[ExI] future of warfare again, was: RE: Forking

[Kelly Anderson]

2012/1/8 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> On 8 January 2012 13:19, Alejandro Dubrovsky <alito at organicrobot.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Not when compared to previous conflicts, and I think that is the
>> > point. Even with 100,000 Iraqi's dead in ten years, that's less than
>> > the 200,000 who disappeared into Abu Garab when Saddam ran the
>> > place...
>
>
> Do you have any source? Really 200.000 executions *in a single jail*, and
> over which period? And the national total would have been how many?
>
> In 2009, Amnesty International estimated 1718 executions took place during
> 2008 in the *entire Chinese territory*, believed to be one of the countries
> with the highest capital punishment rate,  out of a population of 1400
> millions (which equates to less than 0.0001%, or 1 in 1,000,000 of the
> population), compared to the scant 30 million Iraqis.
>
> And if we are speaking of literal disappearances from the premises
> concerned, this sounds even more ridiculous. Have you considered how many
> cubic meters 200.000 adult human bodies make, and how many trucks would be
> required to remove them? And what kind of population could the place contain
> at any given moment, in the first place?

I apologize, I misunderstood an apparently overzealous and none too
accurate blogger. The 200,000 plus deaths were not at Abu Garab
proper, that constituted just short of 1000 documented deaths in
Saddam's time, (maybe more undocumented) however I stand behind the
total non Iran war deaths at the hands of Saddam being greater than
200,000, and I present as evidence the following peer reviewed
article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam%27s_Iraq

I mean of course that it was reviewed by all of our peers... :-)  Feel
free to review it more yourself.

A couple of highlights include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack
Which was part of the overal Al-Anfal Campaign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal_Campaign
A lot of numbers are thrown around in that article, some as high as
over 2,000,000 Kurds being killed.
According to the Iraqi prosecutors, as many as 182,000 people were killed.[8]
That's probably a pretty good number. Who knows of course? Nobody.

In addition, again according to Wikipedia, "In April 1991, after
Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, he cracked down
ruthlessly against several uprisings in the Kurdish north and the Shia
south. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human
rights violations against both groups similar to the violations
mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from
20,000 to 100,000 for Kurds, and 60,000 to 130,000 for Shi'ites.[5]"

Aside from this are the millions of soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq
war, which are not counted in the above numbers and numerous other
smaller massacres.

When I referred to previous conflicts, I was referring to things like
WWI, WWII, Viet Nam, where many more people died than in the Iraq
conflict. We are getting better at avoiding collateral damage due to
better technology and intelligence.

While I'm not defending the US invasion of Iraq by any means, I think
it is a bit of a stretch at this point in history to say it was a bad
thing for the Iraqi populace overall. Saddam is the worst thing ever
to happen to Iraq in modern times.

As to the numbers reported in the Lancet, even if they are 100% true,
I don't think it changes my point that Iraq is better off than they
were before the war. The United States, on the other hand, is probably
worse off for having rid the world of Saddam. We have a black eye in
the eyes of the world. It created a great magnet for would-be
terrorists. I think getting out of there quietly was a good thing, and
I hope we never go back. Iraq is a mess.

Iran is a terrible threat to world peace. I can think of no country
more likely to eventually set off a nuclear device. It's nice to have
a little buffer around them, and Iraq and Afghanistan do just that
without making the Iranian populace more anti-western.

Only time will tell if the war did Iraq any good over the long term...
we shall see. At the same time, Egypt scares the crap out of me. One
more Iran arising, geez.

I prophesy in the name of Loki the Unpredictable that Obama will go
down as the worst Middle East foreign policy disaster since Jimmy
Carter over the long term.

And while I am a libertarian, I think Ron Paul would be even worse at
Middle Eastern politics.

In matters of the Middle East, there are no good answers, only less
than totally horrid stale mates.

-Kelly