I think we're forgetting one critical element in this analogy ... some drunk drivers don't end up killing innocent people. But ALL people who start wars inevitably do. So yes, comparing Bush's actions in Iraq to drunk driving isn't exactly right. We should instead compare Bush to an airline pilot who, after being warned ahead of time not to fly while intoxicated, goes ahead anyway and crashes the plane into a crowded football stadium killing thousands, yet he somehow manages to parachuite to safety. Should the pilot then have the right to publicly criticize anyone who for any reason, under any circumstances, has killed innocent people?
Blackwater is above the law. They can mow down as many iraqis as they want. That's terrorism and tax dollars support it. But we are too evil and lazy to do anything. Heck, if you try to protest, the regime will take you down. Our media would never be allowed to report this! We don't have that freedom. No wonder so many people in North American are on heavy prescription mind drugs...we are forced to believe such nonsense daily. Would made anyone crazy. ------------------------------------------------------------- A very private war There are 48,000 'security contractors' in Iraq, working for private companies growing rich on the back of US policy. But can it be a good thing to have so many mercenaries operating without any democratic control? Jeremy Scahill reports 08/01/07 "The Guardian" -- -- It was described as a "powder keg" moment. In late May, just across the Tigris river from Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, a heavily armed convoy of American forces was driving down a street near the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They were transporting US officials in what is known widely among the occupation forces as the "red zone" - essentially, any area of Iraq that does not fall inside the US-built "emerald city" in the capital. The American guards were on the look-out for any threat lurking on the roads. Not far from their convoy, an Iraqi driver was pulling out of a petrol station. When the Americans encountered the Iraqi driver, they determined him to be a potential suicide car bomber. In Iraq it has become common for such convoys to fire off rounds from a machine gun at approaching Iraqi vehicles, much to the outrage of Iraqi civilians and officials. The Americans say this particular Iraqi vehicle was getting too close to their convoy and that they tried to warn it to back off. They say they fired a warning shot at the car's radiator before firing directly into the windshield of the car, killing the driver. Some Iraqi witnesses said the shooting was unprovoked. In the ensuing chaos, the Americans reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between the Americans and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It could have become even more bloody before a US military convoy arrived on the scene. A senior US adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry's intelligence division told the Washington Post that the incident threatened to "undermine a lot of the cordial relationships that have been built up over the past four years. There's a lot of angry people up here right now." While there is ongoing outrage between Iraqis and the military over such deadly incidents, this one came with a different, but increasingly common, twist: The Americans involved in the shooting were neither US military nor civilians. They were operatives working for a secretive mercenary firm based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Its name is Blackwater USA. It was hardly the company's first taste of action in Iraq, where it has operated almost since the first days of the occupation. Its convoys have been ambushed, its helicopters brought down, its men burned and dragged through the streets of Falluja, giving the Bush administration a justification for laying siege to the city. In all, the company has lost about 30 men in Iraq. It has also engaged in firefights with the Shia Mahdi Army, and succeeded by all means necessary in keeping alive every US ambassador to serve in post-invasion Iraq, along with more than 90 visiting US congressional delegations. Just one day before the May shooting, in almost the exact same neighbourhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in another gun battle, lasting an hour, that drew in both US military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. The shoot-out was reportedly spurred by a well-coordinated ambush of Blackwater's convoy. US sources said the guards "did their job", keeping the officials alive. In another incident that has caused major tensions between Baghdad and Washington, an off-duty Blackwater operative is alleged to have shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard of the Shia vice-president Adil Abdul-Mahdi last Christmas Eve inside the Green Zone. Blackwater officials confirm that after the incident they whisked the contractor safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do. Iraqi officials labelled the killing a "murder". The company says it fired the contractor but he has yet to be publicly charged with any crime. Iraqi officials have consistently complained about the conduct of Blackwater and other contractors - and the legal barriers to their attempts to investigate or prosecute alleged wrongdoing. Four years into the occupation, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations. They have not been subjected to military justice, and only two cases have ever reached US civilian courts, under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which covers some contractors working abroad. (One man was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, in a case that has yet to go to trial, while the other was sentenced to three years for possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.) No matter what their acts in Iraq, contractors cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts, thanks to US-imposed edicts dating back to Paul Bremer's post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority.
The internet is alive with videos of contractors seemingly using Iraqi vehicles for target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Yet, despite these incidents, and although 64 US soldiers have been court-martialled on murder-related charges, not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for any crime, let alone a crime against an Iraqi. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have a motto: "What happens here today, stays here today." At home in America, Blackwater is facing at least two wrongful-death lawsuits, one stemming from the mob killings of four of its men in Falluja in March 2004, the other for a Blackwater plane crash in Afghanistan in November 2004, in which a number of US soldiers were killed. In both cases, families of the deceased charge that Blackwater's negligence led to the deaths. (Blackwater has argued that it cannot be sued and should enjoy the same immunity as the US military.) The company is also facing a mounting Congressional investigation into its activities. Despite all of this, US State Department officials heap nothing but words of praise on Blackwater for doing the job and doing it well. There are now 630 companies working in Iraq on contract for the US government, with personnel from more than 100 countries offering services ranging from cooking and driving to the protection of high-ranking army officers. Their 180,000 employees now outnumber America's 160,000 official troops. The precise number of mercenaries is unclear, but last year, a US government report identified 48,000 employees of private military/security firms. Blackwater is far from being the biggest mercenary firm operating in Iraq, nor is it the most profitable. But it has the closest proximity to the throne in Washington and to radical rightwing causes, leading some critics to label it a "Republican guard". Blackwater offers the services of some of the most elite forces in the world and is tasked with some of the occupation's most "mission-critical" activities, namely keeping alive the most hated men in Baghdad - a fact it has deftly used as a marketing tool. Since the Iraq invasion began four years ago, Blackwater has emerged out of its compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina as the trendsetter of the mercenary industry, leading the way toward a legitimisation of one of the world's dirtiest professions. And it owes its meteoric rise to the policies of the Bush administration. Since the launch of the "war on terror", the administration has funnelled billions of dollars in public funds to US war corporations such as Blackwater USA, DynCorp and Triple Canopy. These companies have used the money to build up private armies that rival or outgun many of the world's national militaries. A decade ago, Blackwater barely existed; and yet its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750m (£370m). It protects the US ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces, and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" centre just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect emergency operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 (£120,000) a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 (£470) a day per Blackwater contractor.
I got your point. I just think that by comparison, the gravity of the issue in the Bush case magnifies the significance of the hypocrisy to where we shouldn't casually dismiss it as a mere "technicality". I think we're getting off the issue of the Bush statement here again. But I'll bite ... let me put it this way: if the world were truly in danger of being taken over by any of these so-called crazed lunatics, then wouldn't "the world" be praising us left and right for what we're doing? Do you have any evidence that the killing we've done was absolutely necessary to preserve our freedom? Irrefutable proof that we are safer now than before 9/11?
Oh, I am quite sure much of the "civilized" world, i.e. Europe, are very grateful that the US is once again at the forefront of fighting fascism but they cannot say so because they either have large, poor, and angry Muslim populations to deal with or they've simply gotten accustomed to this country paying in blood and treasure to protect interests common to us all. And, of course, much of them are moonbats who would rather see the Islamofascists win this fight since it would serve the West right for hundreds of years of colonialization, globalization, and plundering of resources the world over. Of course not. Do you have proof otherwise? Is your contention, then, that force is always wrong if collateral damage cannot be estimated and the results found to be acceptable? And what is the acceptable range, anyway? What would have been the acceptable range for us getting into (or not getting into) WWII?