Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Other Blogs

Here are two pieces I couldn't resist linking:

McCain is waiting for Tet (which btw was a major military victory)
No longer even loosely tethered to reality, John WALNUTS! McCain is now making his worst fears public: that something could happen in Iraq that might possibly turn Americans against the war!

Obama is uppity (and also articulate)
The answer is no, the article, which focuses on Obama's transformation since his 2000 House campaign, doesn't get any less nasty, although it doesn't explicitly repeat the racially loaded term "uppity" (that choice, apparently, belongs to whoever does the front page of Salon).

2 comments:

Robert L [Rivalries] said...

OK... interesting facts on those last two blogs. Apparently 15,000 then 30,000 and now 600,000 dead. Right.

Ask yourself another question... whatever the civilian death toll is
who did most of the killing? Was it us or was is the insurgents?

According to this flawed study:
"Deaths attributed to coalition forces accounted for 31 percent of the dead"

By the way this is what that study was based on:

"randomly selected 1,849 households across Iraq and asked questions about births and deaths and migration for the study led by Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. The Center for International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology cooperated.

They extrapolated the figures to reflect the national picture, saying Iraq's death rate had more than doubled since the invasion."

I'm sure that all the people were brutally honest and none of the killed were combatants. I'm also sure that the amazingly large sample of 1,849 was representative of the whole of Iraq; all the regions, all the neighboorhoods, and all the people.

The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the Vietcong and the NVA. It did however inflict casualties on American troops significant enough to make the people of America want the leave. I think Min knew it... that's why he din't mind sacrificing a couple thousand figthers (NVA/VC dead totaled some 45,000 and the number of prisoners nearly 7000).

What McCain is saying is very viable. It's also what most terrorist groups have learned by looking at our recent history. You can't win the war militairly but you can sure as hell win it via the media. I'm sure if Democrats win the presidential race the insurgents will get what they wanted. And another lesson fortified for the terrorists.

Unknown said...

I agree with Robert L [Rivalries] (he is very good at pointing out the truth) and to put this out there also that Minority Leader John Boehner said today, "Because they cannot defeat Americans on the battlefield, {which they can't!} al-Qaida and terrorist sympathizers around the world are trying to divide us here at home." And soon after Rep. Sam Johnson said, "Words can't fully describe the unspeakable damage of the anti-American efforts against the war back home to the guys on the ground in Vietnam," He was a POW released 34 years ago this last Tuesday.