Donald Rumsfeld made history today with the nuttiest quote out of this administration’s mouth to date, comparing hte violence in Iraq to what you’d encounter in your average US city.
We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What’s the difference? We just didn’t see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other.
I don’t know about where you live, but here in Phoenix I’ve never seen a suicide bomber. None of my my neighbors has been kidnapped, and only a few of my friends have been beheaded. I only occasionally see masked terrorists in the alley firing rocket-propelled grenades. And shooting down helicopers and dancing in the streets wielding the body parts of slain contractors is rare indeed.
Is Rumsfeld totally out of his mind?
1
By ACB
I come from a country with a rather large and very dense population, millions and millions of people crammed into ever major city on a island about the size of california, I don’t think that my entire country had 300 hundred murders last year.
Rumsfeld is a disgrace to the nation and to the species. You can’t compair urban murder rates to wartime deaths.
I haven’t done the maths, but America’s peactime attrition rate in its own country looks to be higher than Iraq’s during wartime.
September 24, 2004 @ 7:43 pm | Comment
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By ‘ï“I
Well, I used to live in Phoenix, and I saw more than a “few” people beheaded there, so I think you are just exaggerating. (or “under-overestimating” as our fearless leader might say).
September 28, 2004 @ 1:41 pm | Comment