How many insurgents will be killed in Iraq on Sat. March 8, 2008

Is there actually a reliable source for this? If its a mainstream US news source such as FOX, blowing up a house with 20 people in it is 20 insurgents killed even if 19 were kids. I am all for killing the bad guys, particularly if we actually want to focus on the ones that attacked us, meaning killing folks in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as well as Afghanistan, just think a mainstream source based on propoganda is a bad idea.

It's more fun than that: "insurgents" depends ENTIRELY on your viewpoint. Patriotic heroes kill insurgents. And how you define WHO are the "patriotic heroes" and WHO are the "insurgents" depends entirely on which side of the fence you are sitting on.

So it comes back to "who are the good guys" and "who are the bad guys", presumably from the popular viewpoint. And as historyteacher notes, are women and children who suffer "death by association" really insurgents? Or are they are a part of the new group of women and children suicide bombers?

Which takes us back to whether or not the war is legal, moral, or ethical...which is another discussion entirely. We do know from the news and hubdub predictions that Americans are fascinated at this time by the idea of CHANGE, particularly connected to the war. That seems to be what fuels Presidential Candidate Obama. Would this include a re-consideration or re-definition of "who are the good guys"? And ultimately, WHO ARE THE INSURGENTS?

And here we are counting corpses AGAIN. Last time, the uproar was over counting dead American soldiers. Now we are counting insurgent corpses, presumably the bad guys. When did we let the mortician's union in?

"who are the insugents?" would be a good question if you could find an unbiased source to settle the question

counting corpes is news. always has been and always will be. bad news is big business (newspaper circultions go up everytime the news gets worst) i spent today looking for good news. the problem was that there is no point posting a question on the US Scrabble Championship or a local Special Olympics event if no one knows the contestants. maybe pogo can add a "Wonderful World" tab. then there would be a challenge to sell "good news"

I'm going to look into if the Pentagon has a record of enemy casualties which they release. If I can't find a reliable settlement source soon then this may well be voided. And yes I know some will have the view that the Pentagon is not a reliable source. So if I choose them as a source I will put that int the market description.

Ryan
Hubdub US Politics Content Editor

sounds fair to me

Pentagon has stopped recording "non-compliant" forces death. So we won't be able to find statistics for the insurgent deaths.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/iraq/casualties.html

Ryan
Hubdub US Politics Content Editor