Julius Caesar - and Gall

[Billhook]

What follows may help to debunk the propaganda that what passes for strategy in the US
is in any way novel, innovative, or even somewhat unusual.

Hoping others will enjoy it as I did,

Bill


Julius Caesar Had Gaul; Bush Just Has Gall
by Terry Jones


In 59BC, Julius Caesar declared he was so shocked by the incursions of the dangerous Helvetii tribe into Gaul, and the suffering of the Gaulish peoples, that he had himself appointed 'protector of the Gauls'. By the time he'd finished protecting them, a million Gauls were dead, another million enslaved and Julius Caesar owned most of Gaul. Now I'm not suggesting there is any similarity between George W Bush's protection of the Iraqi people and Caesar's protection of the Gauls.

For a start, Julius Caesar, as we all know, was bald, whereas George W Bush has a fine head of hair.

In any case, George W Bush is not personally making huge amounts of money out of it. The money-making is all left in the capable hands of companies like CACI International, Blackwater Security and Haliburton.

It's true that Vice-President Dick Cheney's stock options in his old company, Haliburton, went up from $241,498 in 2004 to $8m in 2005 - that's an increase of 3,281 per cent.

But then Dick Cheney is bald.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is absolutely no comparison to be made between Julius Caesar's invasion of Gaul in 58-50BC and George Bush's invasion of Iraq.

I mean, Julius Caesar had the nerve to pretend that the Roman state was being threatened by what was going on in Gaul. He claimed he had to carry out a pre-emptive strike against the Helvetii in the interests of homeland security. In reality, his motives were political. He desperately needed a military victory to boost his standing in Rome and give him the necessary popular base to seize power.

George W Bush, on the other hand, was already in power when he invaded Iraq and, in any case, he didn't need to boost his popularity, because the popular vote had nothing to do with his getting into power in the first place. Julius Caesar was also a very adroit propagandist who made damn sure that his version of events prevailed. He even wrote eight books about his wars in Gaul to make sure it did. George W Bush doesn't need to go to such lengths. He has Fox News.

When Julius Caesar claimed his glorious victory over the Helvetii, he made it sound as if he had destroyed a vast army of 'wild and savage men'. Julius Caesar reckoned he had slaughtered more than 250,000 'insurgents'. In fact, documents found in the remains of the Helvetii camp showed that out of 368,000 people, only 92,000 had been capable of bearing arms.

In other words, it wasn't an army that Julius Caesar massacred, but a whole population including women, children, old and sick, which, I suppose, is one thing that George W Bush and Julius Caesar do have in common: pretending civilians are armed insurgents.

But there the similarity ends. One of the most fundamental differences between Julius Caesar and George W Bush is that Julius Caesar counted his dead, whereas George W Bush can't be bothered. It seems that, as commander-in-chief, George W Bush instructed his soldiers not to count the enemy dead. So the fact that he still sticks to an estimate of only 30,000 dead Iraqis, even when a recently published study in the Lancet suggests he's slaughtered at least 655,000, can only be the result of his extraordinary modesty.

Why else would he dismiss the study as pure guesswork or claim it had used a 'methodology [that] is pretty well discredited', even though the US government has been spending millions of dollars a year to train NGOs in this exact same methodology? Julius Caesar would have seized on the figures with alacrity.

And that is the biggest difference of all: Julius Caesar was an ambitious, vainglorious, would-be tyrant. George W Bush is a modest and self-deprecating one.

Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

[Vortex]

Sigh ...

Many, many thousands have died in Iraq.

However the 650,000 figure from The Lancet is suspect ... you can Google to find various reviews.

Additionally, the "650,000" have NOT been personally slaughtered by Bush ... the Iraqis seem quite good at killing each other too.

Some reports suggest that US forces have probaly killed 100,000 mainly through air strikes ... a horrific number, but still not 650,000.

Quoting huge, possibly unrealistic, casuality figure only devalues the facts. The Lancet's equivalent of the WMD exaggerations.

[Blue Peter]

Sigh ...

Many, many thousands have died in Iraq.

However the 650,000 figure from The Lancet is suspect ... you can Google to find various reviews.

Additionally, the "650,000" have NOT been personally slaughtered by Bush ... the Iraqis seem quite good at killing each other too.

Some reports suggest that US forces have probaly killed 100,000 mainly through air strikes ... a horrific number, but still not 650,000.

Quoting huge, possibly unrealistic, casuality figure only devalues the facts. The Lancet's equivalent of the WMD exaggerations.

I have seen some criticisms of the Lancet report (and rebuttals), but I haven't seen anything which fatally wounds it. Do you have some reasons to suspect that it is fatally flawed?

Of the violent deaths they found:

31% were by the coalition;
24% by other (presumably Iraqis or other resistance)
45% unknown


So, the coalition are still ahead in the attributable violent deaths.


Peter.

[EmptyBee]

The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt.

Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet.

But the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust".

Another expert agreed the method was "tried and tested"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm

Gee Whizz, looks like the Lancet was right all along! Who'd have thought you could trust a bunch of medical professionals over the gentlemen responsible for taking us into this war in the first place? I suppose the only question is now, 'how much has it gone up since?'

[snowdrift]

OP was neither informative, amusing, nor original.

Still, the 650,000 figure is may well be an accurate figure, but it is not, and has never claimed to be the number of people killed by Americans, or indeed killed at all, by the invasion.

It is a figure that measures deaths to due increases in the general mortality rate. In other words, if a 70 year old woman dies because the air conditioning isn't working, because there's no diesel, because Badr's brigade has just commandeered the local delivery truck to use as a VBIED, AND that woman would statistically have died at 72 prior to the invasion, then that death is counted.

The figure is valuable. It reminds us that health effects of wars are wide-ranging and large. But comparing this number with almost all other 'war dead' figures from other conflicts is utterly meaningless.

The reason this statistical approach was taken, is that Iraq is simply too anarchic to use the normal counting methods.

What this has to do with peak oil is anybody's guess. Iraq is now a much less industrialised country than it was before the war, so I suppose we should be grateful for the reduced CO2 and lowered oil production?

[syberberg]

Pity that brief account of Gaius Julius Caesar's Gallic Campaign is rather inaccurate. I'd've expected better from The Guardian. Particularly as Caeser's campaign (or rather series of campaigns against various tribes, including 2, rather abortive, invasions of Briton and one German invasion which amounted to absolutely nothing) ended with the Battle of Alesia in September 52BC.

[gug]

What this has to do with peak oil is anybody's guess.

Wow. do you really see no connection ?

Do you imagine that we're over there killing people because Bush is a good and righteous man and the we really need the sand for our Golf course bunkers ?