Jesse

True, but my reasons for supporting the Iraq invasion are not that I ever thought it presented a serious threat or that I believe it is important to uphold "international law"--I just support it for humanitarian reasons. And in humanitarian terms, although war obviously is going to have some pretty awful consequences, I think the consequences of leaving Saddam in power would have been far worse for the Iraqi people. And in terms of how he treats his own people, I think the Nazi comparison is valid, even if the scale is not the same. See this thread:

How many of his own people did Saddam directly kill?

emotional

Partly because of that ... and also because of Junior wanting to restore the damaged honour of Papa Bush...

From the beginning of this war I've asked myself, "why Iraq in particular?". Iran and North Korea are much more of a threat to humanity than Iraq was. But ... this isn't a rational world we're talking about.

Theli

This was taken from the locked thread in the political forum...
What I don't understand here is that the US is getting all the blame (by some) for the looting in Iraq. As if the people living there are just a pack of crazy animals that can't be hold responsible for their own actions.
I saw a guy on BBC holding a box full of stolen items, complaining at the lacking order in the city that the coalition was supposed to provide, I mean... ????

sir drinks-a-lot

LMAO! You might want to brush up on the history of mankind.

Danya

Because when you strip a country of it's government and don't do anything to contain law and order you leave them in a power vacuum. After being under the thumb of such a repressive and strict government for decades they have no idea how to take care of this themselves...this is something the government always took care of.

I've seen reports that only 5% of the people are doing the looting...even if it's 40% who is protecting the innocent people? Who has the authority in that country right now? We do.

Bush promised to respect their culture and was petitioned ahead of time to make sure these things were protected. He and Rumsfeld say this looting is totally expected, natural, and was anticipated. So who is it that is to blame for not protecting this stuff from criminals and theives?

How hard would it have been to place a tank and a couple soldiers in front of that museum or the hospitals when it was easy enough to do for the Oil Ministry...which had it been looted would have not stripped the land itself of the oil.

Sakpo

Of course the looters are to blame as well, but when it comes to any single organized entity, I blame the United States government. Imagine you come home from work to notice your home has totally ransacked and destroyed. You call the police, and they tell you that yes, they'd had good information that your home was going to be broken into, looted, and vandalized, but they didn't think it was worth sending anybody out to prevent it. Wouldn't you say the police were at fault as well, without absolving the burglars of their guilt?

Happy Wonderer

Some people will take advantage of disorder and power outages. There was a small amount of looting in San Francisco after the Loma Prieta quake. (Famously some kids were walking along the downed Cypress structure ripping radios out of the cars.) The announcement was made that looters would be shot and it quieted down. But in that case we had a functioning police force and government. The damage there was infitesimal compared to the damage in Baghdad right now.

I wasn't there but I think that the blackouts in Chicago a couple of years ago led to a lot of looting.

hw

There was nothing that has shaken my sense of normalcy more than the sight of the San Francisco skyline at dusk with no lights on (except for a few on the bridge for some reason.)

Sakpo

Exactly. We went in, created a power vacuum, and it was predictable some portion of the population would act like this. Although, I don't buy this government line that the looters are simply acting that way as a result of being "liberated." Go to any middle class American suburd, remove the police, and leave everything unguarded...and you could expect some portion of the American suburbanites to behave in exactly the same manner. It's predictable, the lost things are simply irreplaceable, and so, so, so important, and they were warned to protect them, but no, they just protected the oil.

They protect the oil but not the culture, not the hospitals, not the schools, etc etc etc. Well planned mission of liberation my ass. I never believed it, and I really can't see how anyone could think that now.

MrDarwin

I'm not sure what's worse, looting the museum or looting the damn hospitals.

Actually, Rumsfeld is complaining that the media are blowing the looting all out of proportion. He was making a joke of it a couple of days ago, saying they keep showing some guy carrying a big vase over and over, and how many vases could there possibly be in all of Baghdad?

Well, I wonder how many irreplaceable antiquities there could be??? I just can't wait to hear what Rumsfeld has to say about this. I don't blame the U.S. military for failing to anticipate the looting, but I do blame them for not doing anything about it once it started.

Gurdur

---> Theli and
also Jesse, who is evading the point

1. Under the Geneva Convention, a belligerant taking control of an area is under the treaty and moral responsibility to provide order throughout that area.
   
2. Jesse has claimed the looting of the museum was the "price to pay" for liberating the people of Iraq.
   
   Rubbish. It was completely unnecessary. The USA could have been more proactive in stopping looting, especially in matters such as hospitals and important museums.
   It didn't.
   Why ?
   1) Because of Rumsfeld's pet dictum about doing the "job" with as few troops as possible
   2) because the USA admin doesn't give a shit
   
3. This is a loss for us all. Jesse has also tried the evasion of claiming that because most information of the museum is (theoretically) held somewhere, the loss is not great. Again nonsense; the loss of historical artefacts such as those housed in the museum is enormous in terms of common history and heritage.
   
4. The USA has contravened the Geneva Convention by not providing order. It is responsible for enabling the looting of the museum.
   
5. The USA invaded Iraq in what many international law experts consider to be an illegal fashion. Instead of patiently building and supporting a consensus, it tried using strongarm metjods of persuasion on other countries --- methods which backfired.
   
6. Since when is the USA suddenly so interested in the rights and human freedoms of other peoples ?
   Detail for me how much the USA has intervened to protect the human rights of
   Turks (and how many Turks and Kurds have been killed by their own government ??)
   Saudi Arabians
   Kuwaitians (just where is that democracy ?)
   Pakistan
   Chile under Pinochet
   to name just a few.