Who has killed more civilians, Osama or Bush?

[Manix]

After Afghanistan and Iraq, my money is on the ol' Texas executioner.

[DieboldMustDie]

1. Iraq Body Count...

Estimates civilian deaths in Iraq between 8581 and 10,430. I don't know about Afghanistan.

http://iraqbodycount.net/

[Daisey Mae]

2. i have nothing to back me up BUT

BUT BUT BUSH IS IN THE LEAD HERE I FEEL

[maggrwaggr]

3. Clinton's penis!

sorry, that just sorta popped out.

[DrWeird]

4. Bush has killed more civilians. So which is worse?

I guess it depends. How many Iraqi lives is each American life worth?

[Kimber Scott]

10. Well, we know an Iraqi is worth $5,000.00

I don't know how much we're worth.

[m-jean03]

23. Or to quote Willie Nelson

"How much oil is one human life worth?"

[wryter2000]

5. I'm waiting for the day

I'm waiting for the day he's killed as many Americans as Osama. Then, maybe,Murika will wake up.

:cry:

[Bombtrack]

6. Bin Laden TARGETED civilians

You can be a tough democrat without being a friggin extremist. It's this fringe equivocation which causes this discussion board to not be used to it's full potential. Why do you think any and all party apparatus avoid it. It's because of this kind of crap

[bedtimeforbonzo]

7. well, since it was collateral damage

then bush isn't culpable.

Go ahead boys, keep up the bombing!

[ThirdWheelLegend]

9. Ooops wrong reply

TWL

[dpibel]

8. So lemme see now

If Bin Laden targeted a military base, and one of your family members was working on base and got killed, you'd pretty much be down with that?

"Oh," you'd say, "not a problem. Just collateral damage. He didn't mean to."

Or am I missing something here?

[FDRrocks]

11. And we carpet bombed Afghanistan

and forced vital aid to civilians to be cut off from Pakistan, leading to much death and disease.

[ThirdWheelLegend]

12. Shock and Awe on a city of 5 million CIVILIANS...

Nothing to see here, move along.

TWL

[beanball]

14. Soldiers in civilian clothes

are not civilians.Combatants are the same as soldiers.

[dpibel]

24. Soldiers like armless Ali?

You are suggesting here that all the civilians killed in Iraq were soldiers in civilian clothing.

Tell me that's not what you're saying. But if it's not, what are you saying?

[DrWeird]

15. Yeah, neither did Osama.

He targeted military headquarters and key financial centers. The civilians were just collateral damage.

There, does that make 9-11 feel better?

[troublemaker]

17. We can be better than Osama ...

while still taking our share of responsibility.

Our concept of liability contains a highly developed American ethic of responsibility. When harm results from people doing sensible mundane things we consider it an accident. When harm arises from people doing extraordinary things that most sensible people wouldn't do, we consider it criminal.

Two people are are involved in separate fatal accidents while driving home from the store. One of them was driving normally but the other fellow had decided to drive home on the wrong side of the road. Though both drivers had the same intent--both wanted to go home and neither driver had the intention of killing anyone--we imprison one and not the other.

The reckless driver is guilty of some species of manslaughter. Had he intended to crash his car into people and kill them we would be guilty of first degree murder.

How does the Iraq war measure up within or notions of responsibility? I am willing to stipulate good intentions in Iraq so murder is off the table. When intentions are good, what distinguishes mishap and manslaughter? Were we reckless? Did we act outside behavioral norms? Were the malign results of our actions foreseeable?

If the Iraq war was self defense I wouldn't care what the world had to say, but it wasn't. Whatever our internal moral formulations it's clear that 90% of humans around the world considered invading Iraq to be extraordinary behavior akin to driving on the wrong side of the road. Apparently we saw ourselves as Raskolnikov, able to speak a new word and overturn conventional global mores.

Every act of terrorism in today's Iraq is a direct and easily foreseeable result of our decision to invade. Whenever an Iraqi mosque is bombed it is manslaughter and we are morally culpable. The fact that the individual terrorists involved are guilty of the greater crime of murder does not lessen our moral responsibility. Morality isn't a zero-sum game.

And terrorism in Iraq isn't only an accidental result of our recklessness. War proponents cheerfully admit that it was our specific intention to have terrorists blow up Iraqis. "It is better to fight terrorists in Baghdad than in New York." That slogan really means; "It's better for Iraqi civilians to be blown up than American civilians."

It's certainly more politically popular in the US, but what moral imperatives allowed us to pick out the populace of another country as a preferable target mix for terrorists? The phrase "human shield" comes to mind.

I am not a Christian but, like all western liberals, I accept certain tenants of Christianity like the moral equivalence of human beings. How can the Iraq war be a moral cause when the whole plan is based on a calculus wherein Arab lives carry less moral weight than American lives? I can't imagine an American president saying "it's better to fight terrorists in New York than in Chicago." What am I missing?

[Media_Lies_Daily]

30. Excuse me, but where is the actual evidence connecting OBL to 911?...

You can be a tough Democrat without swallowing whole the "official" 911 storyline. Even the FBI has stated that they have nothing to connect Al Qaeda to 911:

FBI Admits: No Evidence Links 'Hijackers' to 9-11
The possibility that 19 Muslim men accused of being the Sept. 11 hijackers were not, in fact, the hijackers, is not so extraordinary an idea as it might seem.
<http://www.americanfreepress.net/051302/FBI_Admits__No_Evidence_/fbi_admits__no_evidence_.html>

Excerpt:

"In an April 19 speech delivered to the Common wealth Club in San Francisco, Mueller said that the purported hijackers, in his words, 'left no paper trial.' The FBI director stated flatly:

'In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot.'"

It's this fringe equivocation to believe whatever the NeoCon Junta pumps into the mainstream media which causes this discussion board to not be used to it's full potential.

[John BigBootay]

13. Talk about "straw man"!

I get accused of presnting a straw man argument for listing the demands that OBL himself made to the world to "end" his reign of terror.

Okay--

Who killed more civillians in WW2, Hirohito or FDR?

Sheeesh!

[dpibel]

26. Good Question

As a first matter, good job of conflating OBL with the war on Iraq. I think the real comparison here is that OBL killed some Americans in an unjustifiable attack, and Americans have killed some Iraqis in an unjustifiable attack (that's granting you that attacking Afghanistan was a just and moral thing to do, a point I grant only for the sake of argument).

So let's frame the question this way: Who has killed more civilians in the course of an unjustifiable attack?

Do you really think that the war on Iraq is more justifiable than the attack on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon? If so, why? Both were based on internally sufficient justifications for the perpetrators. But those justifications hold no water for the majority of humans.

As to your question about civilians killed in WWII, I'm not sure. I do believe that the Japanese killed a lot of civilians in China and Southeast Asia, so the answer's not immediately clear to me. The answer could be Harry Truman, since he authorized the completely unncecessary nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And, frankly, I don't know a lot of people who really comfortably defend nuking those cities and fire-bombing Tokyo and Dresden. Those were reprehensible acts, and deserve to be treated that way.

Do you think there might be any difference in the moral calculus if you consider that WWII was ostensibly a defensive war, while the war on Iraq is an aggressive, unprovoked one?

[Deja Q]

16. Not to forget Americans who lost their jobs and killed themselves...

in depression... or anything else related to depression that * has been responsible for.

Not to forget the Americans he will kill to maintain his position of power, and Americans killd in future terror attacks.

[SendTheGOPPacking]

18. Bush considering the Iraqi and Afghani civilians killed

Oh, I forgot about the executions in Texas.

[RamboLiberal]

19. I'm wondering does anyone have figures on how many

Iraqi's Saddam killed and imprisoned during the last 5 years? And how many do we have imprisoned in Iraq now?

I was thinking last night that even though they had no responsibility for 9-11 the Iraqis have paid a higher toll than U.S. did in civilians killed. And probably 50-100-fold in injuries.

[troublemaker]

22. Last five years...

not a lot. 300,000 killed is the usual figure, but no many of those recent killings.

Thanks for your formulation that 9/11 ultimately killed more Iraqis than Americans. It's elegant.

[dpibel]

27. According to Amnesty International

Fewer than 5,000. The numbers for the earliest four years are given as "hundreds," for the year preceding the invasion, the number is "dozens."

Edited to add this clarification: The balance of this post is not directed at the poster to whom this post replies. It anticipates an argument, and poses questions for those who maintain that the war on Iraq should not be measured by the relative lack of monstrosities in the five years preceding the invasion, but should, instead, stand as punishment for past misdeeds.

For those who argue that he killed tons and tons before then: the biggest killings by S. Hussein are associated with the Iran/Iraq war and the Shiite rebellion. The Iran/Iraq war were good killings at the time, because Iran was the monster regime, and Hussein was the heroic fighter for truth, justice, and American revenge.

The killings during the Shiite rebellion following the Great War of Poppy were many and brutal. They were facilitated by the fact that Poppy decided he didn't want to support a rebellion after all, and failed to offer any air support, leaving Hussein's forces free to use helicopter gunships to great effect.

But how do you parse this: if SH was a monster for killing a lot of people in the Shiite rebellion, what does that make Abe Lincoln? Think about it before you go all apoplectic. Both the Shiite rebellion and the US Civil War were uprisings by rebels against the power in force. We know, of course, that Lincoln was on the force of good and right. But there were some people at the time who might have disagreed. Do we consider killing rebels OK, only if the party in power is baaaad?

If that is the case, where do you stand on Chechnaya? Putin: hero or monster?

[Ms. Clio]

20. Bush

But neither one of them is done killing yet.

[Kimber Scott]

21. 10.000 Civilians Killed in Iraq in a Year

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/032004H.shtml

[Media_Lies_Daily]

31. My personal guess is that the number used is about 30% of actual.

[Name removed]

25. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[debsianben]

28. Bush. Duh.

OSAMA
***********
First WTC bombing, plus USS Cole, plus Embassies--I'm not sure, but in the hundreds, not thousands,

Combined NYC, Pentagon, PA, 9/11 body count--less than 3500 (actually closer to 3000).

Spanish train bombing--200
************
BUSH
************
Bush's savage bombing of Afghanistan bodycount--well over 3000, probably more than 9/11 bodycount

Bush's war in Iraq body count--somewhere in the 10s of 1000s, hard to say. More die on both sides every day.

Bush's Haiti body count--hundreds of Haitians (killed by right-wing death squads given the green light by Der Fuhrer Bush), at least 1 Marine (as of a couple of days ago--more to come?)

Bush's Country X body count (yet to be determined, what country he will bomb/invade/occupy next before he leaves office)--any one's guess

WINNER AND STILL CHAMPIOOOON!
***********
All of this is somewhat inaccurate, in that Bush bears some responsibility for the Osama bodycount, in that (a)the entire Bin Laden clan was rushed out of the country before being questioned shortly after 9/11, (b)Bush blatantly disregarded warnings before 9/11 (even when his administration was taking them seriously enough that Ashcroft wasn't flying commercial planes anymore, they weren't taking them seriously enough to piss off their corporate donors running airline security by federalizing it), and (c)Bush fanned the flames of Al Queda recruitment with his blood-soaked colonial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
************
Let's be honest, in a better world, Duhbya and Osama would be cell-mates at the Hague and Kerry would have lost his Senate seat in punishment for his vote for the IWR and his role in pimping for Bush's lies about WMDs. I'm empowered to get up in the world by the thought that a better world is possible.

[Doomsayer13]

29. probably Bush

but there's a distinction. Bush didn't go out there with the thought "lets kill us some Afghani and Iraqi civilians" while Bin Laden and Al Queda specifically targets civilians, woman and children. Bush sucks, but Bin Laden is a monster.

[chelsea0011]

32. Agreed, there really is a distinction here to be made

But the Iraq war is still immoral