David Gould said:
In terms of the statement itself, though, it could easily be turned around. Why do Moslems think nothing of when a Christian or a Jew dies? (note that I am not suggesting that all, most or even many Moslems think this way - it is just turning it around). The US would no doubt say that they are only taking military action in the Middle East because of terrorists attacking first. It is one of those, 'You started it!' fingerpointing matches that gets everybody precisely nowhere.
it's not about fingerpointing, rather it's a cultural statement, people started out as tribes and back in those early days whenever one of their own tribe died they'd morn him or sometimes her, but whenever someone from a different tribe died they either thought nothing of it or rejoiced at their death if it was a memeber of a competing tribe. Looks at the OT and all those commands to go into a city and kill everyone in there, sometimes specifying that pregnant women were to be first cut open. People are cruel animals, especially when it comes to fighting for territories and/or resources (whcih is btw the case in the middle east, is a fight for the control of the oil fields in the region) and it's this cruelty that the quote basically illustrates
There is also a big difference between the way the US operates and the way terrorists like Osama operate. The US does not deliberately target civilians; they even spend millions and millions of dollars designing systems to make it less likely that accidentally civilian deaths will occur. Osama deliberately and unashamedly makes civilians his target.
give me a break as if the relatives of the numerous iraqis killed in US air raids will feel better if they know their loved ones were not killed deliberately but simply because military intel thought there were terrorists in the house where a wedding ceremony was underway and so it was blown to pieces with a high precision air to surface missile.
Concerning Osama and al Qaida, it's not like it's highly centralized organization like the Us military, Osama is more of an informal inspirer kind of leader and possibly money handler, local cells operate pretty much independently. Plus most likely al Qaida cells make up only a relatively small portion of the iraqi insurgency, in iraq there are just heaps of people willing to kill americans, why? simple because americans kill them, deliberate or not deliberat it doesn't really matter, I mean when US marines set up road blocks and then start trying to stop vehicles approaching their road blocks with the hand signals used in the USMC, the ones they were taught back at boot camp, i.e. a raised fist, and the vehicles don't stop, cause the sign outside the USMC has a totally different meaning, a sign of solidarity in many places in the middle east, it certainly doesn't mean stop, now the vehicle doesn't stop and what do the marines at the roadblock do? They open fup on it, light it up, as they put it, later it naturally turns out there were civilians only in the vehicle, half of them dead now, the other half are dying, they just had no way of knowing that a raised fist means stop in the USMC since none of them have ever been to their boot camps. and such incidents abounded in the first few months, naturally the resentment amongs iraqis grew and more and more peopole joined the insurgency. You can't jsut put it all down to terrorism and Bin Laden.
In fact what's going down in Iraq seems like Vietnam experience being repeated all over again, when a huge field army is sent in to fight insurgency using full blown middle to large scale conflict tactics which would have been perfect had the Cold War gone hot in Europe, but which are totally out of place in counterinsurgency warfare, because to every killed insurgent some 100 civilians get killed accidentally and inevitably more and more civilians are turned into first symathyzers with the insurgents' cause and then as more of their relatives get wiped out in precision strikes, into insurgents, willing to drive explosives loaded trucks into US compounds cause after all of their family has been collaterally damaged to bits, they have nothing to lose and only hatred to run on. All that talk about millions of dollars spent to prevent civilian casualties is basically **** since those millions, if they are real that is, obviously aren't working and to mind also comes a comment by one of the marines storming Falluja, when asked about civilian casualties he replied soemthign to the effect that "What do you want we're marines we're effing kill people"
So, after finally understanding what the statement is all about, I think that Osama is basically talking out of the thing that he sits on.
what the statement is about is that if the US hadn't come to Iraq, innocent people would not be dying there now. The western media goes nuts over western hostages getting kidnapped and having their heads cut off on camera, but if you look at the statistics, how many western hostages have been killed in iraq so far, add that number to how many US troops have died, you'll most likely get a total of under 3000, now try and get the statistics on how many iraqi civilians have been killed since 2003, you'll at least have to add one additional zero to the previous total, and possibly multiply the result by 2 or three or even more and the western media rarely even mentions those figures, the general consensus being that it's the price the iraqis have to pay for democracy which they never asked for in the first place, and everyone's keeeping silent about what they're really dying for - the profits of the oil corporations.
Having said that, I should also add that Osama bin Laden and terrorists like him do respond with terrorism to foreign policy stuff ups by the US and other Western nations, there Western nations do have a duty of care to try to prevent their actions causing these kinds of behaviours. But that is not what the statement is about.
the statement itself just reflects the natural state of affairs in the human kigdome, no matter what we might say, but it'll always remain the case that we care more for our own that get hurt and don't really care all that much about strangers. As for Bin Laden, he's fast being made into a symbol of popular resitance to the western pro corporate plundering policies in the developing countries, whether we want it or not, you can't hurt people and steal their property and expect them to be thankful to you, can you? Going to war in Iraq was basically like seeing that your neighbor has somethign oyu want, then pronouncing you don't like your neighbor and that you think he must be planning something against you and then going and beating him up and then taking whatever of his things you wanted in the first place. It's totally unjust, if they'd really wanted to topple Saddam this could have been done by supporting a local shia resitance and supplying them with weapons. In short once again in a situ where a scalpel was needed, the US hot shots used a hatchet, no wonder there's now blood all over the place.
