Speaking of which - David W - you might want to delete Mark Konrad’s post; I’m not sure what the Swedish laws are on anti-semitism, but I’m pretty sure you’re breaking the law in Germany by having the Vanguard link on your site.”

Our host and their servers are American; that should mean AFOE need not adhere to any other countries laws. Nevertheless I will delete it for being repugnant, and spam to boot.

Speaking of which - David W - you might want to delete Mark Konrad’s post; I’m not sure what the Swedish laws are on anti-semitism, but I’m pretty sure you’re breaking the law in Germany by having the Vanguard link on your site.

And who is seriously raising these issues? Patrick G, who is trying to portray America as uniquely culpable for Saddam’s crimes?”

Can’t go two sentences without doing it again, I see.

And no, I do not refer to the U.S. as AmeriKKKa.
And No, I never said “America endorsed Saddam’s killings”

But yes, I do consider the U.S. Invasion and Occupation to have been as murderous in the past 8 months as Saddam Hussein’s 30 year reign. if you have another way of normalizing that comparison other than dividing kills by length of time, say so.

And who is seriously raising these issues? Patrick G, who is trying to portray America as uniquely culpable for Saddam’s crimes?

“For example does he really believe that Patrick (G) refers to the US as AmeriKKKa? If not it is a spurious irrelevance.”

He hasn’t said it on here, but his arguments are precisely the same ones I see all the time from the sorts of people who do say “AmeriKKKa.” He trouts out precisely the same old falsehoods and misrepresentations that are the bread and butter of the Indymedia crowd, and I don’t think it at all spurious to point out just what sort of ideological company he keeps: “by their fruits shall ye know them.”

I certainly have no problem with sober criticism of the way in which things have proceeded in Iraq thus far, or even the way in which the case was built for the war, but having to constantly deal with ludicrous arguments of the sort advanced by Patrick G on here gets on one’s nerves after a while. The same old tired falsehoods being advanced again and again, the same old false equivalences being drawn ad nauseum, the same old ridiculous rhetoric that attempts to pass off anti-Americanism as principled “anti-imperialism”; not even Job would have reserves of patience deep enough to deal with the sheer amounts of this sort of nonsense that I’ve encountered on the web over the past few months.

Some things are simply too outrageous for those who say them to expect polite responses. Telling lies like “America endorsed Saddam’s killings”, or attempting to equate the million and a half deaths under Saddam to the casualties, however many, of the recent war, are two such examples, and I wouldn’t be any more polite if I were dealing with a Holocaust revisionist either.

I think he has some good points but spoils them by piling straw men upon his opponents.

I wish he would stop and address some of the issues raised instead of putting words in people’s mouths and raising false oppositions.

For example does he really believe that Patrick (G) refers to the US as AmeriKKKa? If not it is a spurious irrelevance.

Does he really think that Patrick is making an argument from authority rather than defending himself against the vague charge of unreasonableness?

Does he really think that the status quo in Iraq and the US/UK invasion carried out the way it was were the only possibilities? If not his charge against Patrick is his own invention and also represents a failure to address the issue of who was responsible for the previous status quo. Murder or homicide, take your choice.

I’ve read his posts on linguistics so I know he can be very sharp which makes this aggressive slopiness seem all the more disrespectful.

On the matter of who is better I do think we are but I think that it is disasterous for that to be the test of our behaviour. You can be very, very bad and still be better than Saddam.

Also Saddam had one solution to managing the disparate population of Iraq. It wasn’t very nice but it was relatively stable. If we don’t have a plan we could behave much better but still make things worse, just not directly.

You seem to be suffering from the delusion that I take, or ought to take, my moral bearings from what some “religious leader” has to say. Hasn’t anyone told you that the argument from authority is an invalid form of reasoning? Of course, in the faux-sophisticated “vision” of the world that is so typical of those of you on the anti-American left, you probably believe that all “fascist warmongers” like myself must be bible-thumping idiot cowboys just itching to take directions from the Southern Baptist Convention … Whatever. I’ll leave you to your pretentions of intellectual superiority.

I’m not saying I doubt her report. What I am saying is that the sort of nastiness she’s reporting is not characteristic of what’s going on in Iraq as a whole.

“Can you be any more revisionist?”

That’s just dumb. You think the Iraqis would have been better off if Saddam had been free of all restrictions imposed as part of the Gulf War settlement? That the end of the no-fly-zones, the end of the arms embargo and all the rest would have made life in Iraq oh-so-wonderful? Why don’t you tell that to the Kurds while you’re at it?

And while we’re at it, please explain to me why the Kurds were able to enjoy so much lower infant mortality than the rest of Iraq if the Oil-for-Food program were really to blame for Iraqi suffering. Please, I beg of you, explain why it is that the invading American troops were able to find several stashes of foreign currency amounting to several billions of dollars, and numerous palaces appointed in the most luxurious style, if it was “AmeriKKKa”, rather than Saddam’s selfishness and profligacy, that was to blame for all the hardship that existed in Iraq?

I’m not going to expend more energy in vain arguing with you, as it clear to me that you’re far too gone in your “America is the Great Satan” delusions to be reachable by reason. I wonder how it is possible for you to sleep at night, knowing that you’re playing the role of apologist for the mass murderer called Saddam. What next for you, a defense of the much-maligned Kim Jong Il?

Disgusting!

Her version of events is corroborated by many other sources. She just happens to be a whole lot nearer to the epicenter of what’s going on.

(Never mind that most religious leaders, barring the Southern Baptist Convention, actually condemned this war as unjustified)

So between war now and a likely civil war later (after Saddam Hussein’s death), you would choose war now ? Very humane of you.

“France, Germany, Belgium and Russia, all of which strove to maintain a vicious status quo even as they mouthed pieties about human rights and concern for the Iraqi people’s suffering, and”

Can you be any more revisionist ?
It was the U.S. and the U.K. that was enforcing that vicious status quo.
Likewise with the pieties about human rights and concern for the Iraqi people’s suffering.