Now that George Bush has gone to Texas, the neo-cons left in his stead or trying to remain relevant in the political discourse. It's hard when the majority of America rejects them for the eight years of destruction that they brought upon us, but try, try, try they might. Take for example, Mr. Fred Kagen of the American Enterprise Institute, who had something rather brilliant to add to the discussion about Iraq.
From ThinkProgress:
At an AEI panel Wednesday, Kagan drastically overplayed Iraqis’ tolerance for “collateral damage” resulting from U.S. military incursions. Comparing Afghanistan and Iraq, Kagan said that a notable difference between the two wars is that Iraqi civilians “were not bitching” when civilians were killed:
KAGAN: The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage. You had nothing like the degree of upset about how many civilians were being injured and how much damage was being done to the infrastructure in Iraq at a much higher level of destruction than you have in Afghanistan at a much lower level of destruction.
Kagan then attributed the differences between Iraqis’ so-called tolerance for civilian deaths — and Afghan’s intolerance — to “cultural reasons”:
KAGAN: I think there’s a cultural reason for that: Afghans don’t fight in their cities. Iraqis do. For good or ill, Iraqis expect to fight in their cities. That’s where the insurgents dug in, Saddam Hussein planned to dig in to the cities or lure us into an urban fight. It’s sort of understood that the battlefield is going to be there, that doesn’t mean that they don’t complain about it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem, but it does mean that when the insurgents dig in and we root them out, the Iraqis don’t on the whole say “darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses.” They sort of accept that. Afghans do not.
It is thinking like this that has gotten nearly 5,000 of our troops killed, gunned down or bombed by thousands of insurgents created by the massacres we inflict on their civilian population. Kagen is an idiot, pure and simple. If the Republicans follow this type of heartless and nonsensical rationalizations, they beatings they took in 06' and 08' are just the beginning of their permanent minority status.
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