There was an accident at a suicide bomber training camp: an instructor set off a vest loaded with explosives, killing himself and 21 other terrorists-in-training, wounding 15 more, and 8 were arrested in the aftermath. Laugh, everyone! Bad guys are dead! And ironically so!
Of course, imbedded in the story are details we might otherwise try to forget.
Iraq is facing its worst violence in more than five years, with nearly 9,000 people killed last year and almost 1,000 people killed last month. On Monday, a roadside bomb in Mosul, in northern Iraq, targeted the speaker of Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni, security officials said. Six of his guards were wounded, but Mr. Nujaifi was unharmed, they said.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria evolved from its previous incarnation as Al Qaeda in Iraq, but recently Al Qaeda’s central leadership disavowed the group, which has taken on an increasingly important role in the fighting in Syria, as well as in Iraq.
Along with the increase in attacks on Iraqi civilians in Baghdad and elsewhere, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and other Sunni extremist groups have captured territory in western Anbar Province, and for weeks they have controlled the city of Falluja and parts of Ramadi, the provincial capital. Other areas of the country have also become strongholds of the Islamic State and of Al Qaeda.
Terrorist training camps have been set up in the mountainous areas of Diyala Province. Northern Nineveh Province has become a gateway for jihadis traveling from Iraq to Syria. Mosul, Nineveh’s capital, has become a center of financing for militant groups estimated by one Iraqi official at millions of dollars a month, generated by extortion and other schemes.
Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!
?
Mission Accomplished!
?
Man, we fucked that place up. Are you still laughing?
only from that dark cynical place that george carlin loves to tickle.
“Man, we fucked that place up. Are you still laughing?”
Is that not the result of any American foreign policy adventure after WW 2?
So, basically, Iraq is falling apart. Is that the gist of it?
Can someone remind me who’s harvesting Iraq’s oil at the present?
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
Hatred is never sufficient to inspire suicide bombing. You need desperation, as well.
kraut — I think fucking places up has been the result of American foreign policy ventures before WW2 like the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico, Hawaii, Haiti, China, and Japan. Like the Iraq wars, there were at least three wars in the 19th century of dubious purpose: the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and the War of 1812. And let’s not forget the genocidal destruction America’s native population.
Re kraut @ #2
The Hun forgets South Korea, now a budding industrial superpower, saved from the clutches of Kim il Sung and his Communist pals. Ever hear of Hyundai, Samsung, etc.
Does each of these worthless scumbags get rewarded in heaven with 72 facepalms? I’m not sure of the theology here…
Must you insist we think instead of just enjoying our jingoistic revenge fantasy humor?
Someone I saw commenting on a version of this story on Facebook said: “I wonder if Jeff Dunham will sue for copyright infringement”. So funny. People living in a country we completely fucked up died! Just like in those racist jokes!
… an instructor set off a vest loaded with explosives, killing himself and 21 other terrorists-in-training…
And “coincidentally” they announce the death of Shirley Temple the next day. Sure…
There’s also the depressing fact that it’s not uncommon for such suicide bombers to have been indoctrinated from childhood and constantly surrounded by people who tell them how glorious it is. They never stood a chance.
No I’m not laughing. I wouldn’t be laughing anyway. I don’t have to support suicide bombers to mourn lives lost to fanaticism and stupidity.
These people aren’t meaningfully “my enemies” even if they, and others, think they are. They’re victims of fuckwitted extremist religion, the foibles and follies of international relations, “the system” (you know, that wonderful intersecting mish mash of causes, effects, and social phenomena that we all adore), and sundry curdling effects of human psychology. They’re ground up and spat out just like the people sent out to fight them. I don’t like what they do, hell, I probably wouldn’t like ’em if I met ’em, but I can’t bring myself to be ghoulish and cheer or laugh at their deaths.
It’s not like they’re homoeopaths or something.*
Louis
* Yes. That was a joke. Well done for recognising it. Collect your biscuit from the office.
Hey! You guys don’t get all the credit – you’re just stirring up the remains of the mess we Brits created with three centuries of global imperialism. None of these countries would even exist if we hadn’t gone charging in to a bunch of complex and diverse societies we had absolutely no understanding of (or interest in understanding) and drawn lots of arbitrary lines on maps with no regard whatsoever for the local politics.
PZ
Well, some of us are…
sonofrojblake #9
Sonofrojblake, the huge bang you heard as you hit “Submit Comment”—that was the point going over your head at about mach-5.
Don’t forget your cunning use of Flags.
I was about to mention the flags. They are essential.
Also, judicious use of the Scottish is quite important.*
Louis
* This is one of the reasons that David Cameron and his Tory Chums want to keep Scotland in the union. The Scots are very useful during a war. Their natural aggression, fuelled by stereotypes and Bucky, combined with careful rationing of deep fried food, can be easily directed at the desired enemy. The Powers That Be can then sit back, drink gin, guffaw at suitable intervals, and marvel at the Jocks kicking shite out of Foreigners. If a few hundred thousand bite the big one, well they were only Celts, probably poor and didn’t go to the Right School. Just wait for the stragglers to get back and try out the Poll Tax on them.
I wish that was satire. Sadly it seems that it is, in fact, Westminster policy regarding our chums to the north. I don’t want them to go but I’m rather afraid they should and will.
A person doesn’t have to support Saddam Hussein to admit Iraq was better off than it is now. Life was awful under his murderous regime, but with nowhere near the levels of violence, corruption, kidnapping, rape and murder as now. Add to that a non-existent legal, judiciary or police system, failing economy, no rights for women, lack of and failing hospitals, clean water supply or electricity, etc.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2006/03/iraq-saddam-better-for-women/
http://www.alternet.org/story/45699/iraq%3A_more_hellish_now_than_under_saddam
Can anyone honestly say the current situation is better? There are probably people in Iraq right now who, as in Russia during the 1990s, wish that the dictatorship would return.
How could I forget the flags?
The evil streak in me wants to laugh but knowing that right-wing Christian whack jobs in the US are basically calling for insurrection as per their Islamic counterparts in Iraq, et al, prevents me.
Wasn’t laughing in the first place.
Not laughing now.
Not funny.
–
No.. wasn’t laughing to begin with. Death isn’t funny, regardless of who it is. I make sure to point this out to people when they point and laugh over this.
@17 – Because that’s what a desert war needs. More ginger people.
Scotland has been fighting for Independence from it’s ancient enemy, Scotland, for centuries.
*This is snark. My family’s scottish, and make pilgrimages back there to the family holdings near loche ness.
I just ran down to the division office.
There were no biscuits.
Louis, you are an evil man who has committed a great injustice. Sure, there are a thousand people dying every month in Iraq because of bombs going off, but I am a White! Man! in America!, and I have no biscuits.
Laugh at the clumsy suicide bombers, but you can weep for my plight now.
Better them than their intended victims. Much sympathy for the rotting mess we left in Iraq. None for the score of murderers who slabbed themselves.
Joegrant, #23,
Yeah the observation re: ginger folk in deserts is a good one!
As for independence? I really don’t want it to happen. I like Scottish people. Some of my best friends are Scottish. I’d even let them use my toilet. Not all at once you understand…
Louis
PZ,
I am very sorry. The reason that there are no biscuits is that I really do laugh at the deaths of homoeopaths. I cannot pretend I am a nice person. Especially when it comes to people who wilfully ignore the reality of the dose response curve.
Louis
Obviously there is a large element of schadenfreude in the idea of a suicide bombing instructor, standing in front of his class saying “Now watch carefully class, I’m only going to show you once ….”
However it was probably a car bomb that exploded, rather than a suicide bomber instruction class. Does that make it more or less funny?
These car bombs were to have been used against other Iraqis, I have little sympathy, even though I agree that the USA has done almost all it can to destabilize the region. At the end of the day individuals have to make the decision whether to work for or against the violence, irrespective of historical grievances.
{Slow clap}
Well done, Anuran, you just failed basic humanity. Congratulations.
The people who blew themselves up were, presumably, not yet murderers of any kind. So you’re just advertising your lack of sympathy for a bunch of people who have been deluded and coerced into a grim situation. Even if they were the worst of the worst, DeliberateAIDSSpreadingPaedophileSuicideBomberHomoeopaths (did I go too far with that last bit?), they’re still human. How they arrived at that juncture matters. Amazingly enough, Iraqi kids do not spring forth from the womb crying “Death to the Infidel!” and crawling to the nearest repository of semtex. They are cajoled there by myriad forces, some of which originate frighteningly close to home for US and UK folk.
Perhaps a better wish would be that no one died at all? Then you could actually be a halfway decent human being by allowing for one shade of grey. No people being needlessly blown up is better than silly people being needlessly blown up is better than silly people blowing up innocent people. YAY! Something approaching complex though!
Oh fuck. Sarcasm gland overloading. I’m off to the pub with my species transfer forms. I think I’ll apply for something that can blow itself. It’ll give me something to do.
Louis
Not the first time. I sometimes wonder if a tail is the only thing anuran lacks.
No denying that Iraq is fucked up, but I didn’t see anything in the posted blockquote which indicates that *we* are responsible for that.
(Not saying we aren’t, not saying we are; I don’t know enough facts to form an opinion.)
Hi Rex, were you asleep the last 10 years? Get some coffee and we’ll get you up to date.
@Rex Little
Gee, I wonder if there is any history that comes before the Great American Adventures in Imperialism that we might compare and contrast to see what Iraq might look like without American interventionism?
If only they had been helpfully linked in comment 18…
Actually, it is very human to rejoice in misfortune among those we perceive as evil. Hell, it’s very primate.
What it isn’t is enlightening or uplifting. Remember, the cerebral cortex is a thin veneer. Most people only use it for rationalizing what the emotional part of the brain has already decided.
Yeah, it’s easy to think “Haha, good riddance to a bunch of assholes!” until you start considering things like how many of those wannabe bombers might have been there due to coercion of one sort or another.
Dunc @#14
You’re right! We can blame the Iraq mess on you Brits…and we could do so with good reason. Britain, with a little help from their good “friends” in France, invented Iraq at the end of WW1, along with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (now Israel). One empire carving up another with arbitrary lines in the desert. I guess the US was just trying to tidy up the mess you made of it with a few surgical strikes.
Rex — I guess you missed the Iran-Iraq War (US supporting Iraq), Gulf War 1, Gulf War 2, plus years of sanctions restricting the flow of trivialities like medicine not to mention lesser hostilities such as the occasional bombing.
@ Howard Bannister
I did miss comment 18, which does connect the dots. Thank you for pointing it out.
29 Louis
And my condolences to you on the loss of your frontal lobes and inability to distinguish between murderers and their victims. Betting you’re the kind of person who cries when a rapist doesn’t get trauma counseling if his victim fights back because this shit is light years beyond “false equivalence”. Get someone to look at that up and read the definition to you.
Are you really that fucking stupid? Do you really think they put this together and were training to use it for peaceful purposes?
These men had prepared a powerful bomb to kill innocents with. It could have killed, conservatively, a hundred people if it were set off in a crowded place. There were at least twenty of them, all training to do the same thing. Call that two thousand innocent lives saved because they screwed up. Unlike you, who lacks the basic human capacity to distinguish between good and evil, I am much more concerned about the children going to school, the woman in the market, the old man visiting a shrine or the busload of folk on their way to work who would have been torn to pieces by the explosions than the wannabe mass murderers.
SLC:
I’m not sure South Korea is such a great example, since despite its close ties with the US (the US still has a big military presence there, and would take command of the Korean military in the event of invasion), it suffered under successive brutal dictatorships until 1987:
Syngman Rhee, MacArthur’s pal: dictator and torturer. Spirited out of the country by the CIA after the April Revolution.
Park Chung-hee: came to power in a military coup, suppressed opposition with a feared secret police, eventually suspended the constitution and tried to make himself president for life. Assassinated by his own stasi.
Chun Doo-hwan: yep, another coup, martial law, suppression of opposition, re-education camps. Finallly ousted partly because of controversy about torture.
But South Korea’s successive strongmen were staunchly anti-communist, and hey, that’s what really matters.
@40 Maggie
South Korea has all sorts of problems including occasionally brutal and anti-democratic governments. But equating it to the DPRK and suggesting they aren’t that different? That might not be completely divorced from reality, but it’s definitely moved out of the house and started dating other metaphysical precepts.
I have stated this before but worth stating again ad nauseum. As progressive as the atheist community is, there was no greater act of imperialism, anti-feminism and racism than when Christopher Hitchens and his secular ilk encouraging and supporting the Iraq war. I had no love for Saddam Hussein but toppling dictators and “imposing democracy” under the guise of “weapons of mass distruction” was among the greatest acts of American asshattery. A millioin-fold shame on those atheists who supported that utterly stupid war and now its aftermath. I don’t care if Hitchens is dead and I will not let him rest in peace. I will not hold my tongue on this. I hold him and others like him responsible for contributing to the blind bloodlust mindset of support that many had in the lead up to that war.
anuran:
Well yes, which is why I didn’t do that.
I think you have sunk into binary thinking. Iraq, like many totalitarian states, was a relative paradise for some, like most Sunnis and families of the large military, but a hellhole for others, Shia and anyone who chose to disagree with Saddam or the Baathist party. Yes, most women enjoyed relative freedom and mobility if they had some money and they carefully avoided any conflict, or appearance of conflict, of any relatives having any conflicts, with the powers in charge.
Of course anyone unlucky enough to be born non-Sunni, or too poor to count, or inclined toward having sympathy toward any of those oppressed groups, could expect kidnapping of themselves, their relatives to be used for leverage, exposure to a very cruel and efficient secret service, torture, execution, and to have their body disappear.
9000 dead in year was just the tip of the iceberg. Nobody really knows how many were tortured and died.
Of course before and during the US invasion this was both highlighted and exaggerated, but the fact remains that we didn’t pave over paradise invading Iraq. The mass graves, prisons, and torture centers were quite real. Yes, a lot of people who had it relatively good have worse lives now, and suicide bombers are not the mark of a happy people at rest but Iraq is a very big place and much of Iraq is relatively calm.
Which may be about as good as anyone could expect in the near-term from a nation formed after WWI by arbitrarily drawing lines on a map. The animus between Shia, Sunni, Kurd, Swamp and nomadic Arabs, and quite a few other groups and subgroups, existed long before the US invaded. Saddam Husein suppressed those conflicts but, in a land where insults lead to feuds, and feuds last for centuries, he never addressed them.
For sure years of sanctions and the invasion destroyed a lot of infrastructure. To the extent the neocons went into Iraq and wasted years trying to inflict a Randian paradise on the place, and generally wasted time and money we did nothing to make it any better. To the extent that we tried to establish some right to form political parties and get the preexisting conflicts into the political sphere we may have established some small start of a political settlement that might eventually settle some of those conflicts. Unfortunately by the time the real nation builders arrived, W and the neocons hated nation builders, the US had been discredited as a moral and potential political guiding light of peace through political conflict. We were back to imposing order by force of arms.
The bad news is that the parties are going to have to thrash this out politically where the bonds are weak and any party or group can resort to blowing people up to bolster their argument and standards of living isn’t going to improve as long as people are in the habit of using explosives in political negotiations.
The good news is that there have been limited areas of relative peace. Many of the parties have had some small successes negotiating with neighbors for common goals. There is a groundswell of people who know the futility of using arms to settle political issues. This problem is one side of the classic middle east problem of the weaker party feeling they cannot afford to compromise while the stronger thinks there is no need to compromise. Explosives changes this. Even a weak party can cause a lot of damage.
There isn’t any easy, quick and simple solution. In some ways the US invasion was helpful, like lancing a boil is helpful in bringing an infection to the surface. The question remains as to whether Iraq will survive the organ rejection originating in the entirely arbitrary creation of Iraq from bits and pieces of other nations. We should have been building infrastructure, the economy, and a political system in the time immediately after the invasion. We did it in both Germany and Japan after WW2 but they both had the advantage of being fairly monolithic ethnic/political/cultural structures. We might have had a shot but the effort got bogged down in mistaken belief in free-market fundamentalism and by the time it was clear to the true believers it wasn’t working the opportunity had passed. We really could have done so much better. As it is we are the cook that tried an alien cuisine that nobody could eat.
Give it a few decades. They may go back to a strong leader totalitarian state with safe streets and violent interrogation centers, or they might assert a strong Iraqi identity, give up car bombs, and solve most problems politically in a rough democracy, or they might fracture as a nation into several states.
yes things were better in Europe and japan after “The War” but it probably had more to do with the development aid in money and expertise after war then it did with the military during.
Just a thought, what might have been the outcome .if we had been sending a much larger percentage of the cost to our treasury of fighting wars Iraq and Afghanistan as cash distributed to the population as grants and development. From what I can see for all of the money so far spent were are still in the same position we were 15 years ago or maybe even in a worse off position. Even granting for the rampant corruption one would expect, hell we have that now
It is a moot question at this time
uncle frogy
Anuran,
My frontal lobes?
Fuckwit, when you can read for even basic comprehension, come back to be and comment on my frontal lobes. Until then, you’re just too embarrassingly bigoted and unintelligent to bother with.
Toodles.
Louis
Yes, your frontal lobes. You cry for cold-blooded murderers who go out of their way to slaughter innocents indiscriminately.
These bastards were creating machines to commit mass murder. If they hadn’t had this accident they would have killed, conservatively, thousands. And as far as you’re concerned the only tragedy is that they’re dead.
It’s hard to think of anything lower and more evil.
Yes, let’s not spend any time wondering about why they ended up in that camp in the first place. That might make the whole issue disturbingly complex and make our hate-boner all floppy.
It’s not as if it’s possible for us to simultaneously condemn what they were doing, while also feeling some empathy with the circumstance that drove them to it. We couldn’t possibly acknowledge that people in extreme circumstances are driven to extreme acts without also completely rubber-stamping everything they do and absolving them of all blame.
Nope, must be black and white; good guys and bad guys. No middle ground for us.
47 anuran
22 potential suicide bombers were killed. They had to make at least 90 victims each to arrive at 2000 victims (which is the lower bound of ‘thousands’).
Conservatively, that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Louis @ 13;
QFT.
The victims of this blast are just that – victims. They were warped and twisted to the point that they found themselves in a terrorist training camp in the first place, and while much of the blame for the events that lead of that can certanly be laid at the feet of extremist Islamic preachers, we in the West must also shoulder our share of responsibility for this. People don’t just wake up one day and think “What a lovely sunny day. I think I’ll go and strap on a few pounds of plastic explosives and blow myself up along with a few dozen people I don’t even know. Just ’cause.” Radicalisation is born out of greivance. Some of those grievances may be imagined, but it would be disingenuous to say the least to try to claim that our own societies haven’t behaved in a grievously exploitative and unethical fashion with regard to our foreign policy within the region.
I am not trying to excuse the horror or grossly unethical character of terroism. That said, rather than laughing at these dead people who happened to be terrorists in training, it would behove us well to recognise the human tragedy of what happened and how it came to pass, and to acknowledge our role in bringing it about.
anuran @ 47;
And what about drone strikes aimed at funerals or weddings that terrorists or their supporters are believed to be attending? Those attacks are not pinpoint, discriminate strikes. Sure, they may kill a few terrorists, but what about the innocents also in attendence? Including children? Are they just ‘acceptable collateral damage’? And then there were the ‘shock and awe’ campaigns of the Iraq war – huge amounts of ordinance flung at Baghdad with assurances that it would only kill ‘bad guys’ because of the magic of modern precision weaponry, all quietly ignoring the fact that even modern weapons can and do go astray all the time, and that with so much firepower aimed at a civilian population centre death and carnage among ordinary people was not only inevitable, it was almost certainly part of the strategy.
And then there is the illegal extra-ordinary rendition, and the use of torture against people without even very much in the way of evidence against them, perpetrated both by Western powers and on their behalf by other countries. I hardly think we can claim some unassailable moral high ground in this most grubby of wars.
Western military forces are crammed to capacity with weapons designed to cause mass death and destruction. Conventional military forces have at one time or another created the most heinous means of slaughtering people imaginable and employed them with abandon, as things like the use of mustard gas in the First World War, the mass incendiary bombing campaigns targeted at cities in the Second World war, and the use of napalm in Vietnam, attests. That is the collective madness of war and all forms of mass organised violence. It is hardly unique to terrorist organisations.
Few terroists attacks kill so many in one strike. And how many thousands have our own military forces killed in the last decade? Should we cheer when a uniformed soldier dies for the same reasons?
Also, it seems likely that they hadn’t actually killed anyone yet since they were still in training, so as of the point when this happened the only deaths were their own.
You have a poor imagination then. How about sending thousands and thousands of people, mostly young and inexperienced, to die and kill in the name of an illegal war based upon a tissue of lies? A war that was always more about geopolitics and oil than it was about the national security concerns that those soldiers were told they were fighting for.
How about defining every male over the age of puberty a ‘combatant’ to massage civilian death figures for the drone programme?
How about imprisonment without trial or any form of due process? Imprisonmnet that is only a prelude to waterboarding? You know the not-torture-really (at least according to the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney) technique employed so liberally under Bush, and whose exponents all escaped any kind of punishment for their crimes courtesy of Obama?
How about defecating liberally over all the freedoms that the soldiers whom the government sent to die and kill are supposedly fighting for? How about imprisoning, in solitary confinment and without trial, those whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning who expose the lies and corruption behind these wars?
I’m afraid that, once one ventures beyond Saturday morning cartoons, the world simply refuses to conform to neat little colour coded camps of white hat wearing ‘good guys’ and black hatted ‘bad guys’.
@34 a_ray_in_dilbert_space
If I were in to tattoos, I would emblazon this on my body.
Fuck me, anuran, but you’re a poor excuse for a human being. Did it hurt, sawing out the empathy section of your brain with a rusty pooper-scooper?
Thumper, you’re right about sonofrojblake, and I’m pretty sure that the same is true of anuran. Great. Flaming. Arseholes.
Wonder if any of the deceased had plane tickets in their pockets?
-Well, it was already quite fucked up and we did help repair it.
@ Tashiliciously Shriked (#1): As much as I love Carlin, Bill Hicks (another dead funny guy) would have pulled it off better. Anyone who actively encouraged the suicides of people based on their career choice would have tackled this subject, no problem.
All those Sunnis dying isn’t “ha ha” funny, it’s “oh my god, holy shit” funny. Sort of like if Ken Ham or Glenn Beck died while engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation.
@ 44:
One of the most reasonable comments I’ve ever read on this site.
I was doing a bit of research today on the intersection between skepticism and politics when I came upon the point-counterpoint debate between Steve Novella and PZ on the topic about a year ago. It’s been awhile since I visited this site so I decided to have a look and see if PZ had gravitated towards Novella’s position at all. This post convinced me that nothing has changed – PZ is a living, breathing, blogging example of why partisan political advocacy should not be intertwined with skepticism.
There is no analysis, no chain of causation, no rational basis for this post other than “Bush hatred” (and the man has been out of office and effectively retired for 6 years). For PZ – so skeptical in other areas – our invasion of Iraq ten years ago is evidence enough that the events described in this current news story is the fault of GWB and the neo-cons. There is no dissection of the Shia-Sunni-Kurd dynamic in the country. No thought put into understanding the motivations or goals of the main players (or what this specific suicide bombing cell would have been targeting). This entire post boils down to: PZ hates Bush…Bush invaded Iraq…Iraq is still a violent place = Bush fucked up.
For context, I have been in the military for 20 years. I spent 3 of those years in Iraq (with another year spent recovering from injuries sustained there). Before and in between deployments I spent a considerable amount of time studying Iraq and its history, culture, and language (I was a fairly good Arabic speaker at one point, although I’ve lost quite a bit in the intervening years). In 2003, as I watched Colin Powell lay out the case for military action before the UN my unit was preparing our personnel and equipment for a deployment to SWA (South-West Asia in military parlance). Later on, as a graduate student at Georgetown I took a class taught by a CIA analyst where we parsed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on WMD in Iraq. While in Iraq I visited the nuclear facility southeast of Baghdad that the Israeli’s bombed in the 80’s, and spoke with many WMD specialists in the intelligence community in Baghdad at the time.
Comment #44 in some respects was right on the money – Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a living hell for the Shia and the Kurds. I spent many months with the Kurds in northern Iraq. Their favorite television show – the soldiers I worked with would always turn it on when it was airing – was, as close as I could discern something akin to the old television miniseries “V” (I didn’t watch the remake…but loved the old show) with Saddam, his two sons, and the rest of the Sunni political and military apparatus cast in the role of the evil aliens. On the anniversary of Saddam’s chemical attack on Halabja I spent six minutes of silence hand in hand with Kurds observing the anniversary of the massacre, and subsequent hours watching Kurdish television recount the horrors.
In 2003, if there was a living, breathing heir apparent to Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler in power his name was Saddam Hussein.
No matter what your politics, no matter what your opinion of President Bush, what is indisputable is that Saddam Hussein was an evil man with the blood of hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of people on his hands. Deposing of scum like this is never a completely bad idea. The one thing that united the Shia and the Kurds in Iraq was their hatred of Saddam. Much like the hatred of Communism united the various factions in Bosnia-Herzogovina or other areas of eastern Europe held choking under the Soviet boot for so many years. Our elimination of Saddam – like the implosion of the evil Soviet Empire – tore open those long festering wounds.
So in a sense PZ is right – GWB is responsible for giving Iraqis the freedom to openly hate and kill each other. Were Saddam still in power, there would likely be more bloodshed (un-reported of course, only CNN had a bureau in Baghdad and only because they they wouldn’t report anything negative about Saddam) and attacks on the US military (Saddam regularly shot anti-aircraft missiles at US aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones in Iraq, another fact largely unreported by the media because the skill and technological advancement of our military rendered those attacks largely uneventful).
Let me posit a counterfactual – if Saddam had died or been deposed by some other mechanism other than a US-led invasion (and lets not forget the sacrifice of the numerous other countries involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom) I submit that Iraq would as much if not more violent that it is today. The hatred at the intersection of the Sunni-Shia-Kurd axis cannot be underestimated – it runs extremely deep. GWB did not create this hatred, all he did was expose it by taking Saddam out of the picture.
As a result, the only thing this post does is expose PZ’s bias – a liberal political bias. He has a considerable skeptical arsenal but he chooses to deploy none of it when it comes to hot-button political issues such as the Iraq War. The result – no analysis, no discussion, just simple dislike/hatred of a President at the other end of the political spectrum.
As a soldier who has first hand experience in not one but two wars, I can say unequivocally that I hate it. No one who experiences death and devastation on that scale comes home quite the same. But I can also speak to the many Iraqis and Afghans I interacted with and worked with on a daily basis – most if not all who were grateful for our presence and yearned for a long and productive relationship with us. These are the people the extreme left Bush-haters turn their back on. These are the people PZ would rather see enslaved or tortured or dead.
GWB did not create the hatred which exists in Iraq, it existed long before he was elected President. Indeed it is perhaps the defining conflict the middle east at the current time, with Saudi Arabia leading the Sunni faction and Iran leading the Shia (the Kurds are in geo-political terms relatively inconsequential). Fault GWB if you must for bringing this conflict to the surface, but the one thing you cannot do is fault him for creating the conflict in the first place. It has existed since shortly after the death of Mohammed and will continue to exist unless and until one faction decisively defeats the other.
Which brings me back to politics and skepticism. For a true believer in, for example, creationism, no evidence one could present would change his/her mind on the subject. Be it 6000 or 14 billion years ago, God created the universe and little to nothing a skeptic could say on the subject would change the true believer’s mind.
So it is with politics. PZ is a liberal (to his credit, he is a self-proclaimed liberal. Many liberals in the skeptical movement refuse to self-identify as such). And as a liberal it is axiomatic that the Iraq war was both (a) bad, (b) Bush’s fault alone, notwithstanding the many Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) who voted to authorize the war, and (c) the cause of any and all negative stories which subsequently emanate from the country if not the region. No evidence presented to a believer will dissuade them from a, b, or c.
Interestingly enough, Iraqis themselves have no say in the matter – Sunni/Shia/Kurds alike are all blameless in the ensuing malaise – their actions up to and including the suicide bomb instructor who blew up his entire class are all the direct result of the original sin of Bushitler’s invasion. They – including the guy instructing all of the potential suicide bombers – bear no fault for any of their actions.
(As an aside – on my second tour in Iraq there was a suicide bomber who made an attempt to kill hundreds of worshippers at a mosque. The attempt failed after his vest malfunctioned and he was subsequently brought into police custody. He was 15. Think about that. 15 years old. His “recruiters” or “handlers” – much like the man described in this news article – had hopped him up on so many drugs that he nearly died in police custody following the attempted attack. When he regained consciousness, he claimed to have no memory of being recruited/trained/prepared for the suicide attack and just wanted to go home to his family. This is the level of depravity exhibited by these terrorists. To my mind, this is evil on an almost incomprehensible level)
A skeptic would not buy the line of argument PZ lays out. A skeptic would say, “Maybe something else is going on here” and do some research. A skeptic would perform some analysis and look into the chain of causation, the military and geo-political situation in the country and the greater middle east as a whole and think “Maybe it’s not all about Bush – maybe some other variables are at work here.”
But for the politically partisan among us there can be only one cause – the one PZ identified. Mission accomplished, indeed.
What a fascinating example of motivated reasoning and selective attention.
First I note that you’re failing to engage with many of the main points. You argue that Saddam was evil and therefore removing him was good. However, nobody is arguing that the war was a bad thing because Saddam was such a nice guy. The argument is that the war was sold to the American people under false pretexts; WMDs that weren’t actually there.
If Saddam was so evil that he needed to be removed, fine. That’s a legitimate argument. However, it’s not the argument that was given back then and that’s part of the problem that many people have with the war.
Second, you argue that the sectarian and ethnic tension in Iraq predate the war, so it’s nobody’s fault that they flare up after Saddam’s removed. However, this completely ignores the fact that we knew all about those problems.
Is it so unreasonable to think that maybe there should have been some sort of plan for how to deal with these entirely predictable conflicts? Either there was no plan or the plan failed miserably, as we can see from the result.
The fact that the conflicts have a history doesn’t excuse the mishandling of them. If a doctor screws up an operation, he doesn’t get off the hook just because the patient was already sick.
Third, you tell a touching story about a 15 year old suicide bomber. It caught my attention in particular because you’re actually arguing against your own point. Yes, young people are indoctrinated and manipulated into such things: That’s the whole point.
That’s why we need to have a little sympathy with these people. Yes, the people organizing such things are horrible, but that doesn’t mean that everybody involved are or that they wouldn’t choose differently if given a genuine choice.
Do you know the people who died in this accident? Do you know which of them were the depraved and evil ones and which ones were like the teenager in your example?
Then maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Finally, you seem to be more focused on Bush than anyone else. The only reference to Bush that PZ gives is the “mission accomplished” bit. That’s it. That’s actually the only thing and yet it’s set off this multiple-page rant of yours.
Bush did fuck up, but he wasn’t the only one and I don’t think anyone is saying that.
@59 – now we’re doing some analysis and I appreciate the response.
You’re correct that PZ’s only reference to Bush was in the last few words of this otherwise short, throwaway post, and that’s partly my point. Iraq is an incredibly rich and complex country whose current troubles cannot be pigeonholed by “Man we (GWB) fucked that place up.” That’s an intellectually lazy argument that a partisan political operative writing to an echo chamber of like-minded readers would make. It’s not an argument that a skeptic would make.
The lack of any tangible argument from PZ also undercuts the first part of your reply, I made no statements regarding the justification for the Iraq war. However I will note that Saddam being evil is indeed one of the arguments used by the administration to justify the Iraq War Resolution, which passed on a bi-partisan basis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War#Iraq_War_Resolution).
To argue that the current level of conflict and violence in Iraq was “entirely predictable” in 2003 is a good example of hindsight bias in my opinion. Iraq was a secretive, totalitarian state that Saddam ruled with an iron fist (one of the reasons the intelligence community was so wrong about the likelihood of WMDs in Iraq). Did we misidentify and mishandle the first couple years of the insurgency? Absolutely. But we changed course and employed a counterinsurgency strategy in late 2006-early 2007 (coincidental with the Surge).
The success of Surge/counterinsurgency strategy we employed also refutes one of the loudest talking points from the left in 2007 – that US soldiers were the cause of, not the solution to – the violence taking place in Baghdad and Anbar province and other areas at the time. This flies in the face of the actual facts on the ground. From my small outpost (termed a JSS) in central Baghdad in 2007 I received dozens of tips directly from Iraq citizens. They came to talk to the Americans and when I asked them why they didn’t go to the Iraqis almost to a person the answer was they could not trust the Iraqi security forces, but they knew they could trust the Americans.
(A little background, the unit I worked with was a part of the Iraqi National Police, composed primarily of Shia recruits – many of them followers of Sadr – with a somewhat well earned reputation for fostering sectarian violence by targeting Sunni)
On a related note – the study of counterinsurgency as a military history subfield has seen a huge boost in the last 10 years. One of the things common to many successful counterinsurgent efforts is the amount of time necessary for the insurgents to be truly defeated. 12 years is about average. We stayed for 8 (and screwed up the first 2-3 that we were there). One can make an argument that it was not the invasion which fucked up Iraq, it was our lack of resolve to stay the course and ensure that Iraq could maintain a functioning government and security apparatus.
Finally, on suicide bombers. I need you to prepare yourself because I’m going to make an argument ad Hitlerum here but only because I think it’s apt. I notice that we don’t spill a lot of ink sympathizing with the Germans who were “just following orders” in 1939. We don’t try to understand their motivations or grievances. They are perhaps not as culpable as those who ordered the extermination of the Jews, but they are culpable nonetheless. I do not consider the 15 year old I described as depraved or evil – I don’t know enough about his story – maybe he was just following orders, maybe he was too drugged up to know. But were his parents just following orders? Were his handlers and trainers just following orders? What you need to understand is that this isn’t some spontaneous reaction to a grievance, perceived or real. The making of a suicide bomber is a well thought out, well financed, and (mostly) well executed system which is part of a broader strategy designed and implemented with careful planning. If the 15 year old isn’t evil, everyone else in this long chain is.
I don’t know what targets these suicide bombers would have been sent to (here’s a sample from two weeks ago http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/05/world/meast/iraq-violence/) but in general suicide bombers strike either heavily trafficked or populated areas to inflict the most casualties (innocent civilian casualties) or they strike specific government or military targets (which are much harder to execute successfully due to the security in place).
There is a clear moral distinction here. Our initial goal in Iraq was to liberate the country from the totalitarian rule of a madman. Our subsequent goal was to defeat the insurgency and allow Iraq to govern itself in peace. The means we used to accomplish those goals never included the deliberate massacre of innocent human beings. When we killed innocents, it was almost exclusively by accident (there are exceptions of course). It was not part of our larger strategy.
For these people it is part of their larger strategy to create as much terror and mayhem in the country as possible, loosening the government and the security forces tenuous hold on legitimacy. They’re fucking up Iraq on purpose.
Let that sink in for a while. Then come back and try to argue that we should even be discussing Bush’s fuck up at this point.
This is a brazen, barefaced, outright, downright, shameless lie. That wasn’t even the official reason, which was to remove the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction. The war criminals Cheney and Rumsfeld were both prominent in the friendly relations with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, at which time he was launching his war of aggression against Iran, and committing atroicities against his own people – both of which were well known at the time. Here’s Rumsfeld, shaking Saddam’s hand in 1983. the “Project for a New American Century” report Rebuilding America’s Defenses, with which many prominent members of the G.W. Bush administration were associated, made it absolutely clear that:
Sorry, premature posting@61 – I was trying to reformat the quotation. It’s from p.14 of the PNAC document. In addition to this geostrategic aim (Obama tried but failed to negotiate a continued US military presence), there were sustained attempts during the occupation to get an oil law, drawn up with American “advice”, and that would give foreign oil companies highly favourable terms for exploiting Iraqi oil fields, passed by the Iraqi Parliament. The desire of the Kurdish autonomous region to increase its independence of Baghdad is currently leading a number of American companies to defy the Iraqi central government by making agreements with the Kurdish government: disputes between the Iraqi central government and that of Iraqi Kurdistan over rights to make contracts with foreign companies continue. Additionally, the occupation generated extremely lucrative contracts for mercenary companies such as Blackwater, construction companies such as Halliburton, and so on. Whether the invasion would be a benefit for the people of Iraq or – as for millions, it demonstrably was – a disaster – was never an issue for those launching it.
Oh, and this claim:
is just complete crap. See for example the CENTCOM “Desert Crossing” war games of 1999.
It’s not clear to me at this point whether it is dishonesty or sheer stupidity that leads you to say things like this. It was, precisely, Bush’s invasion that gave Al Qaeda and its allies the opportunity to put down roots in Iraq – and then more recently, to largely take over the opposition to the Assad regime in Syria.
Nick – lots to cover here.
I linked to this before, but here again is the Wikipedia page describing the Iraq War Resolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War#Iraq_War_Resolution. The capture and destruction of WMD was a key, but not the sole, rationale emphasized by both the US and British governments based on intelligence reports. However, that could not be accomplished without first removing Saddam from power. We were never planning to leave him safely ensconced in his palaces while we roamed the desert looking for chemical labs and weapons caches. Regime change was the primary goal of the original invasion force. For further reading, here is the text of GWB’s final ultimatum to Saddam: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2859269.stm. He said: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”
That the US allied with or helped Saddam at all during the 80s is a non-sequitor. Circumstances were different, Saddam was at war with Iran (who had seized our embassy only years before), he had not yet invaded Kuwait nor had he attempted the mass extermination of his people. Whatever accommodations we gave to Iraq all changed in 1991, and we remained effectively in a state of (non-declared) war with the country in the 12 subsequent years. No armistice fully ended the war, and Iraq was in continual non-compliance with its cease-fire agreement. Removal of Saddam from power became official US policy in 1998 when Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act.
You also charge that the war was all about profit for (I’m assuming) Bush’s friends in the oil and security industry. This is a discredited leftist conspiracy theory first popularized by the notoriously evenhanded and non-partisan filmmaker Michael Moore. It’s no more truthful now than it was when Fahrenheit 911 was released, but it’s wonderful fodder for those who gravitate towards kooky conspiracy theories like 9/11 or those politically disposed to dislike Republicans, GWB, or the war in Iraq. I suggest you take a critical look at this belief and see if it holds up to reason and logic.
On your third point, I have great respect for General Zinni and was familiar with his planning assumptions. I took part in a series of war-games in Kuwait circa 2000 and was well versed with the plan. Zinni’s analysis proved to be correct, but his was hardly the only analysis produced at CENTCOM or the Pentagon. OPLANs are standing planning assumptions produced by the major geographical commands (there is a plan for many/most/all of the foreseeable conflicts around the world) and these OPLANs are tested regularly in simulated war-games. At the bottom of the web page you cited it explains that GEN Franks revised the OPLAN when he took command of CENTCOM and the Pentagon revised it even further in the months leading up to the invasion. This is natural and desirable – you can’t just dust off an OPLAN created years ago and put it into action without updating it and taking into account the facts on the ground. Some OPLAN “assumptions” have to be turned into “facts”. It turns out in hindsight that Zinni’s analysis was more correct than Franks’ or the Pentagon’s, particularly on the issue of the number of troops required to maintain security, but in 2003 opinions on that question differed.
Also note that these are seasoned professionals doing this analysis. These aren’t twenty-something policy wonks sitting around a table trying to figure shit out. These are people who have been specifically trained for the task and have decades of theoretical and practical experience in the field. You may disagree with Rumsfeld politically but he was and is a serious man, you’re not re-appointed as Secretary of Defense a second time if you’re not serious. Professionals can disagree, especially in a field as in-exact as warfare. As a side-note, what is often lost in this discussion is the speed and efficiency of the initial invasion itself – you would be hard pressed to find a military campaign executed as brilliantly as this was. The German invasion of Poland and MacArthur’s entry into Korea at Inchon are two from the last century which are in the same league.
Your final point just re-enforces a point I made in my first comment. I wrote that for a liberal partisan “it is axiomatic that the Iraq war was both (a) bad, (b) Bush’s fault alone, notwithstanding the many Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) who voted to authorize the war, and (c) the cause of any and all negative stories which subsequently emanate from the country if not the region.”
Is Al Qaeda ever at fault? Are the people who train and arm and order suicide bombers to kill as many innocent civilians as possible culpable at all for their actions? Are the religious leaders who sanction and encourage this carnage responsible at all? Are the Iraqis who tolerate and support (actively or passively) these terrorists to blame at all? Has no action of the Iraqi government or security forces either encouraged or fail to effectively combat these thugs? Are other forces outside of the country at work either training or funding these terrorists for their own foreign policy and/or religious goals?
You see what I’m getting at? To say it’s Bush’s fault – full stop – is incredibly myopic. Of course our invasion created the freedom for Al Qaeda to lay down roots in Anbar and elsewhere. But the invasion did not create Islamic religious fundamentalism. It did not create Sunni-Shia-Kurd distrust and hatred. It did not create the authoritarian and genocidal tendencies of a small minority who now seek to impose their will and create a caliphate in Iraq. Our invasion deposed a dictator and installed a representative form of government which takes into account all of the major factions represented in the country.
If you’d like to argue – as one commenter here already has – that a genocidal maniac would be better for Iraq than the current representative government, by all means go right ahead. But that would be a bit off topic.
As I noted in my original post, much of my disappointment in PZ is that he chooses not to train his skeptical eye on partisan political issues. Whether we should or should not have gone into Iraq in the first place is a value judgement – and for the record were I in the President’s shoes in 2003 I would not have ordered the invasion. What’s happened since then is a matter of record, creating implications which can and likely will be debated for years to come.
But serious people debating these issues do not simply say “Bush fucked it up” and end their analysis there. Political partisans do.