From: MaxPlumm@aol.com
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 20:21:40 MDT
I wrote:
> no doubt you are also preparing a pictorial compendium of the
>Saddam Hussein regime and its legacy. You'll find no shortage of dead
>children there.
To which Damien Broderick responded:
"Had I ever made the extraordinary claim that the hideous Saddam Hussein
regime was bloodless, I'd expect to be pulled up short. Why is it so
difficult to grasp this?"
I don't recall ever claiming that you held the belief that Saddam Hussein's
regime was bloodless. However, I cannot recall you regularly inundating the
extropy list with smug rants about Hussein's barbarous regime while it was in
power, yet I do notice your (for lack of better term) "cheap shots" at the
American government. So, naturally you reply to me with the obligatory "I'm no
friend or supporter of Hussein" comment. This is supposed to in some way exculpate
your position of focusing solely on American actions while ignoring or
accepting a status quo where far more despotic and murderous regimes remain in power?
I do not think so.
But more to the point, Spike had originally commented:
With all
>those embedded reporters, there is almost no battle footage.
>The whole episode was fiction, there was no war. Clearly
>the winner: humanity. Technology has made war almost
>bloodless.
Note he clearly said "almost bloodless". Certainly there were civilian and
military casualties in the war. However, when one compares this conflict to say,
the Korean or Indochinese Wars, the number of dead in all categories falls
dramatically. Now, clearly someone as clearly as intelligent as yourself is
aware of this fact, and equally aware of the meaning of Spike's observation.
Despite that fact, you chose to make in my view an unnecessarily hostile comment
which mainly focused on American "misdeeds." Everyone of those children you saw
on the evening news could've been spared the misery they suffered during the
war had Saddam Hussein simply willingly given up power and left Iraq before or
at President Bush's deadline.
Instead, the power mad butcher chose to put his people through an easily
avoidable war in which some innocents were killed. So, ultimately it appears that
you are simply more interested in criticizing the Bush administration than
giving the war in Iraq and its aftermath a fair hearing. Indeed, if your
complaint was the fact that the book showed no dead bodies, might I suggest pictures
of Hussein's mass graves found by US troops after the war?
Regards from slightly right of center,
Max Plumm
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