You really think someone throwing a shoe at our former president deserves three years in prison? Really? Even if it was Obama, I don't think this punishment is just. It was a shoe, not a physical altercation (like trying to grab, punch, or kick). It wasn't meant to maim or severely harm the former president, but be used as an insult. I mean, he invaded the country and stripped it. The previous regime was terrible too, but don't act like one unjust act justifies another.

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He made a choice to throw a shoe. He had to realize that he would face the consequences. I think that if someone had attacked a visiting head of state when Saddam was in power, that person would have been tortured to death without trial and the punishment would have spilled over to his family members.

@once: Some of the posts that I am reading, like "once's" make me believe that people think that George Bush and Saddam Hussein were just different versions of the same type of leader. We invaded Iraq and took the country in a week. We occupied hostile territory for six years and lost 4,000 troops (rest their souls). By historical standards this was a miracle. We could have gone in and crushed Iraq to the point of oblivion. Maybe turned it into another Dresden. We waged war, but certainly not in the cruelest fashion possible. Saddam Hussein and his sons tortured entire families, raped women in front of their spouses and children and committed genocide. It may not have been our war to fight, but I don't get the indignation from the Iraqi's that we put this rabid dog down.

Also, I could care less that Bush put Saddam's gun on his desk. He was an animal who deserved no respect.

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But I suppose if that's really how you think about it, you'll never understand why this guy was enraged by Bush's smirky, smart-assed remarks.

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I may not break down and cry every time a death is mentioned, but there was certainly nothing in my comments that should have lead anyone to believe that I don't care about dead Iraqi's. I was merely commenting that the military action that was always painted as a failure, was in fact a success.

The Iraqi civilian causalities (rest their souls as well) were multiplied due to the resistance that occurred after the initial occupation. It's also a little hard to work on power plants and water treatment centers when a suicide bombers keep running into work sites.

I am reminded of something that I read about Napoleon during the Paris riots when he was a captain I believe. He pointed out that if you fire grapeshot from a cannon into a crowd, no one dies, but when the rioters regroup, they are even harder to put down and you end up having to kill a lot more of them. When you fire cannon balls, a few people die, but then they disband. The point is that eventually, he would have to kill a greater number of people using grapeshot. I'm not advocating this method domestically.

It may be possible that our "light footprint" ended up costing more people their lives than a heavier presence.

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You have a difficult time staying on topic, which is what I was pointing out. To an Iraqi citizen, our side's losses are irrelevant. And no matter how much you may want to spread blame around for the administration's criminally negligent refusal to make any kind of plan for post-invasion security, the decisions that led to that particular catastrophuck are all on the civilian planners of this misguided and unnecessary war.

They disbanded the Iraqi Army and police apparatus.

They made no alternate arrangements for security being carried out by our forces, because they simply didn't want to commit enough of them to do the job, thereby putting our own service people at risk, as well as endangering ordinary Iraqis, the majority of whom were non-combatants.

Despite repeated warnings from our own troops, they refused to secure the weapons stashes used both to attack our own troops and carry about sectarian violence.

They ignored what they knew would happen, or didn't care enough about the potential lives lost to do anything about it.

How do I know they knew it would happen? Well, watch this and tell me if this guy wasn't some kind of prophet:

[vids.myspace.com]

But, to come back to your point, I think your choosing to focus only on American war dead in response to a post about an Iraqi's response to our smirking, irresponsible president speaks volumes about your priorities. Estimates wildly vary about the civilian losses on the Iraqi side, they could be as low as the administration's ridiculous 70,000+ number or as high as a million. But if you want to know how Iraqis feel about our president--whom they are under absolutely no moral obligation to respect--all you have to do is look at the guy at the top of this post.

Finally, just stop with your nauseating pieties about Saddam Hussein. The 80,000+ Kurds killed at Halabja were killed with chemical weapons supplied to Saddam to be used against the Iranians (which they were also). After the Halabja attack, Saddam was awarded with a state visit by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Alan Simpson on behalf of then-president Ronald Reagan. Their message to Hussein was to improve his PR.

The point I've made on this post remains: Iraqis owe no debt of respect to George Bush. Not one of them voted for him and the overwhelming majority regret that he was ever born.

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Yet you always manage to bury a kernel of truth in your meanderings: The invasion itself was a startling success. The occupation was, and continues to be, a miserable failure.

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I think that we all knew that going into Iraq was going to be much more difficult than trying to manage Iraq's lunatic regime from the outside, but in fairness we did try the tact of not invading in '91 and the employing economic sanctions afterward. Having said that, it's apparent now that the war did not have to be fought.

I think your statement about the "overwhelming majority regret that he was ever born," may be projection. I don't know where else you could get a stat like that.

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1) The surge has done nothing except postpone the inevitable, which is the chaos that will ensue as soon as we leave and stop paying sunni tribal leaders, the sectarian violence will start again. So...our soldiers are there indefinitely. I guess since that benefits Halliburton, it's "working." But not really.

2) Of course, I know you won't because people on your side take exposing yourself to consuming media you disagree with as a point of pride, but watch Why We Fight if you want to know about how debaathification, disbanding the military and making about a million armed soldiers unemployed (when a significant number of officers were letting the Coalition they could bring their troops online for security purposes) -- to the utter shock of the administration professionals like Jay Garner they initially hired, and then fired, to help facilitate the transition to the new government -- and the refusal to secure weapons caches basically created a perfect storm that lead to the insurgency and religious civil war.

3) My point is exactly that invading and trying to occupy Iraq was always a dumb idea. Cheney knew it in 1991, and he knew it in 2003, although he said it would be a cakewalk then. What changed? His realization that a protracted and bloody conflict could make a lot of money for himself and his friends--and that's why that war happened. Well, that and the 2002 midterms.

4) You're right, "regret that W was ever born" is not a poll question. However, in poll after poll, Iraqis overwhelmingly reject George Bush and everything he's done to their country. Or Christ, just ask one. They're all over the world these days.

5) You don't really need polls. Want to know what the average Iraqi thinks about George Bush and what he's done to their country? Watch the dude throw his shoes at Shurb's dumb, smirking head.

6) I'd never do it myself, but I can't say I blame him. You obviously have another idea. I hope if our country is never invaded and ruined I'm not standing next to you when the cognitive dissonance may make your head explode and you thank Vladimir Putin (or whoever) for dropping bombs on your kids.

7) I'm not coming back to this post because I'm a little disgusted. It took conservatives at least a few years to start revising the history of America's involvement in Vietnam. That you guys are already working on this one is just shameless.

8) Really, I dare you to watch Why We Fight and tell me what a miracle this war was.

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