Quake3World

Scourge wrote:

scared? wrote:
I think you're full of shit, and I really don't care either way.

scared? wrote: Dumbo alert!

EtUL wrote:Victory for the morons!

Ryoki wrote: As a counterpoint to your counterpoint; all those Iraqis with guns (and huge stockpiles unaccounted for explosive stuff) sure managed to make things very difficult indeed for the best equipped, most modern army in the world for a good time - at least until some evil cunts decided to make it a shiite vs sunnite thing*.

seremtan wrote:i'd like at least one link for this plz. frankly, i'm skeptical. i could just about believe that the occupation forces threw a few cups of gasoline on an already burning fire, but actually start the fire? in a country they're notorious for not really understanding in the first place?

“I swear to you that we have very good information,” Fisk recounts, “One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: ‘Come back in a week.’ When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn’t get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up.”

As incredible as it sounds, Fisk assures us that he heard the same story many times from many different sources. As he says later in the same article:

“There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd – maybe a protest – and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: ‘Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what’s happening here.’ And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car.”

Eraser wrote:But isn't that mostly due to the fact that urban warfare is really, really tricky when you want to avoid collateral damage?

Eraser wrote:Also, look at what's happening in Syria. There's a good amount of "rebel" militia active there, but they have hardly been able to overthrow the regime. Now take a look at Egypt, where overthrowing the government was relatively violence free, and I think we can safely draw the conclusion that while an armed populace may have influence, they in no way guarantee that the government will be kept in check.

Ryoki wrote:

Eraser wrote:But isn't that mostly due to the fact that urban warfare is really, really tricky when you want to avoid collateral damage?

Not sure what you're getting at here..?

Eraser wrote:War needs to be clean now, otherwise you get bad publicity on CNN.

Ryoki wrote:http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/13/the-myth-of-the-surge/

Keep in mind, that the Bush administration had also commissioned the Rand Corporation “to develop a Shaping Strategy for pacifying Muslim populations where the US has commercial or strategic interests.” The conclusions of the document–which was titled called: “US Strategy in the Muslim World after 9-11”– are fairly consistent with the approach on the ground. Rand said that the US, “Align its policy with Shiite groups who aspire to have more participation in government and greater freedoms of political and religious expression. If this alignment can be brought about, it could erect a barrier against radical Islamic movements and may create a foundation for a stable U.S. position in the Middle East.”