Daily Archives: January 21, 2004

Iraq: Casualties

I read an article on Bush’s State of the Union address at Yahoo! News. (Why is this the UK Yahoo! site? Because I use the Opera browser, and the default home page is giving me UK news.) I missed it this year. Oh well. When I listened in 2002, they clapped after just about every sentence. I noticed the same thing in Schwarzenegger’s State of the State address (not much to comment on that except it was good in ideals but skimpy in concrete ideas). I never followed politics much earlier than that, so I don’t know if that was a new thing, or what.

Anyway, this stuck out: “‘American taxpayers are bearing almost all the cost — a colossal $120 billion and rising. More importantly, American troops are enduring almost all the casualties,’ [House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California] said.”

Are we really enduring almost all the casualties? I notice in the news reports that it’s not only US troops being hurt, it’s also Iraqi citizens. If the American troops were taking almost all the casualties, why do the Iraqi citizens feel unsafe? Something to ponder, I’m sure.

Propaganda to the rescue, once again! There needs to be more spin on how the terrorists target “collaborators,” also known as an average Iraqi citizen. Try to take out some of their support base.

However, that’s not the whole problem: I’ve read that many simultaneously view the US as good, but as an occupying force. One part of the solution is holding direct elections that allow the people to vote. But let me hold off any talk about elections until any are actually held, or when some interesting news pops up.

On a side note, there were two more earthquakes last night, but none as large as the second earthquake. After the fourth one, I noticed how close my tall lamp was to my bed and wondered how it could hurt me during an earthquake. I moved it.

Because of an “Internal Server Error” there was a double-post. I have to “Rebuild” to get rid of it, but then I get another error. I’ve been having some problems with MT, lately. The error message is pretty generic, so I have no idea how to fix it, as of now. [EDIT: Few minutes later — double-post is gone, but I’m still having problems with MT.]