'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi... You know, so what?'

[cockneyrebel]

I support the right of people to armed resistance and no doubt many US soldiers are fuckers.

But that doesn't mean you write off the whole US working class.

 

[nino_savatte]

You can hardly claim that things were worse under Saddam, from looking at the situation today.

Perhaps if you were a member of some underground political rebel movement then you could claim at least a portion of the danger which is feted out to Iraqi civilians on a daily basis today, but even then - at least you could claim it was your own choice.

How are things not worse today than under Saddam? Whatever you think of him, there was order and the country wasn't teetering on the brink of civil war.

Saddam was the last in a long line of brutal Iraqi rulers. The British mandate of Mesopotamia/Iraq saw a great deal of bloodshed, much of it caused by the British.

Many people say that "Saddam killed his own people" or "he massacred thousands". Hikmat Suleyman did the same thing...only it was all done under the watchful eye of the British. Google the "Simele Massacre" for more info.

 

[Aldebaran]

You know some strange people then.

For the rest they are absolutely normal. They must wear invisible, selective pink coloured blinders that make such people magically disappear.

I gave up discussing this long ago. If hints to what is not all that perfect in US society provokes a reply, it is to instruct me - the innocent ignorant outsider - that homeless people are there because they like it (as in: "free" in a "free nation", you know) or because they are "illegal aliens" who want to be there equally because at home they have even less and they are not "free".
The Classic however remains in my book the firm belief that poor US people are definitely counting as middle class elswhere and they are just too lazy to get a job.

salaam.

 

[butchersapron]

Bring the other one back please.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

For the rest they are absolutely normal. They must wear invisible, selective pink coloured blinders that make such people magically disappear.

I gave up discussing this long ago. If hints to what is not all that perfect in US society provokes a reply, it is to instruct me - the innocent ignorant outsider - that homeless people are there because they like it (as in: "free" in a "free nation", you know) or because they are "illegal aliens" who want to be there equally because at home they have even less and they are not "free".
The Classic however remains in my book the firm belief that poor US people are definitely counting as middle class elswhere and they are just too lazy to get a job.

salaam.

None of the Americans I know would subscribe to this 'classic' point of view...perhaps they're not real Americans?

Louis MacNeice

 

[cockneyrebel]

How are things not worse today than under Saddam? Whatever you think of him, there was order and the country wasn't teetering on the brink of civil war.

Saddam was the last in a long line of brutal Iraqi rulers. The British mandate of Mesopotamia/Iraq saw a great deal of bloodshed, much of it caused by the British.

Many people say that "Saddam killed his own people" or "he massacred thousands". Hikmat Suleyman did the same thing...only it was all done under the watchful eye of the British. Google the "Simele Massacre" for more info.

I think that is exactly Uberdogs point! And I think he was in turn mis-reading what I was saying.......

 

[nino_savatte]

I think that is exactly Uberdogs point! And I think he was in turn mis-reading what I was saying.......

Fair enough. It was hard to see it underneath everything else.

 

[cockneyrebel]

For the rest they are absolutely normal. They must wear invisible, selective pink coloured blinders that make such people magically disappear.

I gave up discussing this long ago. If hints to what is not all that perfect in US society provokes a reply, it is to instruct me - the innocent ignorant outsider - that homeless people are there because they like it (as in: "free" in a "free nation", you know) or because they are "illegal aliens" who want to be there equally because at home they have even less and they are not "free".
The Classic however remains in my book the firm belief that poor US people are definitely counting as middle class elswhere and they are just too lazy to get a job.

I give up.....

But you might wanna check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

The poverty rate in the United States is one of the highest among the post-industrialized developed world.

"While in any given year 12 to 15 percent of the population is poor, over a ten-year period 40 percent experience poverty in at least one year because most poor people cycle in and out of poverty; they don't stay poor for long periods. Poverty is something that happens to the working class, not some marginal 'other' on the fringes of society." - Michael Zweig, What's Class Got to do With It, American Society in the Twenty-first Century, 2004

The prevalence of food insecurity rose from 10.7% in 2001 to 11.1% in 2002

21% of all children in the United States live in poverty, but 46% of African American children and 40% of Latino children live in poverty

 

[Aldebaran]

None of the Americans I know would subscribe to this 'classic' point of view...perhaps they're not real Americans?

I wouldn't know how people can become an "unreal Amreican" and I don't think you would find many volunteers for such an experiment, but it is worth a try

salaam.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

That sounds like the sort of thing you hear from the thousands of US middle-class college "Libertarians" who seem to clutter up the internet. "There's no poor people in America, and if there are, it's just because they're crap and lazy."

(Not, of course, that there are not equivalents of that everywhere else, but there's a whole political "philosophy" devoted to it there, which is actually considered respectable.)

 

[cockneyrebel]

Also by Aldebaran's logic black and latino people in the US must be lazier as they suffer higher poverty rates.....

 

[FridgeMagnet]

To be fair I don't think it's his logic, he is telling us what he's been told by Americans without saying that it's true. He needs to meet a better standard of Americans I think.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Also by Aldebaran's logic black and latino people in the US must be lazier as they suffer higher poverty rates.....

You hear that quite a bit too, though people rarely say it directly. It's more "there's a welfare-dependency culture now", "if we stopped government handouts it would make them more self-reliant" and so on.

 

[Aldebaran]

That sounds like the sort of thing you hear from the thousands of US middle-class college "Libertarians" who seem to clutter up the internet. "There's no poor people in America, and if there are, it's just because they're crap and lazy."

I heard this from adults and children when I was a child. Maybe it is also believed by the population you describe, but what I find the most amazing is the firm belief that anyone ever classified as "poor" in the USA is -at least- "middle class" elswhere. I seriously don't know where they get that idea.

(Not, of course, that there are not equivalents of that everywhere else, but there's a whole political "philosophy" devoted to it there, which is actually considered respectable.)

To me it always came across as being out of touch with reality outside their own experiences with life in the USA, combined with a necessity to trivialise any obvious problem that might become visible nevertheless.
In my idea this is at the root of the problems after the hurricane Katrina. People just couldn't imagine some citizens were simply too poor to pack and leave.

Exactly the same counts when it came to "evacuate" entire cities like Fallujah. How on earth could people "stay" when "warned" on forehand was not understood by anyone I talked about it.
Hence if civilians got trapped, wounded or killed that was of their own making. (or they were "insurgents" anyway.)

salaam.

 

[Aldebaran]

To be fair I don't think it's his logic, he is telling us what he's been told by Americans without saying that it's true. He needs to meet a better standard of Americans I think.

Some are my personal friends since childhood but with the disadvantage to be raised and living in an unrealistic bubble of convenience. I think I need to stay out of there for a while, to be honest

salaam.

 

[treelover]

Yeah, years ago my mate in the band the Farm, toured right across America, he said exactly the same, he said many of the towns he saw wouldn't look out of place in the third world or in pre war Russia. Poverty is the U.S's dirty secret, you won't see such scenes in Hollywood films, etc.



'You know some strange people then. My girlfriends brother lives in the US and when he and his family went on holiday in the south last year they were absolutely stunned by some of the poverty they saw - people living in roadside shacks etc.'

 

[TAE]

I hope this will be investigated further:

A number of interviewees revealed that the military will attempt to frame innocent bystanders as insurgents, often after panicked American troops have fired into groups of unarmed Iraqis. The veterans said the troops involved would round up any survivors and accuse them of being in the resistance while planting Kalashnikov AK47 rifles beside corpses to make it appear that they had died in combat.

Sounds like the US military knows that there are lots of innocent people in Iraqi prisons.

For example, I'm wondering what actually happened here:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/function/...en-tagesschau_englisch_nachrichten-435-rdf-mp

 

[slaar]

The full Nation report is in the Guardian today. It's grim reading on many fronts, but well done to the journalists, it's very important this stuff gets out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2125142,00.html

Iraqi culture, identity and customs were, according to at least a dozen soldiers and marines interviewed by The Nation, openly ridiculed in racist terms, with troops deriding "haji food," "haji music" and "haji homes." In the Muslim world, the word "haji" denotes someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is now used by American troops in the same way "gook" was used in Vietnam or "raghead" in Afghanistan.

"You can honestly see how the Iraqis in general or even Arabs in general are being, you know, kind of like dehumanized," said Specialist Englehart. "Like it was very common for United States soldiers to call them derogatory terms, like camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger."

According to Sergeant Millard and several others interviewed, "It becomes this racialized hatred towards Iraqis." And this racist language, as Specialist Harmon pointed out, likely played a role in the level of violence directed at Iraqi civilians. "By calling them names," he said, "they're not people anymore. They're just objects."

According to descriptions culled from interviews with thirty-eight veterans who rode in convoys--guarding such runs as Kuwait to Nasiriya, Nasiriya to Baghdad and Balad to Kirkuk--when these columns of vehicles left their heavily fortified compounds they usually roared down the main supply routes, which often cut through densely populated areas, reaching speeds over sixty miles an hour. Governed by the rule that stagnation increases the likelihood of attack, convoys leapt meridians in traffic jams, ignored traffic signals, swerved without warning onto sidewalks, scattering pedestrians, and slammed into civilian vehicles, shoving them off the road. Iraqi civilians, including children, were frequently run over and killed. Veterans said they sometimes shot drivers of civilian cars that moved into convoy formations or attempted to pass convoys as a warning to other drivers to get out of the way.

In the winter of 2004, Sergeant Campbell was driving near a particularly dangerous road in Abu Gharth, a town west of Baghdad, when he heard gunshots. Sergeant Campbell, who served as a medic in Abu Gharth with the 256th Infantry Brigade from November 2004 to October 2005, was told that Army snipers had fired fifty to sixty rounds at two insurgents who'd gotten out of their car to plant IEDs. One alleged insurgent was shot in the knees three or four times, treated and evacuated on a military helicopter, while the other man, who was treated for glass shards, was arrested and detained.

"I come to find out later that, while I was treating him, the snipers had planted--after they had searched and found nothing--they had planted bomb-making materials on the guy because they didn't want to be investigated for the shoot," Sergeant Campbell said. (He showed The Nation a photograph of one sniper with a radio in his pocket that he later planted as evidence.) "And to this day, I mean, I remember taking that guy to Abu Ghraib prison--the guy who didn't get shot--and just saying 'I'm sorry' because there was not a damn thing I could do about it.... I mean, I guess I have a moral obligation to say something, but I would have been kicked out of the unit in a heartbeat. I would've been a traitor."

"As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky," said Sergeant Jefferies, who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a day. "That means stop to most Americans, and that's a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please freeze, but an open hand means stop. That's a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they're saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they're saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you're shooting pregnant women."

 

[Fruitloop]

FUBAR is the appropriate term I think.