I only know what I say -- Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld/Rove/Wolfowitz, et al; they all have blood on their hands. I read on another post somewhere that the US is responsible for more deaths than any other country in this century. OK, the century is young, but it is just a sickening thought. How did we get here?

Oh, yeah, I remember; so we can make them kill everyone THERE so they won't have time to kill anyone HERE. Brilliant.

Why is Karl Rove looking so Cheshire-Cat-Like lately? Look out, world!

Jan Knaus

Good points!

Re. the 650K figure, including 200,000 Iraqis killed by Coalition Forces, and our collective silence, one casualty is our ability to criticize other nations with any moral credibility: When the Turks dismiss the Armenian genocide, when the Japanese worship at Yasukuni, when the Sudanese shrug their shoulders over Darfur, when Cuba imprisons dissidents, when China arrests journalists, who are we now to raise our voices -- with the blood of 650K people on our hands ?

Or take Iran and its "mad" government! How many people has that mad government slaughtered? Meanwhile we've butchered their next-door neighbor? What kind of American blindness is it that keeps us from seeing that, when we accuse Iran of being dangerous, the rest of world just laughs and says "Look who's talking!"

Not to make this personal, but my own family history makes me rather sensitive about governments killing huge numbers of citizens. And if I've learned anything in my life it's that whether the victims look like me or don't does not matter the slightest bit.

I understand intent matters and I am not accusing anyone in the US government of genocide. But mass killing, regardless of intent, matters greatly. And a society that doesn't take responsibility for it deserves absolute scorn.

I'm just hoping, and hoping that some other nation will arrest members of this administration on their territory for war crimes.  I would view that as a healing process for our country. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Seriously, I see no basis for meaningful comparison between Amin and the Iraq occupation.

Yes, Uganda has about the same population as Iraq does now, and yes, Amin killed hundreds of thousands of people.

But so what? Uganda's population was significantly smaller, as much as 1/3 smaller when Amin was running things.

Amin was a British trained boxer and sargeant who had enough troops loyalty to evict Milton Obote, who had the triple handicaps of being corrupt, incompetent and disliked by the west and his own people.

Amin was welcomed initially by Ugandans and by the world. His viciousness, incompetence and grandiosity slowly made Uganda a worldwide sick joke.

Nevertheless, he remained in power for years until a border incident with Tanzania. Tanzania overthrew him and placed Obote on the throne. Obote proceeded to kill even more people and was eventually deposed.

So where's the comparison with Iraq? America certainly was not welcomed in by anyone. Are we comparing Bush's grandiosity with Amin's? American corruption with Amin's? American incompetence to Amin?

Historians will say unkind things about Bush and Rumsfeld. But comparisons to Uganda will not spring immediately to mind.

Fun is fun, but I don't think it does anyone any good to compare Bush to whatever 'bad thing' we happen to notice that day.

The reason I cited Amin-- other than yes noticing the comparison because of seeing the movie -- was that big numbers can just lose meaning without a comparison.  So what mass murders should we compare Iraq to?  I wouldn't reach for the Khmer Rouge, so what makes Amin interesting as a comparison is that he was a more "normal" mass murderer, if on a larger scale.

And the fact that Amin's scale is remarkably similar to the numbers from Iraq makes it a useful comparison.  There are no doubt nuanced differences, but, yes, the levels of paranoia, indifference to human life and corruption of the Bush administration does have resonance in the Amin comparison.

But if there are other nominations for What kind of Mass Murderer is Bush most like?  I'd be happy to hear them. 

I think Nathan's comparison is interesting.

Both Idi Amin and George Bush caused deaths in the hundreds of thousands -- completely unnecessarily.

And yet there's a not a living soul in America today who does not think that Idi Amin was a blood-thirsty maniac who probably drank children's blood for breakfast. There's unanimity, right?

OK, now, remember that Bush was reelected two years ago and still commands the respect of a third of all Americans.

Probably because butchers can't be white, Christians, and Americans. They have to be like Saddam and Idi Amin: funny accents, funny clothes, funny skin color.

So Nathan's post invites the question: shouldn't anyone who respects Bush and loathes Idi Amin asks himself why the double standard?

Why do we need to make mass murder comparative? Isn't mass murder itself egregious?

Nathan
Just curious, what did you think of the movie overall?

Hmm-- THe Forrest Whittaker performance was compelling as billed and the story as story was well done, but the viewpoint politically stayed at the level of the doctor protagonist-- clueless and without much context.    Hard to do analysis in a movie, but just a bit more folks explaining to the doctor what the hell was going on would have been useful. 

... except that the Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 election results are both invalid due to Secretaries of State (Harris and Blackwell) acting as Bush-Cheney co-chairs and rigging both elections.

Tom

Unfortuantely, Tom, this is sounds disingenuous to the world, when neither election was challenged by the voting public. We allowed the Supreme Court to select the President.

We have done nothing since to ensure the intergrity of the vote, either. Diebold is putting in machines left and right, with no paper trail after having donated millions to the GOP.

So, worldwide, the voting fraud, means little relative to the toll of death and destruction the Bush administration has engaged in. Lets not even begin to talk about how ignorant Bush looks to the vast majority of heads of state, his refusal to talk with N. Korea and his snubbing of the Chinese leader. Bush is a total disgrace to any American who beleives in democracy and the Constitution, let alone the art of diplomacy...ugh..Bush, I hate to say it ...but he is simply an asswipe.

Agreed, but that and believing that it's a fact that Harris and Blackwell stole Florida and Ohio are not mutually exclusive.

Tom

When I saw the title of this post, I sort of laughed thinking "wow, that's from left field." reading it however, I have to say Nathan, you have many applicable points.

"Amin was a paranoid who bombed villages to get at a few opponents-- he was called a mass murderer for such attacks, but we dismiss similar US bombing actions as merely engaging in collateral damage against civilians".

It wasn't until after reading, that I realized the true tragedy of it... in essence, we are talking about over 1 million people here, dead, and such comments like "But so what" cause one to step back and say, when 3,000 plus people died in the US, it was seen by many of US as the crime of all time.

Numbers like Nathan has brought up, put much into perspective.

Napoleon once said something to the effect of 'History is the events of the past, we choose to agree upon'. Let's up, for our children and our children's children, that they agree in the future that Bush and Rumsfeld were in the same category as Idi Amin Dada.

I have tried to make this point repeatedly, but rarely get agreement.  There is a grave responsibility involved in voting.  It is not a game, not a place to "send a message", and not a place to make decisions based upon who you would like to drink with.  This is true when voting for a school board member, and it is true when voting for a President.  We are responsible for doing our voting duty by assessing the candidates abilities versus the requirements of the job, then voting accordingly.

In 2000, no one could have rationally believed that Bush was capable of being President.  To do so required that one simply ignore everything they had learned about the man.  But, we still gave Bush almost enough votes to win.

In 2004, it had been abundantly demonstrated that Bush was incompetent as a President, and much worse, was dead set upon violating our Constitution in every way he could, appointing people even less qualified than him to hold appointive offices, and unwilling to learn anything at all about the world and the country.  Still, a majority of our voters voted for him.  (Possibly less than a majority, but very close to a majority.)

Those two elections represent a total failure of our democracy, as limited as it is.  The world, and especially, the Iraqis have suffered enormously as a result of our incompetence, disinterest, and failure to take our voting jobs seriously.  We all should collectively be ashamed, and that is far from an adequate consequence for our actions.   Unfortunately, just as Bush has refused to learn a single thing about the world, we, as voters appear to have refused to learn a single thing about selecting our President.  Time will tell if this is true.

Hoppy in Sacramento

So... if in the course of suppressing the insurgency, the United States just sort of accidentally happened to wipe out every Iraqi Sunni... that still wouldn't make it Genocide? Because there has to be an element of mens rea?

Lemkin's an ass.

I would like to learn more about the difference between Harris and LeMay. Could you explain that a little more? Just to explain why I am interested, one of my uncles, for whom I was named, was a co-pilot on B17s in WWII. Of course, he did not serve under either Harris or LeMay, but I am still very interested in the subject. My uncle was on the Schweinfurt raid. He bailed out several times, and most of his war was spent in a German prison camp. He did not like to talk about the war, but I know that he had a very jaundiced view of it. He said that if I wanted to know what it was like, I should read Catch-22. He cited the bombing survey that was taken after the war, which indicated that the bombing increased the will to fight of the German people, contrary to the intended effect.

Why not use an American example, as in Lyndon Johnson, the last US president who involved the US in a long-running and quite bloody war?

Apropos of such an example, let me recommend HR McMaster's Dereliction of Duty, which is the best analysis of LBJ's thinking, off on his own side with a group of political advisors. It was legendary that the Tuesday Lunches, with Maxwell Taylor, an Army officer, present from the military (and then no military after he became Ambassador), doing detailed airstrike planning on the North.

McMaster did get some new information, in documents and interviews. IIRC, the book grew out of his doctoral dissertation in history. Not a pure academic, McMaster was a distinguished combat leader in 1991, and, most recently commanded 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq and taking it back to the US. This opened doors that might not have been open to lefty pinko pacifists, or something like that.

The buzz among some of my Army friends is guessing how quickly he will go to four stars, and in what job. In 1991, he is well known for the Battle of 73 Easting, where his company team took out an Iraqi armored brigade with no US losses. In the Army, however, he is known for an incident that has no real name, since it was not a battle.

The situation, a day or two after 73 Easting, was when his unit encountered dug-in Republican Guard. He had all the artillery and air support on demand to destroy them with no risks to US forces, but chose to do something else. He called for an interpreter and a loudspeaker system, and, perhaps over half an hour, gave respect, and talked an Iraqi unit out of losing their lives for no reason. Not that many commanders are known both for savagery and mercy.

I mention this background to give some idea of the access he obtained. Partially through interviews and partially from documents not previously released, he documented how several members of the Joint Chiefs seriously considered resigning in protest, but decided they could help more on the inside -- a problem almost certainly happening now.

I was shocked to learn of what I considered an impeachable offense. Up to reading McMaster, I assumed the timing of the first retaliatory raids into the North, just after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was simply for tactical reasons. It turned out that LBJ, in order to make the evening news and the morning newspaper deadlines, went onto TV to announce the raids, when they were still inbound to the North Vietnamese air defense system. There's some indication that NV did not believe their Soviet advisors and didn't come to full alert, and, of course, the air defenses were not yet at their peak. For minor political benefit of making the news, he significantly raised the risk to a couple of hundred aircrew.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

He was certainly a micromanager of things he did not understand. Another dimension, though, is that he got into a personal macho contest (in his mind) with Ho, while McNamara thought everything would work if it was totally emotionless statistics.

Had Kennedy lived, the Bay of Pigs might have conveyed wisdom.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I novel I read recently had the plot device of Kennedy being assassinated by Diem's family, in revenge for the coup. Families in Vietnam were supposedly, at the time, more like Mafia than simply relatives.