. This is probably the dominant view of honor in the English-speaking world, at least its the ideal that's usually presented as being dominant. There are other cultures for whom this makes no sense: If you are treated in a humiliating way, your honor and dignity are reduced, and you deserve contempt for not returning the humiliation.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ned=tus&q=suicide+bombers+forced&btnmeta%3Dsearch%3Dsearch=Search+the+Web

CNN.com - Some Iraq suicide bombers 'forced' - Jul 27, 2004The US has evidence that some suicide bombers in Iraq may have been forced against their will to carry out attack missions.
www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/07/26/iraq.bombers.force/ - 49k - Cached - Similar pages

why is that not a reason to stay and fight?

If these people are willing to blow up old folks for no reason that we can discern, why should we let them succeed? Why should we effectively hand the country over to them by withdrawing?

We haven't been able to do it yet.

Redstone

Other than bringing in more troops.

But that's precisely what makes it a quagmire... both staying and leaving are bad options.

Bushco has blown them up and continues to blow them up as well (old, young, male, female, sick, injured, whatever) and referred to them as collateral damage. Do you see a pattern here?

And both the American and Iraqi people know it.

d, raped (although only Congress and Sy Hersch have seen the photos, Abu Ghraib), murdered, bombed, "shocked and awed," hit with chemical weapons (white phosphorus, Fallujah), massacred (Haditha) and now illegally occupied.

See if you can fathom the evil behind these such acts.

with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, erc. I shouldn't have to post a disclaimer on my OP. I made it clear that we are the reason for the insurgency.

It disgusts me that the Insurgency in Iraq is a sacred cow to many posters on DU.

:sarcasm:

unfortunately the different groups/players end up getting lumped under one label.

The only ones who benefit from this belief are the private security contractors. Follow the money!

If you were an Iraqi right now? Collaborate with the U.S.? Sit tight, shut up and pray? I'm just wondering.

The feeling of solidarity for the insurgency comes from those of us who feel that if someone came in and occupied our country, we would cut off their fucking heads and blow up their fucking trucks.

are doing; try and survive in an unbearable situation. And what do you consider collaborating to be? Is voting collaboration? Working as a translator for an American news organization? In addition, you fucking fail totally to address the fact that insurgents are killing far more Iraqi civilians than Americans.
If the US was occupied would you set off car bombs at the local market or church?

The sectarian violence is separate IMO--not the same players.

...words around to meet the OPs own agenda. Thats what this entire post was started for to begin with.

From the OP: >>>It disgusts me that the Insurgency in Iraq is a sacred cow to many posters on DU.<<<

These people are becoming more transparent as time goes by.

Don't let them get you down The Stranger. Posts like the one to you where the OP has to stoop to twisting your words into something you didn't say only shows we are winning.

Don

Thanks for the words of encouragement. Keep keepin' on.

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...and never commented on it. Like it wasn't even there.

We don't know who these suicide bombers are or why they are doing what they are doing even according to our own military.

These suicide bombers we keep hearing about could be some poor bastard who is having his family held by some of Chalabi's thugs for all any of us know.

But we can't suggest the obvious though. Or we all become terrorist sympathizers.

I have seen this movie before.

Don

the wasted lives . . . good to speak of the inanity of violence, wherever it comes from.

I didn't tiptoe around it. I didn't address it. In fact, I didn't address lots of posts on this thread. Even if some of the suicide bombing are coerced, that doesn't address the fact that some of the insurgents are fucking murdering and terrorizing innocent Iraqis. For the hundredth time, our responsibility for the goddamn mess, is not exoneration for those that perpetrate such violence. How fucking hard is that to get?

and terrorizing innocent Iraqis..." Where did that fact come from?

The so-called "insurgents" are Iraqis who are defending their country from a foreign invasion. Oh, yes there is also a religious civil war going on made possible by that invasion.

Please don't confuse the two.

what is broadly known as the insurgency have used violence against civilians in order to forment civil war. That's hardly an unknown tactic, and it's widely accepted by scholars and experts from across the political spectrum. I doubt that you can find one credible expert or scholar to dispute that.

Sounds like bullshit to me. "Widely accepted by scholars and experts from across the political spectrum." Good, then you should have no problem at all providing me with copious links, and reasons why a citizenry would attack their own in order to get rid of hostile invaders.

Ridiculous from top to bottom. Sounds like a WH press release. :crazy:

we need to get out now, but wait, they are building that massive embassy, so we are going to be there for a long time.......sigh.

because it's the combination of a civil war with an anticolonial war. There is NO WAY for us to win anything but a lot of good kids killed for Stupid's vanity.

We overthrew their government. We got the guy who headed it. We set up an interim gang of puppets. We need to get the fuck out NOW.

Then we need to supply whatever hostile government they come up with after the civil war ends with the materials to rebuild the stuff we wrecked.

We can't rebuild their families. They will never be our friends. We can do the right thing, though, and that means GET THE FUCK OUT NOW and resupply them later.

It's only a matter of time before we see similar images coming from Iraq. There can be no other outcome.

would it stop if we left?

I don't think it would. It's a civil war issue.

As long as the Nation-State, and not the individual, is viewed as the Legitimate and the Final Ultimate Arbiter, then invasions of "Soverign Countries" will continue forever. Under many pretexts, instill democracy, stop torture, freedom, liberty, etc...

Oh and it doesn't matter if the guy in the White House has a {R}, a {D} or whatever label behind his name...

Remember we only went after Saddam after he stopped being an ally of our "Nation" prior to that we couldn't care how many of his own people he killed, tortured, etc. Think about Turkey, Turkey fucks some of it's citizens over (The Kurds) and has done so for many years. But as long as their country is an ally of our country we allow it.

So, just remember, murder on this scale has only become possible thanks to the Industrial Revoultion combined with the rise of Nationalism.

There are criminal elements involved in extortion, kidnaping, reprisals . . .

there are other politically motivated attacks by rival sects . . .

there are armed struggles for territory which had been in opposite hands before the invasion . . .

there are residents who've watched their families and friends killed, their homes and cities destroyed, their lives yoked to U.S. oppression, seemingly unending to them . . .

there are opportunistic tyrants thriving off of the chaos, both in and outside of Iraq . . .

Most of this wouldn't be happening if we hadn't invaded and occupied. But, now the Iraqi residents have a new junta in place, lording over them and their resources, whose first mission is 'cutting off the insurgents'.

What a notion. The appointed government of former exile, Maliki, has launched what amounts to an even tighter occupation on Baghdad, Ramadi, and wherever else he decides, his new army together with their American benefactors setting up barricades and checkpoints, making hostages of the very people who allowed him to achieve power with their votes. Sad that the most the new regime has accomplished, outside of the feathering of their own nests, has been the oppression and intimidation of their own countrymen at the U.S. behest.

Here in the U.S. some tend to see the militarized resistance as an affront to America, and it certainly is. But, it's much more than that. A great deal of the resistance, whose citizen members' initial compliance and participation in the elections in Iraq was rewarded with a self-interested puppet government which regards them as enemies, has been frustrated into violent expressions of basic perogatives of nationalism and self-determination which our occupation disregards as threats to our consolidation of power. The violence is abhorrent, on either side, but, the government's military response with the U.S. at their side only fuels the resistance.

Certainly, with reports of unprovoked shootings by coalition forces; the certain innocent 'collateral' casualties among civilians caught in the way of our attacks; the mass round-ups of innocent men and children, detained indefinitely without charges or counsel; certainly these would cause one to consider the Iraqis necessarily defensive, if not merely desperate and frustrated to the point of taking up arms or taking their own lives.


my latest 2 cents: Cranking the Occupation (6-20-2006)

The OP's flaw is maintaining the fiction that there is one "brutal insurgency" when the reality is a patchwork more like the one you describe. The idea of a unified enemy is what leads us to the idiotic notion that killing one guy (Zarqawi, Uday and Qusay, etc.) is going to have any impact.

I absolutely agree that it was a good post, and I wasn't nearly clear enough in my OP. There are many factions, and I oversimplified. Nor have I ever had any delusion that the elimination of someone like Zarqawi will make any difference. I've expressed that in other threads. So let me be clear: I'm condemning those elements that are killing and terrorizing the Iraqi people. Yes, that would include groups like Zarqawi's who have attacked civilian Iraqis as well as American and Iraqi troops. It's very simple: I condemn brutality whether its American or not. This country is accountable for the violence rife in Iraq. That doesn't mean that others who employ brutal tactics against civilians aren't also responsible for what they're doing.

If you post it as its own thread I sure will.

Don

An insurgent is a "member of a political party who rebels against established leadership."



Nothing about civil war.

Nothing about sectarian strife.

Nothing about religion.



Confusing the two plays into the hands of war profiteers who want to keep us there forever. Let's avoid that, shall we?

Does things to you. I bet you couldn't understand people in the Congo, either. These people have never had a peaceful or stable environment to live in -- of course such violence would be conjured by them.

And we all know the occupation is what is bringing out the greatest fear and violence.

It is a concept that is lost on americans but not the rest of the world.

NOW.