Afghanistan is world's most dangerous country for children

[G_j]

http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=a4a5af3b-476e-4b17-86b4-001f312a3c6e


Afghanistan is world's most dangerous country for children

Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters
Published: Friday, November 20, 2009

Eight years after a U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the war-ravaged state is the most dangerous place in the world for a child to be born, the United Nations said on Thursday.

It is especially dangerous for girls, UNICEF said in launching its annual flagship report, The State of the World's Children.

Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world -- 257 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 70 per cent of the population lacks access to clean water, the agency said.

As Taliban insurgents increase their presence across the country, growing insecurity is also making it hard to carry out vital vaccination campaigns against polio, a crippling disease still endemic in the country, and measles that can kill children.

"Afghanistan today is without a doubt the most dangerous place to be born," Daniel Toole, UNICEF regional director for South Asia, told a news briefing in Geneva.

..more..

[Oregone]

1. "I don't care that they are dead. Their government gave care and comfort to a man and organization"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=8688361#8688459

Look, besides mentioning this as a fact, its all pissing in the wind if this sort of sentiment is shared on a progressive and liberal board. The war machine will roll on, despite the protests, until it becomes cost-inefficient for it to continue to do so--most people, down to their soul, really do not give a shit. Our cries and their blood is purely irrelevent in the mean time.

[sabrina 1]

2. Wow, that is pretty disgusting ~ it is the same mindset

as those who get us into these wars. And it is astonishing to see that there are people on a progressive board who still believe the Afghanistan War was ever about Osama Bin Ladin in the first place. It was about setting up bases in the 'stan countries north of Afghanistan, running a pipeline through that country, to get to the supposed last big oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. It was to get ahead of the rest of the world in a mad rush to be the first to stake a claim to those resources, if they exist. Osama was just the excuse.

But, regardless of why we are there, for any human being with any humanity left in them to claim that innocent children should pay a price for what their governments do (and the Taliban DID agree to hand over Bin Ladin, if the US provided some evidence of his guilt, since he was denying it. Hardly unreasonable unless you don't care about the rule of law, which the US does not anymore) sounds like something you hear from third world dictators or Cheney/Bush. The US has killed over a million people so far and each killing creates enemies for the people of the US. I wonder, will this same DUer argue that if those people should seek revenge for their slaughtered loved ones, they are within their rights and too bad if children are killed in the process? I doubt it, because in the minds of such people, brown people's children's lives are not as valuable as American children's lives. Primitive thinking.

There is so little hope for this country until its people are deprogrammed from the belief that they are the victims and kept in ignorance of the war crimes engaged in by their own government. It's especially sad to see it on a board that is supposedly a Democratic board. I guess the objection to Bush's crimes for many was simply because he was a Republican. It had nothing at all to do with morality after all.

[G_j]

3. oy

"..did nothing to defy their own government or free themselves from the shackles of their own tyranny."

[MisterP]

4. "legitimate targets" *snarl*

why does the Big Tent (TM) have to include George Wallace and Cheney Dems? probably for nuking Vietnam, if it brought victory and "saved lives"...

this BS was what okayed the incineration of Japanese and German cities (because their governments didn't respect civilian life, of course!)

Murray Leinster's The Murder of the U.S.A. expresses this ultra-psycho philosophy: it extols MAD as the only thing that could "re-establish in a torn and despairing world the idea of justice and hope." Here, "every surviving human being in America craved vengeance even more than he craved continued life." This ideology of mutual annihilation (another word for genocide) comes from the bloodcurdling, monstrous, Nazist idea of collective responsibility. "A man who lets himself be enslaved, so that his leaders may plan war, commits a crime against humanity," Leinster wrote: in the story, Moscow nukes America, and the Soviets must be cremated because each and every one of them has "forfeited" their human rights. It's this jack-booted fascism that sent Italy into Ethiopia and my own grandfather to Stalingrad (hint: he wasn't a Soviet man).

"I demand the destruction of every city, every hamlet, every cross-road. I demand that the enemy country be turned into a waste of bomb-craters." The orders are to "destroy open fields and tiny hamlets and forests and streams and everything that moved or lived or breathed," the Leinster novel concluded with.

this is absolutely not a Dem viewpoint, nor one the party must tolerate/foster so that "we" can win

(I'd like to thank www.conelrad.com and H. Bruce Franklin)

[G_j]

5. sounded vaguely familiar..

then I remembered, the Old Testament,

(bible quote deleted, because it's just too awful)