Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

You have no idea what you are talking about. You obviously have no comprehension of the level of brutality of Saddam. How many Genocides does a dictator get? How long would the Muslim world have allowed Saddam to continue? Just a brief refresher boys, because the “good old days” are taking on a real rosy glow here:

Several thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed, forcing residents to live in appalling camps. In at least 40 cases, Iraqi forces under Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, used chemical weapons to kill and chase Kurds from their villages. Then, during the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988, Iraqi troops swept through the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan rounding up everyone who remained in government-declared “prohibited zones.” **Some 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed. Only seven are known to have escaped. **

**The full scope of the Anfal horror became known only after Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War. **The Iraqi military’s withdrawal from the region in October 1991 after the imposition of a no-fly zone made it feasible for the first time in years for outsiders to reach the area.

Human Rights Watch investigators took advantage of this opening to enter northern Iraq and document Saddam’s crimes. Some 350 witnesses and survivors were interviewed. Mass graves were exhumed. And Kurdish rebels were convinced to hand over some **18 tons of documents that they had seized during the brief post-war uprising from Iraqi police stations. These documents were airlifted to Washington, where Human Rights Watch researchers poured through this treasure trove of information about the inner workings of a ruthless regime. **

With this extraordinarily detailed evidence of genocide, Human Rights Watch launched a campaign to bring Saddam to justice. At the time the U.N. Security Council was creating special tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but there was no consensus for similar action on Iraq. France and Russia, each with extensive business interests in Iraq, threatened to wield their veto. China, worried about analogies to its treatment of Tibetans, was disinclined to support an International Criminal Tribunal for Iraq. With no International Criminal Court then in the works, and the Pinochet option of exercising universal jurisdiction in national courts not yet widely recognized, the prospect of criminal prosecution was remote.

We should have gone to war with Saddam based on the above paragraph, not WMD. The WMD however was the only rational that could have been backed by China, France and Russia. The same people who did the killing for Saddam are doing the killing now. The Shia have adopted their tactics. Saddam gave birth to a society where the most brutal rule.

How many Genocides does a dictator get before you guys call for his fall? The Muslim world should have been enraged. Instead you ended up against the US, and are now supporting genocide as a way of controlling murderous masses of Muslims.

Very Cool. You guys are geniuses.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Thank you..i was wondering why i was feeling diff over the last week, i was begining to think of it as a cold, but must be self-dellusion :smiley:

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Dude you are talking like you are sitting right there at ground zero with your laptop bringing all these facts and stats to us from Iraq. Whats your source? Of course your source is the American media be it tv, radio, news paper or internet. An American being fed by the American media, its like a dog chasing his tail.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

^ abay u still dont know OG is part of intelligence community stationed t check on desis on GS as well as other sites to observe the mood, influence ppl, look out for suspicicous individuals and all, therefore he has a keen insight into this whole thing.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

first off i dont understand why every thread on Iraq's different incidents winds down to the same discussion, dont you guys get tired of the same arguments?

The argument that Saddam killed more people was losing credibility in 2004. Now that even modest estimates put the number between 100 and 200k and even if the 600k number is off by a little or a lot, the fact is that the figures are comparable. So if Saddam killed more people, then not by much.

Saddam was a hated figure in Iraq, by the majority shias and the kurds, and much of the sunnies too. Do you then agree that the Occupation should also be hated?

The reason there arent threads on Darfur or Iraqi on Iraqi violence is not that people dont care about Muslim blood if it isnt an american bullet. It is the absence of debate. Me, Ohioguy, Seminole, Fraudia, Teaser utd, captain1 i.e. everyone would have the same thing to say about the people engaging in it, perhaps one subset would have more to say about the responsibilities of the occupying power.
Every time there is a bombing in Pakistan where Muslims kill Muslims there are very active threads on it, and much more discussion than this thread, because there are representatives of the parties involved.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

im not totally comfortable with what saddam did or didnt do.

anfal must have been indeed a bloody campaign. on one hand you have kurds hungry for kurdistan and on the other a dictator. iraqi central governments have been killing kurds since well before saddam btw.
lets see how the kurds have been dealt with elsewhere
how about democratic prowestern Turkey?

were kurds 'insurgents'
was anfal 'fallujah'

the situation at hand has been caused by US interference and saddam was roughly the leader for the iraqi people as hindsight has proven

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

No, infact I have tried to go beyond the media before I formed my opinions about Saddam. Let’s forget WMD for just a minute, and look at what he did to his own people. If you did not read my post above, it references the Anfal campaigns used by Saddam to purge the Kurds. Now there were other campaigns, against the Marsh Arabs, a number against the Shia, a number of purges against political enemies, but the one against eh Kurds is unique in many ways.

The Baathists were unique in many ways. They were highly organized, and very methodical. As you can read below, and in further documents on the Anfal campaigns, the Genocide of the Kurds was highly organized, well documented and fully integrated into the fabric of Saddam’s administration. This was not an accident, not a rogue unit gone astray, not some over zealous administrator in the hinterlands.

Genocide was the official policy of the Baathist regime of Saddam. The cold blooded murder of perhaps 100k people was highly planned, documented and executed.

So, go beyond the common media, and read what really happened. Decide for yourself if Genocide on Muslims should be allowed or punished. Decide when rulers have stepped over the boundries of humanity. What would the future of Iraq have been under a leader who destroyed 4000 Kurdish villages so that these area could be settled by Arabs? They perform a census, and anyone who identifies himself as a Kurd is ethnicly cleansed by rounding them up, booking them into Nazi-like concentration camps where they are never seen again. See the following:

People who are whining that things were better under Saddam, are frankly ill informed idiots who do not carefully consider what they are really saying. The real issue is why Muslims allowed Iraq to fail simply to spite the US. Was it worth it? Did you do all you could to help your “brothers” in Iraq? Or have you sat completely idle though the regime of Saddam, and now through the sectarian slaughter?

Whether you believe it or not, the US troops who mistakenly shot some fire fighters believe that they are there to assist the Iraqi people in making a new future. They showed up. They put their lives on the line, and they believe that there is a better future. Many of them have died in that cause. That those guys are now branded as “trigger happy” (when 100 of them have been killed this month) by some Canadian computer geek whose closest brush with death will be commuting in his air-bagged Volvo strikes me as a bit silly.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

come on dude, all volvo driving techies are not geeks. Most are but not all.

PS: I am niether a techie nor a volvo driver, but am a geek

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Ohioguy, normally I agree with you but this time I disagree…

Saddam was a evil Mofo, but that doesnt mean that Iraqis today are better off than they were under his rule.

I think Iraq will probably split up just like Yugoslavia but only after a lot of blood has been spilled

Do You Rememeber ...........?
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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Is there any way to hold these disparate groups together that hate each other w/o a brutal dictatorship? Splitting the country is probably the only viable option. Too bad they can't do it before a massive bloody civil war.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

mods where are you?
this is a personal attack on a member with a very sober point of view.

og: the soldiers you are talking about are they the same ones as on youtube shouting "OH YEAH" after killing deffenceless people? look like cowards to me
saddam husseins brutality would have been humbled by execution of firefighters doing their job. american soldiers are there to kill sand niggers, for american pleasure.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Geez, I thought I was being gentle by avoiding the first words that came to mind, router-tweeking p***y. My respect for those whose arses sit in nice lumbar supported leather seats while critiquing people whose lives are in the line-of-fire is a little thin. Perhaps real men should pass judgement on mistakes in battle, not ones whose biggest achievement can be measured in Nintendo levels.

Mercenary,

My point is not whether Iraq is better off today or not. Possibilities for the future exist today that never existed while Saddam and his spawn were in charge. What the Iraqis make of this opportunity is largely up to them. The Muslim world is happy to let them self destruct if it means a black eye for the US. Really quite pathetic.

The US's biggest mistake was basing this war on WMD, while muttering something about Saddam being a bad man. The US should have said, "One Genocide is enough, he must rule no longer, and must face trial." Most Iraqis would have understood, certainly the Shia and the Kurds. The message would have been one that could have been carried forward to other circumstances in the world.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

how the US keeps iraq on boilling point

hands over responsiblity, but not decision making
expects iraq army to do job without equipment(they share rifles!)
covering up extent of civil war

we dont hear iraqi voices who ALL HATE US at all

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

Saddam’s treatment of his people was NEVER an issue when the USA invaded. If the USA was so concerned about dictators destroying a country, they are very quite about Zimbabwe.

The USA went in for the sake of Israel and oil - period.

I agree with some of the other posters. The USA should pull out and let the Iraqis sort themselves out. It most probably will come down to a second Yugoslavia. It’s time for the Muslim world to step up to the plate and prevent it without the help of the USA who do not understand the culture and background of the region.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

**

How dare you make such a vicious attack on me - I completely detest accusations of being Canadian. Far from it, I am British.

Honestly… being labelled as a Canadian is one of the worst insults I’ve had all year. I have half a mind to formally protest to the mod about it affront.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

i donno what is more worse - calling somebody canadian or you protesting being called one.

in my opinion, calling soldiers name is unfair. they do what their commander asked them to. bush and chainy and rumsfield made the mistake, not the soldiers, right?

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

I must say that I agree..
The world should start to support the sunni insurgents and make sure that Iraq is where the legacy of the mythical power of the US is destroyed. America has lost this war no matter how much propaganda the Us and its allies feed us. We the general public take for granted the this satanic power is in power because it has the ability to make fiction into truths. ppl will also start to c that the term terrorist should actually read;freedom fighters and legit resistence.
Although most now c through the BS, they must help in the stabalisation of earth through the exposure of the treachery of the US towards the shia for they will most certainly be abandoned and most likely face annihilation by the minority sunni(the real ppl of god).

The US upon realisation that they were no match for the mujahideen, then started to blow up sunni and shia mosques and blamed each other so a sectarian crises had arisen. This they achieved but events on the ground are nothing like the dream that the satanists had in the white house. Their shia allies only now are starting to realise this which in turn has led to shia against shia violence.
Once America is dead, Israel and Iran should be the next target of the mujahideen as they too helped in the creation of sectarian conflict against a minority sunni in Iraq
by torturing their clergy, raping their women and children and killing the men.

Funny how this tiny minority is devastating the worlds superpowers as well as exacting retribution on the godless shias who drill holes in sunni heads and gauge out their eyes. Shias are now also realising what they have done and will live in fear in the near future for gods army will find them and serve justice where there was none.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

then y r u in Canada?

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters


Not all actions carried out by army-men are commanded to them by higher officers.

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Re: Trigger-happy in Baghdad - US troops butcher unarmed firefighters

This is so true. Does anyone really think the Average American soldier (aka terrorist) gives a siht about Iraqis??? Just look at the comments from average middle class americans being interviewed about the war, the rapes, the murders. Their response is… “Oh, but they must have seen one of their friends get killed”.

I hope all the f****ing American terrorists in Iraq die a horrible, horrible death.