IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN!
3000 casualties on September 11, 2001, Arianna. That's all we've been talking about since. That's why we're at war. Get a clue, sweetie.
We are fools if we attack Saddam at his strong point (Baghdad) with simple ground forces. Much better to lay seige - or even better attack his weak points and undermine his will to fight.
A MOUT campaign accomplishes little and risks much. To hear generals talk about it in this article should be a warning flag to anyone.
Please!
In the Gulf War, BTW, we lost 147 killed and 457 wounded. Estimates prior to that were in the tens of thousands. I'd go out on a limb here and suggest that the reason nobody's talking about the estimates is that they're not particularly accurate.
And Beenliedto, I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not but I'll take you at face value: I'm willing to fight for oil. Our whole economy is built on oil. Frankly, I don't need any other reason and if Saddam is fixing once again to find a way to control the region's oil, I say we take him out and anyone else we have to.
Because the casualties in battle will be lower than the casualties of a nuclear first strike by Saddam.
Tick tock, LET'S ROLL!
We don't know, Adrianna. No one knows. The future hasn't happened yet. The only thing we do know is that the same experts who are telling us 10,000 this time told us 10,000 last time as well. So even though they call themselves experts, they aren't any better at knowing the future than anyone else.
Asking people to tell us the future in advance is not a reasonable thing to do. It is an obstructionist tactic, and a dishonest one.
What makes it doubly dishonest is that you have not also asked, anywhere in your article, how many Americans might die in a chemical or biological attack on an American city, or in multiple, simultaneous attacks on American cities. This is the tradeoff Americans must make, and they must do so with imperfect knowledge. None of us knows for sure whether Saddam will supply terrorists with weapons or know-how from his arsenal. None of us knows whether they would be able to get them into the country, or deliver them effectively. We hope not, but we don't know. What we do know is that if they succeed, they could kill upwards of 100,000 Americans on a single day... and that's with what they have today. If they acquire nuclear weaponry, all bets are off.
Against this horrifying prospect we must weight the dangers of war. There will be casualties; for sure the number will not be zero. Maybe it will be hundreds... maybe thousands. No one knows.
No one knows either side of this. We must guess, hopefully in an informed way. Some will look at Saddam Hussein's track record and conclude that he cannot be trusted with such weaponry. Others will see a man who is belligerent, but not insane, and who can be deterred. No one can possibly know which side is right.
One thing we can do is assess the penalty for being wrong. If we trust deterrence and that turns out to be wrong, some six-figure number of Americans will die, almost all of them innocent civilians. If nuclear weaponry is involved, we might also have large areas of geography that will be uninhabitable for hundreds or thousands of years. Either way, we will then have the same war that is being proposed now.
Or we can have the war now, and skip the part about the hundred thousand dead American civilians.
Or, we can sit back and wait to see what happens. If you're wrong, Andrianna, you'll be very, very wrong.
Tough to say Arianna. Could just be a 5 or 6 sniper victims. Could be tens of thousands--beyond those at WTC on 9-11 Oh, these are US civilian causualties if we let Saddam go on as Clinton did. You really are a disappointment. Stick to things you can opine on, like BJs and lying about it.......
Yes, of course you're right Huffi, and when and if he drops poisonous gas on his own population,he won't be descerning who is an American Military Citizen or Iraqi Citizen EITHER.Ms. Libertarian herself had to include the word Republican in her reference the his elite units too.She's as relevant as Bill Maher thinks he is.LOL