Keeping it short

[unixronin]

Two good articles in Iraq, by Tony Blankley and by Thomas Friedman.

Best quote (from Blankley):

"Fighting and winning always impress.  Even merely fighting and persisting impress.  Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general.  He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there.  They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States.  What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?"

Comments

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

If you think anything we've done in Iraq makes 'Saddam Hussein look like a great humanitarian', there's a ship leaving your planet and headed for Earth any day now.

[ossuarian.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty outrageous thing to say. It's a hyperbole. I just Googled it, and he executed 600,000 civilians. 500,000 died in the war with Iran. That's just over a million people in five years. It's really hard to imagine what could be worse.

Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths since the U.S. occupation are between 500,000 and one million in five years. So the U.S. occupation and its failure to keep order is killing people somewhere between two and four times as fast as Saddam Hussein.

You yourself called Iraq "the smoothest reconstruction since Berlin after World War II". I try to remind myself that you're just trying to get under the skin of your liberal peers, and you're just paraphrasing what you read in Fark.

In Baghdad,they bolt manhole covers to the ground so it's tougher to dump dead bodies into them so the sewer won't get choked. We did that.