How many civilan Iraqis have been killed by US forces? Maybe you refuse to acknowledge their deaths as anything but collateral damage, but at least have the intelligence to realize that Muslims will consider them to be innocent victims of US agression, and will therefore feel that terrorist bombings are nothing more than retaliation of like kind.
Proactive measures have been taken to avoid collatoral damage; the United States is not targeting innocent Iraqis; so the answer to your question is zero (0). Have innocents died in Iraq? Yes, but unintensionally! This is far different than Saddam Hussein's intensional murder of his people. The people of Iraq want the United States to stay until the mission is complete and the terrorist threat is neutralized. Those bringing murder and death to Iraq are the terrorists; best you remember that!
InTheNet thinks that an improvised explosive device is (rightly so) defined as a terrorist weapon. On the other hand, an American Tomahawk cruise missile landing on an open-air market is a little boo boo. You can't reason with these neo-cons. They are as radical -- in both speech and action -- as the Muslim terrorists. The only difference is that the neo-cons get someone else to die for them.
I'm here for another half hour or so - you got anything more planned? Only, this is actually quite good fun.
The point I was making that they are humans too who similarly believe that murder is wrong, hence they don't go around killing one another. However they do excuse or even advocate the killing of innocent people in Europe and America because misguided though it may be, it is their ideology which is driving this. If you or I were born in those countries and grew up in the same situation and "taught" similar things, we may have been doing similar thing without respecting rules of law or the devastation of lives which can only be thought of as wrong (perhaps akin to the old problem of determinism). Hence we cannot target these people IMO, but we can target the ideologies and give them no reason to follow such a path. Secondly, UK knew an attack was inevitable but the problem is short of martial law there is little that can be done to stop these things. Any chemistry student can suddenly go crazy, make a bomb and blow it up somewhere. The reason they don't do it is because they have no reason to. Hence I don't think it was Homeland security that put a stop to these attacks in America (how many have been successfully prosecuted for terrorism since 11thSep?). I am unfortunately a pessimistic person and believe that more attacks are only inevitable, even in America despite the measures taken unless something is done to fight these wrong ideologies.
Actually, to be fair to Neocons, Muslim terrorits also get others to die for them. So Neocons aren't actually worse than their "Islamofascists". They're just no better.
"Destroyed their country"? You think it was better when Saddam was killing and burying his citizens by the thousands, or now, when people are free and democratic reforms are opening up the nation, infrastructure reforms are improving utilities, and schools are open again and accepting girls and boys?
They are NOTHING like me And if you dont know what drives them, how do you know they are just like you or I ? You may choose to blame yourself or your governments, poverty or the support of Israel. I do not. I place the blame squarely on the heads of the barbaric savages that commit, sponsor and plan these acts.
Point taken. But I'm waiting for InTheNet to volunteer to detonate himself in the middle of a terrorist planning session. Instead, he'd rather send a kid from rural Mississippi to do the work for him. Suit up and ship out, soldier. Or is that cyst on your ass giving you fits?
What is it with this assumption that the military is made up of only folks from the South or rural areas ??
Well, as of 2 or 3 weeks ago, 82 of 275 Iraqi members of parliament (that's 30% called for the withdrawal of all American troops. I saw a news item yesterday that said the number is now over 100, though I have yet to find an authoritative link.
Who assumes that? But Mississippi is one of our fifty states. And it does have some rural areas. Or am I wrong?
I would strongly disagree. I always say a simple line that religion is divine but humans are flawed. Religion can and is often abused for personal views or purposes. Democracy is not synonomous with Christianity neither is the opposite true for Muslims. Are we forgetting the atrocities committed by the Totalitarian Christian Church or the acts of the KKK or even perhaps Hitler, all in the name of a flawed ideology based on religion (perhaps arguable in Hitler's case) - that is if you meant that by your statement. Both religions can be interpreted as saying you should fight or that you should not, in Christianity both dictum of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" and "offer the other cheek" exist. Also as far as I know, Jihad is only permitted when to defend Islam and ones beliefs, hence if there was force used to convert people or something similar then fighting would be compulsory (I am not sure about this as it was my conclusion followign various discussions). Jihad to me appears to be a tool for allowing the free practice of one's religion and should that be limited then Muslims must fight back. It is simply largely outdated since such freedoms are now common place in many countries (all Western countries that have been attacked). This is inevitably a simplification and the answer is not as simple as I have put it, otherwise there would be no doubt and those people would not continue their attacks however this is my view none the less.
Hmm. Low-ish marks for style and originality. Plus an extra deduction for getting my political affiliation wrong. I'm not a liberal. I'm an independent centrist.
So far, Americans have killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein did. We know this from the recent news report. I think Iraqis would suffer much less without this Bush invasion.
Actually to be fair to the terrorists, they are willing to blow themselves up. Neo-cons get others to die for them and don't risk a thing.
I don't entirely disagree with everything you say here, but Making no moral judgements on this but.... Between international sanctions and the war, most of that has been externally imposed. Iraq went from a 90=% literacy rate down to around 50 in the space of a few decades thanks to those sanctions. Saddam's regime was not conservative religious... grantinf that he was extraordinarily oppressive, women and men were oppressed about equally. There's plenty of bad things that Saddam did, lets just keep it on an even keel.
It is this lack of understanding of others that drives American foreign policy. They are humans who follow a different belief. As I said, had you been in their shoes, who is to say you wouldn't have ended up the same? You have been priviledged enough to be born in a good country into a decent family and then you view these people as something different and attack to kill them (American policies) without understanding what is driving them. The attack on Afghanistan was right since these people had found a stronghold but a war against terrorism is a war against an ideology scattered around the world, even present in America and England. That is why the Western world should attack the causes of terrorism such as poverty. If America was helping to end poverty around the world, how much more likely would it be that those people would support these extremists and give them safe harbour?
Sometimes being lost in semantic discussions takes you further away from an understanding of what is going on, and what to do about it. Terrorism is not just merely a tactic, but it is a tactic that is universally employed. It pretty much does not matter how you define it, as long as you try to put a definition to it the following conclusion is inescapable: the US and Israel are the single biggest employers of that tactic. The only reason it does not appear that way for someone sitting in somewhere in America, is because their lives are not being threatened by American or Israeli attacks. The same is true if you are sitting in Europe. Here is a clue: whenever a nation implicitly or explicitly considers certain circumstances as justifying using "nuclear weapons" to blow away an entire city or even society, they are endorcing terrorism on a massive scale. Unless you believe that the residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not the targets of the atomic bombs dropped on those cities, but rather Truman was seeking to hit some military target and they were just "collateral damages", then this one example should illustrate the nonsense about the pseduo moralism that are employed. The notion that the US does not "target" civilians is absurd even on its face Take the case of Iran's nuclear program. The US is actively considering attacking Iran's facilities. Well, besides that fact that a nuclear plant is itself a civilian facility, those who are working there are civilians too. They are the targets. Not some soldier with guns. Indeed, any soldiers dying protecting those sites are themselves the real "collateral damage" in such an attack. Lets put it this way: If Iran was considering sending "covert teams" to blow away a US nucelar reactor, you certainly would consider it terrorism. Yet that is exactly one of the "options" actively debated in the US to stop Iran's nuclear program! American terrorism certainly goes way beyond the "collateral damage" cases involving the US trying to hit one target and incidentally killing people not within the real scope of the target. It even goes beyond the obvious cases when then US is waging war, intentionally targetting numerous economic and infrastructure targets such as factories, bridges, government builidings, power plants, etc. Despite all its facilities, forces, power, riches, all its advantages, the US even does the kind of things that generally the very weak are forced to do when they are waging war. Yes. The US even sponsors and supports terrorist groups in various societies it wants to undermine. Every "opposition" group in every country the US has in the past, or which the US opposes today, that is willing to further its political agenda by unlawful means, is -- applying FBI's own definition -- a domestic "terrorist" group. And God knows the US has directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly, funded and supported many of those! There are even 100 members of the US Congress lobbying the US to officially support the MEK -- not just any terrorist organization, not just a hated cult group, not just a bunch of lying traitors, but a group that has killed many Americans in the past! Because they have not only bombed and killed many Iranians, but also Americans, they are in the US terrorist list. Yet, if they can be useful right now, someone want to use them! Indeed, they are doing so, unofficially and indirectly, through certain militias established in Iraq run by CIA's former "interim Iraqi prime minister" Alawi. To illustrate, incidentally, how silly all this can get, let me quote from Professor Beeman, director of the Middle East studies department at Brown University, in his article entitled "Anatomy of a Smear Campaign".
I completely understand the jihadist movement I have no illusions about their goals or their motives -it's to kill and maim as many people as they can until we leave them alone to transform their homelands into a real life version of Bedrock If you are trying to say I paint all Muslims with the same brush, then you are a complete and utter fool because nowhere have I ever said such a thing. I've met more Muslims than you have hairs on your balls and I can easily make the distinction between them and a savage like Zarqawi or Bin Laden It's YOUR lack of understanding of what these people are about that is the real crux of the issue
You are so fvcking clueless that you are hopeless. The people funding terrorism are not in poverty, moron, they have more fvcking money than you can ever hope to have. There is not much terrorism being exported to America from Africa, where poverty exists unlike any other place on earth. You are just stupid and in denial, and fvcking attitudes like yours will get us all killed.