If Bush isn't made to pay for this...

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, August 4th, 2008 1:57pm PDT - promote requested by kulpims.

It's a real shame what the US government has done to Iraq. It's also the peoples' fault for not taking enough action to knock some sense into them.

Seriously WTF Have We Done to Iraq?

It's a question you're trained never to really ask. All you know is Bush is a bad man who fooled the entire world with lies, and it's all about oil.

Since the left prefers the order of tyranny to the chaos of freedom and self-determination, the UN should just choose another Iraqi dictator to take over.

^ Yes, it's because of programming that I think illegal, unjustified war is wrong. Also torture, lying, and destroying the environment. Oh, and violating the Constitution.

What's your programming say about those?

*politics

Adding video to channels (Politics) - requested by NetRunner.

QM believes everything he hears on the right-wing blogosphere

found more parts to this 3 part youtube documentary. Here's the sift post containing parts 2 and 3.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Baghdad-5-years-on-Killing-Fields-and-The-Lost-Generation

nice find lucky760. Glad you found this for me.

We can carve up a major world city with 12-foot walls, yet we can't put four of them around the man who's responsible.

What is wrong? Why are homes taken by Iraqis from Iraqis? It is easy to blame the US, especially in the Muslim world that is nothing new. I am not a USA citizen, but I can clearly see that the killing is not by the US on the civilians of Iraq. It is by one Muslim sect or people group towards another Muslim sect.
Of course you could wish the heavy hand of a dictator that by killing, starving and brutalizing a country and it's population held these forces in check!
More then telling is this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQa7UlJZSng&
That is what is wrong! Open your eyes and be honest!

thats to bad and all but maybe if u guys woke up and stop killing each other maybe we woulndt have to come in and babysit you.

>> ^tbone8ty:
thats to bad and all but maybe if u guys woke up and stop killing each other maybe we woulndt have to come in and babysit you.


Lol, where are the US forces in assisting with the human lives being lost in:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904550.html

Algeria
Ivory Coast
Congo
Somalia
Sudan
Uganda

?

The only reason your troops are being sent to die in a foreign country is because of oil. How many barrels of oil do you buy with an exploded Humvee and five young dead US soldiers?

I have a friend from Basra, whose parents won't let him come home to visit them because they're afraid he'll be killed.

It doesn't matter if the surge is working or not, because we don't care about reconstruction. We only work with destruction and mayhem. More troops, but still no planning. This war was started on an aggressive stance, with no foresight as to the period after toppling Saddam. Sure, they had a vote and they have a President, but do they have local governments to keep order and begin rebuilding what they've lost? No. They have rival sectarian militias who Saddam kept at bay. Now they have civil war.

Baghdad has the Green Zone to protect American diplomats, while the rest of the city has nothing but a broken sewer that is left untreated, and hopelessness.

We treat our POWs with torture; what surprises us about the way we ignore the struggling of the average Iraqi citizen?

While I don't believe we should have ever invaded Iraq, this seems to be more of an Iraqi issue. They have the perfect opportunity here to do away with all the old sectarian issues and get on with rebuilding their country, and instead they choose to keep hanging on to the old hatred that has been around that part of the world forever.

Even though I now think Bush is a colossal idiot (not just because of Iraq), I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt way back when they were lying to us about WMDs. Despite the now obvious reality that invading Iraq was a complete mistake, this seems to be a 'them' issue more than an 'us' issue.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
We can carve up a major world city with 12-foot walls, yet we can't put four of them around the man who's responsible.

Did you spend all night coming up with that one?

It was some of the most dense thinking that this government has ever done to think that we could roll into a nation with thousands of years of infighting and animosity built up and "liberate" those people from it by simply removing one man.
In regards to rebuilding I find little fault with the people who are the victims of an invasion. I fully acknowledge that there are probably many instances where the Iraqi people have done little or nothing to help themselves but how much can you blame a person for loosing when you've handed them a fixed deck? How many corrupt building contracts have gone unfinnished? How many dollars have been wasted or just plain "lost" that were to go towards rebuilding and lifting the Iraqi people back on their feet?

>> ^shadownc:
While I don't believe we should have ever invaded Iraq, this seems to be more of an Iraqi issue. They have the perfect opportunity here to do away with all the old sectarian issues and get on with rebuilding their country, and instead they choose to keep hanging on to the old hatred that has been around that part of the world forever.
Even though I now think Bush is a colossal idiot (not just because of Iraq), I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt way back when they were lying to us about WMDs. Despite the now obvious reality that invading Iraq was a complete mistake, this seems to be a 'them' issue more than an 'us' issue.


I agree. I hate Bush as much as everyone, but as far as this video goes, it doesn't really convince me that this is all Americas fault. Suddenly we're to blame for their centuries old holy war?

More atheism please.

>> ^quantumushroom:
It's a question you're trained never to really ask. All you know is Bush is a bad man who fooled the entire world with lies, and it's all about oil.
Since the left prefers the order of tyranny to the chaos of freedom and self-determination, the UN should just choose another Iraqi dictator to take over.


Wait, who supported Saddam's rise to power again? And who gave $3 BLN to Bin Laden and the Taliban? Now who messed up the entire war on Iraq? Same shit different guys. Even if you agree with all the actions of the current administration, you can't argue that they fucked them all up. They are incompetent to no end.

I guess you totally underestimate the importance of oil if you think this war was started because of anything else. In that case you're even dumber than Bush and co. Even they know that oil is the most important thing in that desert.

God, you guys cant win a war to save your lives. USA is the new France.

HAHAHAhAHAAHAHAhahhaahaHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA


USA IS THE NEW FRANCE!!!! HAHAHAHAhhahahAHAHAHhAhhahaHHAHAHAHAHhA


AHAHHAHAHAHAhAhhahahaA

that is sooooo fucking funny. thanks man, send me the tshirt

Zut alors! Je suis le baguette!

>> ^MINK:
HAHAHAhAHAAHAHAhahhaahaHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA

USA IS THE NEW FRANCE!!!! HAHAHAHAhhahahAHAHAHhAhhahaHHAHAHAHAHhA

AHAHHAHAHAHAhAhhahahaA
that is sooooo fucking funny. thanks man, send me the tshirt

What has been done to Iraq and its civilians is a clear and defined story. What is not defined is what this meaningless war has done to the best volunteer army in the world, it has shatter the lives of thousands of people who gave their hearts, sweat and blood to make something out of the cluster fuck they were assigned, if not killed, they are horribly injured, if not injured they have PTSD and have to deal with the VA whose funding is not sufficent and the general bureaucracy of the military.

They have done incredible things, from pacification of Fallujah, Sadr Army, Fedayukin, all while riding around from the threat of unseen enemy fighting on tactics designed for confrontation of a uniformed army.

Now they are there trying to make something out of the sacrifice of lives already lost. I feel sorry for what the US Army and Marine Corp and all other uniformed forces had to bear because their leadership and command structure was too weak to argue against a ridiculous assignment by a joke of a president and secretary of defence and national security.

Even if you agree with all the actions of the current administration, you can't argue that they fucked them all up. They are incompetent to no end.

I've never heard of a war where everything went right, much less a streetfight. Then again, I'm not comparing the real world to Utopia. Success follows success in Iraq and all the American left does is continue to pour the whine.

Saddam is gone, but...
Iraq had free elections, but...
The Surge worked, but...

Do you ever get tired of being wrong?

I guess you totally underestimate the importance of oil if you think this war was started because of anything else. In that case you're even dumber than Bush and co. Even they know that oil is the most important thing in that desert.

Power is more important to leftists than oil is to anyone else.

Oil is a valuable commodity needed to run things. It is far more useful and tangible than any Socialist Council of Do-Gooders, who are parasitic wastes of space and unnecessary for good government. Democrats, the American equivalent of Eurosnobs, are preventing the tapping of American oil, of which there is more than in the entire Middle East. Presently we get most of our oil from Canada and Mexico, and not a drop from Iraq since 2003. Indeed, it's all about the oil.

God, you guys cant win a war to save your lives. USA is the new France.

If I want to hear from a troll, I'll piss under a bridge.

Pay no attention to the gigantic mask that bellows about spreading democracy. Look behind the curtain at the man making all the money. War critics make the mistake of assuming that the war creators give a shit. Pleas to feel the pain of the poor Iraqis fall on deaf and confused ears of the people for whom it is going so well. The surge, like the war itself, made no consistent claims about what victory means or what the objectives actually were. Anything that happens can be attributed to the surge simply by its existence somewhere nearby. Cheerleaders go in making every possible claim about what could go well, then they pick whichever one comes true and use that to justify any atrocities that may have been committed. The purpose is to feed you a little candy--"USA #1 The surge is working! Yay me!"--without actually claiming victory, which would put an end to the ongoing glory--"but there's a lot of work left to do!" The point is to engage your enthusiasm while making it seem like the only reasonable way forward is to keep doing the same thing. Which is what they want to keep on doing for whatever reason it is that they keep on doing it. It's all the same strategy that only almost worked the first time. Think back on how many great reasons there were for going in there--ONE of them had to end up being true. But none of them did.

For the US administration and its supporters, the war might be going great for all we know. They probably did, and do, have a VERY good reason for going in there. At least from where they sit. None of the misery or failures affect the matters that concern them. It's expensive? The rich don't pay taxes any more. Soldiers are killed? As good as none of those guys have family in the armed forces. Government is bankrupt? Never much cared for it anway. One thing that obviously was important is for the oil to go out onto the "free" market, where anybody _could_ buy it. Sounds egalitarian and fair, but the likeliest big winners are relatively few and they know who they are. The one thing you will never never hear from the government in Bagdad are calls to nationalize the oil resources. This mission really is accomplished, and Bush may actually consider it a success--he has said and may actually believe that history will exonerate him. All we need now are enough police to keep the business running. We're not quite there yet, and from the administration point of view, this may be the only failure. Therefore, the best solution: more cops. Pulling out, at the very least, means just one thing: fewer cops. Police is always the one public service that Republicans really really like--always looking for that government handout to help them hold on to all their stuff.

SO that's why this video rocks. The final remaining stated and moral claim to support the invasion, the freeing of the poor, long-suffering Iraqi people, is as obvious a distraction as all of the other ones were. This video illustrates that fantastically. (I've gotta go out and see the rest.)

This whole business is criminal, but technically legal. We're probably going to have to accept that all these guys are going to get away with it. I suppose if we need vengeance, we could go after them for some distantly related, but ridiculously lesser crime, such as with Al Capone and tax evasion. But this vengeance would just be a pointless and counterproductive distraction from the problem that so desperately needs to be solved: how can we make sure it doesn't happen again? Until then, it will good-as never stop. What laws--even constitutional updates--are needed? What unfortunate human tendencies is our system encouraging in us, that this has been allowed to happen?

You wanna know who is least likely to fix it? The upcoming Democratic Party cross-government majority. They are next in line, and they've been waiting a long long time.

But maybe all of that is just a bit too conspiratorial. It might have been just stupidity and bigotry the whole way through. Muslims bombed New York. Saddam's Iraq was the least popular and easiest to beat up bunch of muslims that had any milk money for us to steal. So everybody gathered round and cheered while the football captain put his boot in. And, oh yeah, they bombed Afghanistan too.

I believe two things.

1) The administration did not expect resistance in Iraq to be as heavy as it was, thats why it was so poorly planned with regards to post invasion action. However the problem was further exaggerated when the CPA followed with disastrous policies like sending young college kids to rebuild the nation based on a US model and the disbanding of the Iraqi army and previous governmental offices.

2) The various infractions that the administration committed with regards to US citizens rights, privacy rights, torture, obfuscation, governmental privatization is a clusterfuck that will not be unraveled or brought back from excesses by the next administration. This will leave a gaping policy hole where US rights and standards used to exist, allowing further infractions to occur in later years.

I don't think the US really changed the country. All their guns and planes removed a dictator and his army, but you cant make peace with bullets and shrapnel. The US fought a conventional war in unconventional times. I don't know whats worse; that the leaders is Washington failed to learn from past mistakes and tried to fight long standing hatred and deep divides with an army, or that they knew democracy could not be forced and that it really was all blood for oil.

How simple is it to understand that the politics of a country is not just dependent on its leader? You cannot simply hang the head of a country and expect all those beneath to fall into line. Far from me to advocate the criminal Saddam was, but his influence was massive and it was plain to see his removal would create a power vacuum that would suck the place into chaos.

All the while its spun to the people as part of the War on Terror, and the people believed it. I was 13 years old on 9/11, and even I knew it was not Saddam's hand guiding those planes. What a colossal failure to let all this happen.

I hope History remembers ALL the crimes of war.

>> ^quantumushroom:
I've never heard of a war where everything went right, much less a streetfight. Then again, I'm not comparing the real world to Utopia. Success follows success in Iraq and all the American left does is continue to pour the whine.


Where everything went right? How about where something went right. This corrupt government is taking you for a ride, exploiting your country, overcharging your military for the extra buck or simply for a stock rise and you keep thinking this is about left vs. right. Wake up! Doesn't matter what side the administration conned into voting for them, what's important is that they are running your country into the ground. Normally I wouldn't give a shit, but it's starting to affect the global economy. Get your act together and try to understand that this is bigger than your petty red vs. blue bullshit.


Power is more important to leftists than oil is to anyone else.
Oil is a valuable commodity needed to run things. It is far more useful and tangible than any Socialist Council of Do-Gooders, who are parasitic wastes of space and unnecessary for good government. Democrats, the American equivalent of Eurosnobs, are preventing the tapping of American oil, of which there is more than in the entire Middle East. Presently we get most of our oil from Canada and Mexico, and not a drop from Iraq since 2003. Indeed, it's all about the oil.

Iraqi production rates are so low because the US bombed the shit out of most production equipment and refineries. In addition, foreign oil companies are reluctant to send their people to Iraq because it's a goddamn mess and there's not a shred of security. This is a clear failure of Bush's Iraqi agenda.

Saudi Arabia alone has more proved reserves than Canada and the US combined, so I don't know where you get your utopian oil surplus from.

Oh and on that France remark: War on Terror, Drugs, Iraq, Afghanistan...How's that going? You didn't even manage to find Bin Laden, how pathetic. But then again, you don't really want to find him, do you?

Fucking stupid people defending Bush obviously did not watch the video and did not witness even there the tragedy that is Iraq after the invasion. The right wingers will tell you it is about ending tyranny, which is bullshit because if that were the case Bush and Cheney would both be at the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity. If these arsewipes seriously think that Saddam Hussein's tyranny is equal to the tyranny of foreign occupation then there is no helping them. Their brains are too clouded by the Fox News Propoganda networks. They don't realize that they are to American propoganda what the followers of hard line communism were to Pravda, you're one and the same, hardline American patriot is equal to hard line Soviet communist. The irony just reeks.

The war was about taking Iraqi oil from the Iraqis for the friends of Bush and Cheney. End of story. All other official stories are a litany of lies.

The USA might mean well.

But unfortunately she thinks fucking around with other people's economies is "democracy".

The "free market" or as i like to say "antisocial" policies in the Baltics have failed, and that's a christian european country so you'd expect more synergy, right? but.... You can't just walk in to a place and tell everyone your system is right for them. That's totally not democracy.

Democracy took thousands of years to emerge as an idea, and still hasn't been implemented properly anywhere. To talk about "successes" in the struggle to bring "democracy" to Iraq is just perverse, especially if you're a republic, not a democracy.

>> ^quantumushroom:

>>>>Saddam is gone, but...
>>>>Iraq had free elections, but...
>>>>The Surge worked, but...
Do you ever get tired of being wrong?


I dunno i only count 1 true thing in there, saddam is gone. and that was illegal.

free elections do not coexist with death threats and occupying armies.

the surge worked in what way? on TV?


dude if anyone is tireless about being wrong around here....it's...

You wanna know what's really fucked up? One small city in Sweden called Södertälje did in 2007 welcome more refugees than the USA and Canada did TOGETHER! ONE CITY! This by a country who has about 9 million citizens and who doesn't even support the war. The Swedish people just got one more reason to hate on the US... sadly.

Can't invade a country without an army.

One change would solve this entire problem: volunteer soldiers refusing to sign multi-year contracts.

The Baath party was secularist coalition incorporating both Sunni and Shia elements. It never let this kind of Sunni vs. Shia genocide happen. The de-baathification of Iraq has empowered religious fundamentalists and destabilized the country. Saddam was a terrible tyrant, but the ethnic cleansing that has occurred in Baghdad in the last 3 years is worse than anything Saddam ever did. But I remain agnostic about whether, in the long run, Bush's war will have been better than noninterference with Saddam's regime. Eventually the Iraqi people might have improved their own government without unsolicited help from the USA.

BUT YOU DON'T WANT THE SMOKING GUN TO BE A NUCLEAR EXPLOSION DO YOU

etc

>> ^quantumushroom:

Power is more important to leftists than oil is to anyone else.

You are so full of shit I should be laughing my ass off.

It's not just that you're freakishly one-sided and reactionary to the point of lunacy, but you flat out lie every chance you get.

You espouse "truths" that have no basis in fact whatsoever.

You claim that "success follows success" in Iraq, but when pressed, you can't post one single solitary example.

You call Democrats and Liberals "traitors" for doing nothing more sinister than disagreeing with Bush policies.

Again, I should be laughing, but fascist reactionaries are no laughing matter.

*promote. This is serious shit.

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Monday, August 4th, 2008 3:12pm PDT - promote requested by rasch187.

You have to think in the long-term. Liberal whiners can't think beyond their next ration of free cheese.

Attaching some perspective to the severity of these crimes: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2002/11/0079384

The depressing thing is that this really isn't a surprise. Things have gone downhill. This reminded me of the documentary in the shadow of the palms, a film that was shot before, during and after the initial US invasion into Iraq and looked at the changes to the civilians. this is the website with their trailer http://www.intheshadowofthepalms.com/

I found this very difficult and upsetting to watch. I can feel nothing only total anger toward anyone who tries to defend or justify the illegal invasion of Iraq and the slaughter of its people.

And I'm supposed to think of the soliders who went out there as heroes? Fuck them, fuck all of them and damn them to hell.

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The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 4:38 - length declared by Mandtis.