NLF base camp after U.S. attack
With all the killing the USA military has done to date in Iraq, you mean to tell me there will be more after we leave on a scale to daught what occurred in Bush's illegal war? Who's kidding who? Even the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot couldn't kill as many people as the Vietnam War did.
UN urges Cambodia to reconsider judge's transfer from genocide tribunal (click here)
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: The U.N. urged Cambodia to reconsider its decision to transfer a judge from the Khmer Rouge tribunal, saying the move could disrupt efforts to convene the long-awaited genocide trials, a spokesman said Wednesday.
You Bun Leng, one of two investigating judges at the U.N.-backed tribunal, was recently appointed by the Cambodian government to head the country's Appeals Court.
After numerous delays, he and Marcel Lemonde, the U.N.-appointed judge, only recently began investigations of former Khmer Rouge leaders accused of crimes against humanity, genocide and other atrocities that caused the deaths of some 1.7 million people in the late 1970s.
The world body has urged Cambodia "to consider keeping Judge You Bun Leng in his current function as co-investigative judge" of the tribunal, said Peter Foster, a U.N.-appointed tribunal spokesman, in a statement Wednesday.
He said the U.N. officially delivered a note of concern to the Cambodian permanent representative in New York last Thursday, and was now awaiting a response....
It also resulted in atrocities. "As much as the military command might deny its significance, the widespread local support for the full-time main forces of the NLF and NVA was the central disadvantage faced by American soldiers." Villagers would supply the NLF with soldiers, food and assistance in the planting of land mines. What many U.S. soldiers feared most were
land mines and then ambushes. Soldiers would become demoralized by weeks of mundane patrolling and then they would be hit unexpectedly by the explosion of land mines or an ambush....
...Never speak to the civilan deaths of Iraq...and Never allow any discussion of lowering military budgets to end the war in Iraq.
Iraq's civilian dead get no hearing in the United States
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Evidence is mounting that America's war in Iraq has killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and perhaps well over 100,000. Yet this carnage is systematically ignored in the United States, where the media and government portray a war in which there are no civilian deaths, because there are no Iraqi civilians, only insurgents....
The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8·1–419) than in the period before the war. (click here)
Findings (click here)
Three misattributed clusters were excluded from the final analysis; data from 1849 households that contained 12801 individuals in 47 clusters was gathered. 1474 births and 629 deaths were reported during the observation period. Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4·3–7·1), compared with 13·3 per 1000 people per year (10·9–16·1) in the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654965 (392979–942636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601027 (426369–793663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.
VIETNAM as reported after the USA left (click here):
Vietnamese casualties are far less specific, and they weredeliberately falsified prior to 1995, leading to some of theconfusion. According to the Agence France Presse (French Press Agency)as reported on, "...the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north,and 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were deliberately falsified during the war by the North VietnameseCommunists to avoid demoralizing the population."So approximately 5.1 million total Vietnamese casualites.And a grand total of approximately 5.4 million.
The lessons of Iraq are still obscure to most people as they are overshadowed by the events of September 11, 2001, which had nothing to do with Iraq.
Vietnam was engaged by Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy had reached a moral impass on Vietnam. He witnessed the distress of citizens setting themselves on fire to protest the continued presence of American advisors numbering about 5000 which propagated the 'idea' of war to defeat Ho in the North. President Kennedy was on the verge of reversing the trend started under SEATO by Roosevelt, withdrawing military advisors while leaving in place medical and humanitarian aid. President Kennedy put human life and dignity before treaties too dangerous to be honored. SEATO has since been disbanded.
The lessons of Vietnam are obvious. It should have never been engaged and Kennedy was right. The potential of a USA miltiary force to do enormous damage was to be prudently considered.
The lessons of Iraq are nearly the same, except, this time our Constitution was openly assaulted and continues to be by the current administration to create a 'dictator' of the Presidency.
THAT is different about Iraq than Vietnam.
The lessons of opposition of the Vietnam War by the American populous were not to be tolerated by the Bush Oval Office and he methodically set out to destroy the USA Constitution including Habeas Corpus and Civil Rights of privacy; instead replacing all rights with 'self-righteous' governmental tithing to God to justify the oppression of the people of the USA.
The lessons of Iraq are more about 'the sheep' created of the American people than of the atrocities of war, which are egregious and CURRENTLY genocidal.
