So you got nothing?

{whatever….}

but thanks for not wishing a nasty death on me!

Let me see if I can summarize…a real challenge with someone with writing skills as poor as yours…but here we go…

“paul statement (repeat for about 3 pages), quote the article….where is the evidence”?
Then quote something showing that the violent death rate in a war zone is worse than new york…no question, no statement, nothing.

Paul, unlike the free-newspaper movie review section, or the “doctoral committee” for a sociology degree, discussion and argument require some sort of synthesis of information, crafting an idea. I’m sorry, but your incoherent babble just doesn’t qualify…no matter HOW many times you post…or how many of your “collegues” try to goad me on various threads….(I would comment here about people fighting their own battles but I suspect character issues are lost on our resident leftists…)

“In the 29-day period following the mosque attack, 955 people were murdered in Baghdad province, which includes the capital city and its outskirts, according to the U.S. military.

That’s more than the number of murders in New York City, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, Boston and Seattle combined for all of 2004, according to the FBI. Those cities have a combined population of 10.8 million, compared with Baghdad province’s 7 million.

An additional 146 Baghdad residents were killed in bombings during that period, according to the U.S. military.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060404/ts_usatoday/civilianstakeuparmsamidiraqiviolence

… most of them don t allow comments, and most of the ones that do don t allow ANY dissenting opinions…

Puhleeeeze

I don’t post on conservative boards. Then again, most of them don’t allow comments, and most of the ones that do don’t allow ANY dissenting opinions.

A polite request. Is there any way you could round up some decent trolls for this site of yours? The quality of trollery around here is just abysmal. Is there some kind of service you could look into, maybe Rent-a-Troll? Seriously. What do you have to do to find a conervative troll with even an ounce of brains or integrity who won’t disappear the minute someone calls them on their bullshit only to return later with empty non-sequitors and whiny cries of victimhood? Does such a creature even exist? Anyway, maybe it’s something you could look into. Thanks.

The rate of killings in Iraq is already as bad as during the horrendous 1975-1991 Lebanese Civil War, in which 150,000 to 200,000 people were killed over 16 years — an average of between 9,375 and 12,500 people were killed there per year.

These comparisons, of course, can be misleading because in those conflicts, as in almost all civil wars, the rate of killing is not uniform but explodes in peaks and then settles down at lower levels for long periods of time.

But the comparisons are unfortunately revealing in another way — once the kind of polarizing aimless cycle of sectarian retaliatory killings between paramilitary forces in the two communities that have lived together for many centuries begins, it is often impossible to end it for decades, or before hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or, as was the case in Lebanon, both disasters have happened.

http://www.wpherald.com/print.php?StoryID=20060403-030211-9401r

It seems that way when your head is hollow. Now, do you care to debate Frame’s points or are you going to run away from the thread like you did when I challenged you?

And you have yet to identify the most compelling argument made by the article you linked to. I’ve identified what I think is the stupidest point in the whole article: the flat out contradiction of the last paragraph in which “the most significant trend” in Iraq is both identified as happening and denied.

Other brainstorms include the the notion that Arabs don’t have a word for quit which is why the insurgency has gone on so long but, of course, neither do Americans, which is why we are winning. Okay.

Then there’s the repeated celebration of MORE violence as a sign that the violence will soon subside:

“Many of these people want revenge, and they all have guns. Many, especially those that belong to the police, or militias, are taking their revenge. The Sunni Arabs want protection, for they cannot muster enough guns to defend themselves. Now the Sunni Arabs want the Americans to stay, at least until there’s some assurance that the Kurd and Shia Arab vengeance attacks have died down.”

I’m sorry, what? Where’s the evidence that Sunni Arabs want us to stay to protect them from the Shiites that they’ve been killing for three years? Is the guy basically arguing that revenge killings are a good thing for Iraq? Where’s the evidence that the insurgency can no longer stage it’s own attacks or keep itself supplied? This statement flies in the face of the death toll in Iraq which reached 900 civilians last month.

Or how about this gem:

“They have noticed that if you attack the Americans, chances are you will die, and the Americans will just keep on keeping on. It used to be that the Sunni Arabs could take heart from the occasional attack where they killed a few Americans. But no longer. Everyone knows the trend, and doesn’t want to be another victim of it.”

Really? The insurgents always knew that attacking Americans would lead to their deaths, that’s why they use guerilla and terrorist tactics instead of direct assaults. At the same time, attacks on US forces have slowed while attacks on civilians have gone up. Here’s a report from today’s Seattle Times:

“A suicide bomber rammed a pickup truck filled with explosives hidden in dates into a Shiite mosque in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 10 Iraqis … Some witnesses of Monday’s truck-bomb attack described the mosque as a bastion of followers of al-Sadr, whose militia has been accused of kidnapping Sunni Arabs and attacking Sunni mosques in retaliation for attacks against Shiites.”

It’s more of the same. Here’s an article about GOOD news from Mosulwhich nevertheless is forced to include this:

“To be sure, things here remain precarious. Insurgent attacks continue apace. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are a daily concern. Prominent politicians and their families have been targeted time and again. University professors are afraid to talk to the media. Residents complain of frequent kidnappings and gunfire in the streets.

“It’s a little better now, but I still don’t leave my home unless I have to for work,” says Saleh Ahmed, an Iraqi police officer. “No one is safe still.” As if to hammer home his point, Mr. Ahmed sits in the front seat of a blue and white police pick-up truck with a blown-out windshield and pockmarked doors, the scars of a recent IED attack.”

That’s a freakin police officer talking!

THen there’s this from your article:

“But now the Sunni Arabs have noted that much of the country is getting wealthier even without the oil. The Sunni Arabs have been living off oil for so long that they forgot there are other ways to make a living.”

Really? And where are the facts and figures to back this up? As other posters have noted, the unemployment rate in Iraq is approaching 40 percent.

From the artcile linked to by z_adura above:

“Much of the Iraqi population has seen no palpable benefits in the way that they live their lives. And both those inside and outside Iraq point to a deterioration in pre-war standards. Some would even argue that the vast majority of Iraqis are poorer today. And, with rampant unemployment estimated to be as high as 40%, there is little to dissuade Iraqis from joining the ranks of a bloody insurgency.

 Economics has a lot to do with helping Iraq settle down and get on with a better life. Without jobs and without some economic development Iraq will be locked in its furore and depression longer than needs be, says Paul Sullivan, a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown University.

 It has been very difficult to make any realistic progress either with physical reconstruction or with any kind of administrative or economic reform programme with the security situation so fraught, says David Butter of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).  The programmes that were envisaged in the early part of the post war period have all been very difficult to implement and there has not been that much that has come through to replace them. ”

Now would you like to debate any of these points?