liz_marcs | Iraq: 101

Via Crooks and Liars:

For those of you who haven't been paying attention...or for those of you who have but needed a nice little primer to help you keep track of what's what, Mother Jones has put up a well-researched and well-sourced primer called Iraq 101.

While not a lot of the information in there is news to me, I tend to get the political parties and who represents whom mixed up. For example, I tend to assign Sunnis to Shiite political parties and Shiites to Sunni political parties, which...yeah...very, very stupid and very, very bad. At least I tend to correctly match the Kurds to their correct political parties.

Even if you think you know all the Playas and all the facts, guaranteed that you'll be learnin' something new in this handy online primer.

The sources section is an especially nice collection of links.

Fellow U.S. citizens, it's been 4 years since we launched an illegal war on Iraq — a country that we not only armed back in the day, but never attacked us and also posed zero threat to our national security.

If you haven't educated yourself on the key facts, it's time to start.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thank you so much for the link, Liz. I get the various factions mixed-up far too easily... *shakes head at self*

*salutes*

No sweat. I read over it this morning over my bagel and clicked on a few links in the sources. It's definitely a very hand-dandy online guide, methinks, and one that's fairly well referenced.

I tend to get very, very confused with the factions myself. I think the only reason why I keep the Kurds straight is because they tend to use some variant of "Kurd" in their faction name/political party.

I have a funny yet sad story to tell. I sent some of my friends a long essay talking about Muslim beliefs and factions, but I had done was write about Klingons from Star Trek. Throughout the text I had replaced the word "Klingon" with the word "Muslim".

One of my friends picked up on it when I mentioned their ancestral home of Sto-Vo-Kor, but that was it. Everyone else thought I was totally serious about it ... even when I got to the part about the Honor Houses and how if the Muslim High Council disapproved of a trivial House than the very House itself could fall.

Sorry for the typo above. In all seriousness, I am glad you posted this link because more people need to see this to understand the different factions and the true cost of this ginormous mess. Thank you.

When you say illegal, you're referring to international law, correct?

Yes.

But if the president does it, it can't be illegal!
Oh. Wait. It can.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am glad that Saddam Hussein is not in power any longer; but still, the way it was conducted was... terrifying.

Errr, can we get out of Iraq now, please?

honestly, some of the numbers seem a little suspect. I would like to see the regression that they ran to determine if there has been an Iraq effect. Although I think that removing Iraq and Afghanistan from the calculation was appropriate since the nature of the study seems to want to focus on jihad attacks, as in terrorist attacks, and it seems that most attacks in Iraq will be of a different nature. An eyeball of the data shows that with the level of variation in the data, it could be possible that Iraq is not statistically significant, but then again I don't know how the rest of the data is calculated and events like Vietnam may be included and should be excluded.
JimboS

Well,i'm glad that at least some people know that US was wrong to invade Iraq...People there, are living everyday in fear...

I've been catching up with stuff from my Flist so I just got to this post.

You know, it's kind of scary that I learned a lot of the things mentiined there in school, when I was like 15, 16, and yet a lot of people in the states never get this information. See, I went to catholic school in Latin America, the war in Irak [even though it didn't really affect the country I lived in directly] was a subject teachers thought we should know about, you know, current news and whatnot, and yet kids in the states aren't beeing talked about this. People in general in the states don't know this and it makes me abgry because hey, I am an American [albeit a not very patriotic one] and I know more about this stupid war because I live over seas than I probably would have learned living in the states. Or maybe that's not exactly right, I've been exposed to more information over here than I would have living there.

There were a lot of facts I didn't know though, so thanks a lot for pointing me there.

Iraq: 101

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