Oops! Who "forgot" to mention the "blood feud" portion of Iraq's history?

[IdaBriggs]

Its one of the reasons we are officially beyond words SCREWED in Iraq. If I understand this correctly, they have a pseudo-tribal legal system in place to prevent multi-generational blood feuds: when something happens in anger or by accident, you can pay what Americans think of as "were-gild" or "blood price" to remove the stain on the honor of the family of the victims. If you don't do that, the only way the family can "regain their honor" is to kill the perpetrators.

The U.S. Military DOES NOT pay compensation to civilian victims of our attacks as our legal system does not recognize this system. I'm not sure of the exact details (anyone out there have more than a cursory knowledge?), but its kind of a REALLY BIG OOOPS, and is one of the ways we Americans are being STUPID with our ignorance of other peoples' cultures.

Welcome to Iraqi Blood Feud 101: You killed my father / brother / cousin / mother / sister /son / daughter -- prepare to die!

:cry:

[annabanana]

1. Just one more stupid thing.......................

waist deep in the big muddy and the old fool says "Push On".

[wtmusic]

2. Nah they stopped compensating anyone

it's much cheaper to just label 'em all 'insurgents'

[whistle]

3. If we take the $200 billion spent so far on the war in Iraq plus the...

...$18 billion now committed for reconstruction and assume that if we have to stay in Iraq with a full military presence of say half what we now have for ten years and that costs the U.S. another $48 billion per year, then the total already spent and committed on bringing freedom to Iraq will have been $700 billion. Now the population of Iraq in 2002 was 24,001,816, but with the number of children dying at the rate of 3,000 per month and a comparable number of Iraqi adults also being exterminated, I'll assume that the Iraq population has remained at 24 million.

If the U.S. were to pay every Iraqi citizen the some of $29,166.00 as restitution and just leave, would that suffice as blood money and all would be forgiven? The trick of course would be to do that in such a way that no corrupt politician or corporation would take their share, it would just got directly to every citizen.