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America is just too nice

shecky

Master Poster
shecky
Joined
May 24, 2002
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sez Yaron Brook.

"Shamefully, the Bush Administration has been unwilling to make hostile Iraqi civilians pay for their crimes," said Dr. Brook. "Time and again, it has treated Iraqi lives as sacrosanct and American security and soldiers as dispensable. It is in the name of sparing civilians that our soldiers have been ordered to follow crippling rules of engagement that have cost hundreds of their lives. It was in the name of sparing civilians that we withdrew from Fallujah in April, and in November allowed thousands of insurgents to flee to places like Mosul. Such capitulations have preserved and emboldened the insurgents, while giving hope to Islamic terrorists worldwide.

"To win this war," concluded Dr. Brook, "we need a fundamental shift in our moral priorities. We need to see the military place the lives of Americans--including American soldiers--above the lives of Iraqi civilians. To those who insist that we continue to sacrifice for the sake of Iraqi civilians, I say that the death of 19 Americans yesterday, and the many more to come, are on your heads."
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Does the U.S. need to be more ruthless? Is the prize worth the extra destruction? Does America have the stomach for it?
 
shecky said:

Does the U.S. need to be more ruthless? Is the prize worth the extra destruction? Does America have the stomach for it?
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It does seem to me to be an "all or nothing" situation.
 
Let's see ... about 1300 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war, and a recent study estimates the civilian death toll to be about 100,000. Yep, that's clearly way too sacrosanct. An American must be worth more than 77 Arabs, otherwise forget it.

Irony aside, both international and local support for the occupation of Iraq are kind of fragile already. Is this a good time to call for the killing of more Iraqi civilians?
 
Yahweh said:
100,000 is an overestimate. http://iraqbodycount.net/ estimates the bodycount between 15,000 and 17,000.

So, the math indicates one armed US soldier is worth ~12 Iraqis.
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The two numbers can't be compared like that, IBC only counts cases reparted in the media, also AFAOK they only count those killed directly by the insurgency and the US military, while the 100.000 estimate is an attempt to find the total overmortality after and presumably caused by the invasion. That being said the 100.000 number is very uncertain.
 
Kerberos said:
The two numbers can't be compared like that, IBC only counts cases reparted in the media, also AFAOK they only count those killed directly by the insurgency and the US military, while the 100.000 estimate is an attempt to find the total overmortality after and presumably caused by the invasion. That being said the 100.000 number is very uncertain.
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Given that the IBC includes all direct and indirect casualties of armaments regardless of the individual circumstances, as well as indirect mortality that they subjectively attribute to the invasion (for example disrupted foods, water electricity supply etc.), I would say that the lower numbers have a very wide catchment.

Neither could you argue that there is any political bias retarding the IBC numbers. In fact the political leanings of the project are quite explicitly against the military intervention.
 
Conservatives generally like to point out how few casualties we're suffering over there. We don't even count Iraqi casualties. We've never fought a major war with this kind of media coverage before. If we loosened the rules of engagement, we'd further anger/alienate the population.

Germany and Japan were successes, but they were homogenous societies that had suffered clear defeats. Iraq is neither of those, and I don't think it's realistic to expect cooperation regardless of how many civilian casualties we inflict.
 
Wasn't Vietnam the last time the US public eventually got somewhat sick of the use of bodybag counts as a measure of "military success"? To the point that what was originally a publicly backed military venture became effectively unwinnable due to public opposition? (Yes, I'm being simplistic, to make the point.) Unfortunately it DOES sound like Brook hasn't heeded lessons like that...

Also, it's blatant racism, isn't it? Or am I stating the bleeding obvious again...
 
It appears to be a strategy taken from 'butch cassidy and the sundance kid'. Now that they are holed up in the corral, the only option is to shoot their way out.

As to Mr Brooks rationalisation, it was the US that asked itself in.
 
You left out the kookiest part of the op-ed piece written about the president of the Ayn Rand Institute.

The blame for the murder of 19 Americans in Mosul yesterday lies not only with the insurgents who initiated the attack, but also with the Bush Administration's suicidal policies, said Dr. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute. "The insurgency would have been crushed long ago, and yesterday's attack averted, were it not for America's altruistic policy of placing the lives of Iraqi civilians above its own self-defense.

"America must destroy the insurgency if we are to implement a non-threatening government in Iraq," said Dr. Brook. "This can be done, but to do so we must make the insurgency's complicit civilian population--those who harbor and support the insurgents--pay for the violence that they abet. We must enforce their complete surrender to our presence. Thanks to such a policy, during the occupation of Japan zero soldiers were killed by insurgents and the threat posed by the country was ended.
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Summing up: if we had killed more of those complicit civilians, there wouldn't have been a suicide bombing.

Conclusion: the Ayn Rand Institute did not do much vetting before selecting a president.
 
Isnt Iraq its own country? If Iraiqs are commiting crimes shouldnt the Iraqi govt do the punishing.
 
Ayn Rand Institute did not do much vetting before selecting a president.

We are there as aggressors - well meaning, hopefully benevolent ones. We should own our behavior, not rationalize it as some kind of 'defense'. To do otherwise is to affirm the terrorist position: that aggression is a valid type of defense.

The Ayn Rand group is promoting terrorism as a valid defense.
 
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