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Originally posted by: Simon2
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How would you feel if I claimed that you killed my mother on the way to work and forced you to admit it solely on a picture of a woman who looks like my mother who was hit by a car that looks sort of like yours, then to find out the next day that my mom is alive and well and that the picture was taken thousands of miles from where you live?
Why are you so rash to judge others on partial and unverified evidence?
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Your analogy makes it so simple. Let's say that it did happen (knock on wood). Let's say I laughed in your face and told you that you deserved it or let's say I said something like, "It was a mistake/accident (whatever you want to call it. Its just semantics). I will try to correct it next time." Would that give you any comfort? That I would make sure I don't hit your mother again?
What if I said, "I hit your mother because I thought she was a terrorist. I'm sorry." Would that make you less sad? Knowing that I just made a mistake?
I guess I'm just sad that too many innocent people are dying. Both American and Iraqi. Remind me again. Why is the US in Iraq? Where are the WMDs?
You can bet the relatives of those people are now hating the US. If they loved the US for liberating them, they are hating the US now.
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1st of all we're hardly laughing in the face of the families who have loss. The message is that we are investigating an incident that happened only a few days ago and which we have only partial and incomplete information on. You are talking as this is a done deal. You are judging the hear and now. So the 1st part of your example is totally off base. All we are doing is not rushing to judgement.
2nd if my mom was killed it would be hard to console me. But it regardless of the situation where she died I would not appreciate someone rushing to give me incomplete and inaccurate facts because of some political agenda. You are judging the US guilty of killing innocents when there are no conclusive facts to indicate this is the case. Why are you doing this? Because you have some political axe to grind? You hate America? You're incredibly naive? It really doesn't matter, it does not help the families of any victims to jump to conclusions. We don't know exactly what happened and won't for some time yet.
Now how many innocents dieing is too many? I would agree with you in that one is too many. However we don't have a choice on no innocents dieing. That's just not an available option in the real world. Whatever actions we take or don't take, there will still be innocents who die. That's life. What we can do is all in our power to limit the overall loss of innocent life. IMO we're doing a pretty damn good job of that. Can we do better? I certainly think so. We're far from perfect, and therefore have room to improve.
Now whether you like it or not, Iraq is a war zone and will be for quite some time. It is not possible to make it anything less in any short amount of time. Now you can sit in your ivory tower and bitch about how unfair life is or you can accept the realities of life and try and make the best of it.
Pratically this means mistakes will be made. Some of those mistakes will cost the lives of innocents. That's just how things are. We can look at why those mistakes happened and do our best to see that they don't happen again. What we cannot do is bring back those who have been lost. That's beyond our power. There are no magical words that we can say to any family who have lost a loved one to make it all better. We can say we're sorry. We can say that we're taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. We can even offer to compensate them for their loss. But that's about it. We just don't have power to do much else. We could give in to our enemies, but that does nothing for the families.
What is a shame is that many will shamelessly exploit the loss of innocents to further their own politcal agendas.