We have been asked on many occasions why a public health blog spends so much time discussing war. The implication is that war is "off-topic." There are many reasons why we disagree. Here is one.
A Coroner in Oxford, England has officially ruled that a British journalist who died in Iraq in 2003 was unlawfully killed by American forces.
Oxfordshire Assistant Deputy Coroner Andrew Walker said he'll be writing the director of public prosecutions to seek to bring the perpetrators to justice.
"Terry Lloyd died following a gunshot wound to the head. The evidence this bullet was fired by the Americans is overwhelming," Walker said.
Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman also was killed in the ITN crew, and cameraman Fred Nerac remains missing. ITN cameraman Daniel Demoustier survived.
Lloyd -- who was aged 50 -- was shot in the back during U.S. and Iraqi crossfire and was apparently shot by U.S. forces when he was taken away in a minibus for treatment.
"There is no doubt that the minibus presented no threat to the American forces. There is no doubt it was an unlawful act of fire upon the minibus," Walker said.
[snip]
"Until now we were unaware that my father was able to stand and walk to a makeshift ambulance after being shot once by an Iraqi bullet. The man who stopped to help my father was an ordinary Iraqi whose intentions were to take him and other wounded to a nearby hospital.
"After helping my father into his minibus the evidence shows that the vehicle whilst driving the wounded away was fired on by U.S. forces, and that one bullet entered my father's head after passing through the vehicle, and it was this American bullet which killed him."
A statement read by an attorney for Lloyd's widow, Lynn, said the court established that the "circumstances of his death from an American bullet whilst being ferried to hospital is a very serious war crime" and that the Marines should now stand trial.
"The evidence of how Terry Lloyd was unlawfully killed has shown that this was not, I wish to stress, a friendly fire blue on blue incident or a crossfire incident. It was a despicable, deliberate, vengeful act, particularly as it came many minutes after the end of the initial exchanges in which Mr. Lloyd had been hit by an Iraqi bullet."
Her statement said "U.S. forces appeared to have allowed their soldiers to behave like trigger-happy cowboys in an area in which there were civilians traveling on a highway, both Iraqi and European." (CNN)
What to say about this? Do we think US soldiers intentionally killed a British journalist? Probably not (at least we hope not, although we note this war has been the most dangerous for journalists of any in recent history and that combatants on all sides have been accused of blatant disregard for the welfare of reporters). Or do we think that this is just the kind of thing that happens in war?
We think the latter. Just as My Lai and Haditha are the kinds of thing that happen in war. Whether you call them war crimes or not, they are precisely the kinds of thing that happen in war, not just to journalists but to civilians. Iraqi civilians, however, have no Coroner to take their side, to say that under any other circumstances this would be a clear case of negligent homicide.
There will be disagreement, we are sure, whether it is fair to say that as well "in this circumstance." Our view is that the circumstances themselves produce very high risks of death, dismemberment and injury for innocent people. If this were an ordinary worksite or the same toll resulted from a toxic spill or water contamination or medical error or malpractice, it would not be tolerated. It would be considered a grave public health emergency. War is a grave public health emergency.
War is prosecuted to achieve political and policy objectives (like "regime change"). This is true whether it involves state sponsored coercive policies or the coercive tactics of non-state actors (aka, terrorists). Either way it is a public health problem, well within our province and expertise as public health professionals.
We expect the usual whining about being too soft to do what is "necessary" in Iraq. We have also seen how well the tactics of these so-called realists have unfolded. If we ever mounted a public health campaign whose result was so massively harmful and counterproductive, we would have been relieved of our posts long ago. They are manning their keyboards and fighting the good fight. But why should anyone in their right mind listen to them any longer? Isn't the proof of the pudding in the eating? And isn't this meal pure poison?
War is a public health problem, and we will keep saying so.
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"There is no doubt that the minibus presented no threat to the American forces. There is no doubt it was an unlawful act of fire upon the minibus," Walker said.
Regardless of the validity of this conclusion, I am having a little trouble believing that the Oxfordshire Assistant Deputy Coroner could possibly be in possession of sufficient evidence to establish it.
PhysioProf: According to the report, the Coroner summoned the US military to appear as witnesses but they didn't show up, instead sending a statement. So the Coroner made his conclusion on the basis of the best evidence available. Unfortunately I believe the conclusion is highly plausible. If this were any other circumstance it would be considered negligent homicide (which is an unlawful act). This is the same charge as would be brought for any reckless endangerment, for example, drunk driving where a person killed someone. It is worth thinking about that people don't think this is appropriate if in a war setting. This is a commentary about the setting and the reason we believe it constitutes a public health emergency.
If a country provides some export or some service to surrounding countries, war will cause an end to commerce (ransacking not included). And if the county is pillaged, what is left when all the immediate useful materials are gone, (just looking at commerce not brain drain), then at the end it is as if the country never existed. Other countries must step in to rebuild because the 'vacuum' can be devastating to the surrounding region.
Many times people within a war torn country try to escape and cause economic troubles by their move to find peace and food and shelter. Disease usually follows refugees which can jump to the surrounding countries. Large groups of people whether from war or natural disasters burden even the most adept countries. Water bourn disease from inadequate sewage and trash removal in refugee camps, food distribution and the general stress on those living in bad conditions increase the likelihood of disease and high death rates.
I was looking over a Google map of Germany (there was a thrip - a garden insect - photographed on the map) and what was striking I noticed the total fragmentation of their forest. Also, there were huge areas still blackened from US bombing from WWII. Very little new growth is seen to this day! So, after a war, the return and re-growth of the environment takes longer - even without radioactive materials - after modern warfare. And it takes more than sixty years.... that is several generations without useful land to human and most other organisms.
Sam Harris in his book, The End of Faith; Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, does a commendable job of examining the evolving ethics of warfare after the acceptance of collateral damage. As we hide the truth about collateral damage from ourselves we allow in all manner of horrific possibilities like torture and the imposition of our core values on cultures unready for and uninterested in assimilation of them.
The extreme POV that we are really no better in our state sponsored terrorism than those following their own terrorist agendas is summed up well by A. Roy (War Talk, 2003)
Harris contends that with perfect weapons we would be able to easily distinguish the morality of men like bin Laden and Hussein from that of Bush and Blair. Our "good intentions" may remain reprehensible but the unintended consequences would be ameliorated. OTOH, Harris says, "consider the conflict in Iraq. If the situation had been reversed, what are chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualities?... What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers?" "Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessay underpinnings of a civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbrity of the fourteenth century."
Our largely unprincipled prosecution of our economic agendas (energy security, access to 3rd world slave goods and services, impositon of free market ideals with concomitant ennviromental impacts,,,) has now brought us into "conflict with whole societies whose moral and political development - in their treatment of women and children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty - lags behind our own." We were there recently; take yourself back to the New York streets of 1863 for example and imagine those people coming to possess chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Pulling out of Iraq and letting the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds duke it out will surely imperil the global economy because of probable splash on area petroleum production and likely enable a Iranian hegemony (perhaps perfect for keeping the Muslim world in continuing sectarian internal conflict and minding their own business as they milk our pocketbooks for oil).
Could be that negative economic outcome or maybe the flu will give us all some "breathing room" to sort this out. Maybe the next election here will enable us to rethink our approach (removing the fundy neocon constraints). OTOH, maybe Musharraf will go down and we'll find a new focus over proliferation that will make the Korean mess that much more interesting. Could be the Jews will find it necessry to unlimber their enhanced radiation weapons for a trial run at Armageddon.
I'm with MRK here; hard to imagine that we're not going to soon again see the horror of nuclear collateral damage which will put falling skyscrapers and thousands of already dead Iraqi kids into true perspective. Let us hope we are restrained in our response to whatever shit lands in our mess kits.
Tympanachus writes: "Harris says, "consider the conflict in Iraq. If the situation had been reversed, what are chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualities?..."
Are we on the same planet? What "care" was used during the opening days of "shock and awe"? How many apartment buildings full of innocent women and children did we blow up looking for Saddam, his sons and other party leaders? With a death toll of between 200 and 600K Iraqis now on our hands, at least half of which were civilian women, children and the elderly, please Mr Harris explain to me again how freaking compassionate we've been compared to those republican guard a-holes....even without bringing up the fact that Iraq had done absolutely nothing to us to provoke such an attack in the first place, and thus it was outright mass murder, not simply "collateral damage".
And speaking of collateral damage and the health effects of war, I am surprised no one here - revere included - has mentioned the effects of the depleted uranium we've been using in Iraq for our tank and bunker busting weapons, and what that has done to cancer rates, birth defects, and miscarriages among the citizens of Iraq. Bordering on genocide, I'd say.
Believe you missed the point, mih. Harris does not excuse our poor performance but insists that we face up to the consequences of accepting collateral damage that show us to be no better than those who clearly operate with a more primitive (14th century barbarism and religious certainty) set of intentions and ethics of conflict.
I think he takes some comfort, as do I, that we citizens of an emerging theocratic democracy did not intend to make such a cock-up of the whole deal. Still, we individually have some culpability because of our supposed ability to guide the country though our elected representatives. I'm not ready yet to tar GWB, Cheney and Rummy with strictly bad intentions and callous disregard for the unnecessary casualities and infrastructure damage. Perhaps that's naive but I think they are as stupidly blind to the implications of collateral damage as the rest of us. Shame about that - a regime change here is probably not going to change that a whit and it appears that things will soon get a lot worse. With perfect weapons, I like to think we might be better behaved as regards unintended consequences though those at the strike point of those weapons will always be a bit suspicious. Our current set of adversaries clearly could not care less about the distinction. Ask Osama what he would do with a smallpox weapon for which only he had a vaccine.
Along these lines, you might enjoy Stan Goff's take on Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America.
Author Stan Goff, a retired 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism - white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization - are ascendant in America today.
Tympanachus: Jonathan Glover does a very good job describing the incremental acceptance of "collateral damage" in his book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. He describes how each new wartime causation of civilian deaths was justified by the previous ones.
Thus the blockade of Germany after WWI justified city bombings, justified firebombings, justified nuclear bombings... etc. At first, the bombing of civilians at Guernica brought horror and Picasso's famous painting... very soon, everyone was doing it.
I recommend the book highly. I find him psychologically and sociologically quite astute.
I'm with MRK here; hard to imagine that we're not going to soon again see the horror of nuclear collateral damage which will put falling skyscrapers and thousands of already dead Iraqi kids into true perspective.
tympanachus, are you taking the Bush regime rhetoric seriously? Or is that hyperbole?
I assumed you knew that the NK "nuke" turned out, Randy to the contrary nothwithstanding, to be a dud. Like the embarassing "missile test" that set some very expensive fireworks off near the Korean coastlne back in July.
Bottom line there is that the Norks are attempting to use a much tougher technology than a U-235 bomb requires. You have to "cook" U-238 in a reactor to get your plutonium. But once it absorbs the neutron it needs to go from U-238 to Pu-239, it wants to absorb more and climb the ladder to Pu-240 and Pu-241. So you have to remove the partially converted U-238 sooner than you'ld like, remove the plutonium while it's still nearly all Pu-239, wash, rinse, repeat. Because if you have more than 5% isotopic impurities (Pu-240 and Pu-241) in the plutonium in your device, it's going to misfire.
If you get the plutonium sufficiently isotopically pure, then you have to get the implosion right too, and that's also a higher bar than you have to clear with U-235. Read up on the Manhattan Project's misgivings about that technology. They got it to work, yeah. But they had to test that design before they used it for real, which they did not feel compelled do with their U-235 bomb.
As for the Iranians, again, Randy to the contrary notwithstanding, they're 10 years or more from a demonstrator nuke at best. That's if they can prevent their WMD program from turning into a mini-Pentagon, rife with corruption and fraud expanded to system-crippling levels. This last is quite typical of WMD projects in strongman-run developing countries. That's what happened to Saddam's A-bomb project in Iraq, prior to 1991.
Bottom line: they need 3000 centrifuges to seperate sufficient U-235 for one bomb in two to three years, they don't have a tenth that many right now, and they cannot manage the ones they have.
We get enough of this from the radical right. Please do your homework, OK?
"I think he takes some comfort, as do I, that we citizens of an emerging theocratic democracy did not intend to make such a cock-up of the whole deal."
You can take false comfort in it. The truth is we, not as a country but our leaders, went in not giving a damn about who they offed. Collateral damage is just that, something that happens on the way to a goal. Their goal is dominating the oil fields. Period.
The collateral damage is suffered here (USA) in 'the homeland' as well: increasing gaps in health status among the poor, people of color, women, children, elderly, and uninsured. To me there are parallels between Iraqi civilians' plight, and the mostly unheard and unaddressed stories of marginalized communties in the USA.
caia: Thanks for the Glover tip, I was just holding his Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design in my mitts at the bookstore. Didn't buy it - have you read it?
Roten: "Please do your homework, OK?"
Kinda full of yourself there Charley. I've spent most of my work life in the biz helping the Labs benchmark and buy the next super (from IBM Stretch to ASCI Q). I have a fair grip on the physics and the codes. My first memory is the flash of Tinity over my crib in Las Cruces - probably shit my pants.
If Pakistan goes sideways or the Shiites get stupid about Israel, the likelihood of a small nuclear exchange will take a frightening bump, all rhetoric and blog bombast aside. If I recall Randy K right, I think he was suggesting we might be the first light one off in anger again.
G in Indiana: "~we, not as a country but our leaders"
I really doubt that most of the poor benighted souls that have been voting these sorry bastards into office for the last 6 years have so little ethical sensitivity to collateral damage. Harris says many do because of their deep belief in the bad book (it's not just the Old Testament, either) but not most. But the rest of us get to live with their ignorance about it (deliberate or otherwise) and you/we can't duck the responsibility - that's the kind of political system we have.
Tymp: I don't think I did misunderstand Harris. He reveals himself and his biases in the things he says, repeatedly. As do you, when you state: "... show us to be no better than those who clearly operate with a more primitive (14th century barbarism and religious certainty) set of intentions and ethics of conflict." Can't you see the built in bias in that statement? "More primitive...set of intentions and ethics..." What exactly do you think the intentions and ethics of our government was in the blitzkrieg of Baghdad? What you and Harris are doing is intimating "gee, we have done bad, but we didn't really mean to be bad, not like those evil Iraqis would have done if they were in our shoes." How could they have done worse?
Here's another quote by Harris from your above post: "Harris contends that with perfect weapons we would be able to easily distinguish the morality of men like bin Laden and Hussein from that of Bush and Blair." So, what Harris is saying is that those high minded God fearing men of valor, integrity and ethics - Bush and Blair - are far more moral than bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, right? Based on what criteria? Number of innocent people killed for political and financial gain? Oops, I think that in sheer numbers, Bush and Blair have it all over those two bad guys by several powers of ten.
And yes, you indeed are naive if you believe that GWB, Cheney and Rumsfeld had no idea of the kind of collateral damage they were going to cause, and that they have coldly and callously continued to cause for the past 3 plus years. They were told repeatedly by the top generals and military strategists at their disposal what "shock and awe", DU bunker busters, etc would do to the people living in the areas being bombarded. They just didn't care. No doubt, when the effects of Depleted Uranium on the Iraqi people and ecosystems finally becomes so broadly and publically known that it can no longer be denied, they again will claim stupidity, and you will pat their little heads and say you believe them. Naive is too kind a word to put on it, Tymp. I cannot stomach people who refuse to see what is right in front of their faces, because to do would shake their little world, prove their long held beliefs and value systems were all a myth. People like that screamed at me and spit at me when I marched to prevent the war before one child had died at our hands, and their continued "naive" support of GWB has given him the green light to continue the slaughter of innocents in our names.
Now lets not get too far off the subject here. Charles is right about the need for 3000 centrifuges. Its nice that the French got about half of that into the country from Framatome by shipping them to the Russians and with the Clinton Administration approval. There were some really keen metal milling machines that landed as well from the Germans and oops those light water reactors also made it in there. Wouldnt want to be inhumane and have the lights off in Norko.
Fight as we will about this, I swear it seems to me that we build them all up just to take them all down. Saddam was our boy as long as he took on the Iranians. Osama was our protege as long as he kilt Ruskies. Then Charles there are the missing nukes from Chechnya. Nothing really big. Just 11 -50 megaton warheads. Did they catch the boat from Iran to Korea, dont know and I wont smoke up the room by saying that I know. Thats the 300 million dollar question-Some say yes. Most of those nukes would have never made it out of the silo's anyway. Ah, but run that muther back thru the refining process because its already hot and you dont need those centrifuges, you can use the screens to catch the metal. Its easy to reprocess the stuff once its already refined.
Did Kim blow the big one and get a fizzle? Dont know, dont care. He says he is a nuclear power now, so now its time to deal with the inevitable. We all knew we would be back into Iraq. We all know we are going to go back into Iran. Its inevitable and a BUNCH OF PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE. Is it necessary to do Norko? Thats the debate. I think it is. I dont want to take the chance that Norko gets it because then you have a full blown arms race in SE Asia. I sure as shit dont want the Iranians to have it because they could control the Straits with just two. Why 2? One to prove he can do it, then one to hold onto if the Coalition forces decide to get antsy. Only gotta get close and it could pop a carrier group.
No, the only way to stop this trip from happening is if the Chinese wade in there and stop him. He could be gone in a day. They would simply walk in and shoot the bastard. I hear all of this and say okay, what do you got? More negotiations, its a health care matter? There are things under the rocks of this world when we pull one up each and everytime we have started in on a war we have gotten fettered. That is what gets OUR people killed. In WWII we had clear military and political goals, kill Japanese, kill Germans. Kill civilians in a mowing way-Dresden for example. Acceptable casualties? Maybe not to the casualites way of thinking but we smoked 'em hard and fast. 100,000 people died in one night. Conventional style. It took their will to fight out and it was basically over... Oh yeah, and we got the ball bearing plant too.
How about N. Korea? Why not just say okay asshole you got 24 hours else regardless of the consequences we are going to take your military off the map. Theres a military goal that achieves a political one. Kim would be gone. Hey killing people works. Look at Vietnam- Bomb them IN HANOI and all of a sudden they want to negotiate.
Now we run up on Iraq. I say embrace the inevitable horror and just wipe Teheran in a huge conventional strike. Gory? You danged skippy. But if either of those clowns get nukes then the gloves are going to come off hard and fast. The Israelis are going to smack the shit out of Iran if they do. They will surely use a nuke or two because they have no other choice, so someone had better start coming up with something viable else the military is the ONLY option out there. Come on, give me something other than civilians are going to get killed guys. There's going to be one one big shit lot of them going if a nuke is popped on the Iranian/Russian border. French troops are in Lebanon. Russians and Chinese could be on the ground there and in force in 48-72 hours to "prepare for an invasion" of Israel to protect their national interests. Thats the reason I said no Frenchies in Lebanon. They would be backed by Damascus, and the Lebanese government. Then that will drag the US and NATO in. Yes, the French are in NATO, but only when it suits them. Start screwing with the Israelis and you are screwing for sure with our national interests too. Six Russian divisions could be across the Iranian border in a day. The Chinese probably 15. The would be allowed to cross Iran heading to Israel without doubt. We would respond because there would be a credible force that could sweep into the oil fields of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia... See why I am nervous and why I dont give one shit about civilian casualties right now?
So what do we do? Continue status quo? Give peace a chance? Peace on this planet lasts about five minutes and thats only because its the time it takes to do a reload. He who carries the biggest sticks wins by default but it looks like we are being maneuvered into something that no one wants and its NOT Bush. The Iranians and the Koreans are basically defying the world, so do we let them?
We could fight this war and win it in three weeks if we would just let the military do what they REALLY want to do. My unit is now on their 18 months over there and the sentiments are all the same. We can hold Iraq, but we have to hit Syria and Teheran to do it. We either apply 500 pound bug killer to the situation or we apply a 35 megaton all encompassing broacast spreader later on. If we dont kill them now, they will take their shot later on. I actually seem to hear dissapointment that Korea's nuke didnt work out so hot, that it will take 10 years for them to get it. So what we sit and wait and then do what then? Inevitability is what we are talking. 600,000 now might be damned cheap than later. I havent seen any proof of 600,000 casualties by any credible source anyway. With Koffi "Sell them a rifle" Annan being gone I might believe the UN a little more now. Sorry Revere I know you feel for these people. So do I, but there is NO limited war. We need to just hit them bad and good guy alike and eliminate them for at least a generation or two. Its not something that I would really like to do but all I hear is rhetoric. Where are the answers that preserve our society and security?
I guarantee you that in November that the Republicans will keep the House and Senate because people are scared and I am too. We also wont have to trot down for yet another damned impeachment proceeding. So the answers had better start coming else its bird bug or bombs, take your pick.
Sorry for the length.
Randy: Thought I heard you correctly the first time. Thanks for taking a another well considered look at the crack into which we've backed ourselves.
I tend to want see the downside possibilities as adventurism as opposed to some global opportunity that finally resolves the Jewish situation and pitches us onto the economic dust heap of history. But you have some cogent arguments.
My wife and I know (marketing relationships) most of the CINCs space from to Piotrowski to Myers. All of 'em, especially Estes, have been worrying, often publically around here, these issues and I'm familiar with the threads you gather. So, I suspect we've plenty of air war side of the SIOP options carrying terrible collateral damage assessments.
Can't imagine that we're going to be too bold ("bring 'em on" appears to have been properly douched by events and politics) w/o provocation and it deeply grieves me to think we might act unilaterally with WMD again. I never saw a good argument against our nuking the Japs but it's not a trivial decision, even for a Cheney.
mih: "Can't you see the built in bias~"
There is often an intersection of bias and truth. I'm with Krishnamurti on his general perspective about truth:
Occasionally science will serve to make truth apparent. Harris says it is neither racist nor unscientific (because science has not yet addressed the moral sphere in any systematic way) to understand the distinction between our ethics and those rooted in the 14th century. He says, "Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by Muslim governments. If we want to draw conclusions about ethics - as well as make predictions about what a given person or socitey will do in the future - we cannot ignore human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything."
I feel your pain mum. I was caught up in these same feelings in the LBJ/Nixon era featuring My Lai and Danny Ellsburg. You are welcome to the pin-headed high moral ground here though your righteous umbrage seems to have compromised your emotional and intellectual clarity in your desperate perch there. Certainly it has made you disagreeable and difficult, if not unfit, for debate.
A friend of mine was visited by Jesus (she's not a Christian) in the midst of a psilocybian vision (some of those little Copelandia cyanescens are probably waiting for you right there in your back yard - doubt you've had a sniff). He wanted to know just what there was to misunderstand about "Love your brother." She immediately replied he might have showed some concern for our sisters too (working the feminist agenda was more important to her then). Y'Shua bar Joseph then left in a huff leaving me frustrated by some unanswered questions I'd hoped to pose through her to try for more clarity and understanding about our general situation.
Yes, we're in a pickle with our modern weapons but it not only to enrich the defense contractors that we spend money on them to tighten their CEP. The reality with which we must deal seems to have escaped you.
Here's a small bone for you as recompense for causing such indigestion problems and to perhaps help you get on more even footing. Ken Wilber is building a large tent that attempts to be inclusive in his promotion of Integral Psychology. You could dive right into his new book about Integral Spirituality (probably not the best approach) or you could wander around Integral Naked on the free month offer and see if anything feels right to you, Maybe this would help get you up from those amber-red levels of consciousness (see pg 33 of the free intro to Integral Spirituality) to more like the turquoise levels. I'm not there either but we all must start to move there to have any hope of getting out of the profound bind in which we find ourselves.
M in H. Hi. I read your post with some of the well written glib of Tymp. He and his squeeze are ex-military and have held clearances before. Man Mary, I wish to Hell it was a world we all could live in, but its not. If it wasnt Bush it would have been Democrat or Republican XXX, that went into Iraq. The same will apply for Iran and Korea. The train is pulling out of the station and we are talking about depleted uranium effects on the Iraqi's? Be glad its the only radiation they are dealing with right now because Tymp like me feels that the game has started already and they are lining up for the tip off. He and I have seen the movements before on this sheet of music. We are hearing the same noise that we did before the opening round of Iraq 1, the Gulf of Tonkin, Neville Chamberlains appeasement of Hitler (We are only going to take a little piece of Chechoslovakia) kind of thing. It wont matter folks, the balls going into play. Dem/Rep whatever, its coming. To think not is delusional.
Lead up to the election for politics by opening a wider war? For sure partially, but mostly because its necessary. An attack is underway it just hasnt happened yet. I for one am sick as shit of seeing Condi Rice playing the goddamn piano when troops are in the field. Her ass needs to be out there talking to Russians, Chinese, French, Brits, Japanese and doing a Kissinger with shuttle diplomacy. Threatening where necessary, assisting where not.
We have Hugo C. down south along with his buddy Castro, the uni-laterally illegal acting France selling to all sides, the Iranians and Syrians with what might be a dirty bomb weapon in range of Baghdad or our troops, or Haifa. Our old missile batteries have been upgraded by the French in Iran, Korea officially popped a nuke (just in tonight for US confirmation that it was a 100 Kiloton weapon) and an arms race is beginning in SE Asia. Yep, that about covers it. The puck is about to drop and as they say in the business we are going to be in a fur ball and damned quick. I think by January myself. Maybe sooner.
The Democrats will continue to hammer Bush and try to impeach him if they get the House and will if they do the Senate. We will have troops in the field that cant be pulled out, or if we do we will be in a bigger mess than we are now and oh vey, a pandemic looms. I think that about covers it and we are talking about depleted uranium. Sheyit! Lets talk about the live uranium and plutonium. Now that for sure will kill you especially if its popped over Japan or S. Korea. Getting nervous yet?
Does it escape anyone that Norko popped what would be a tactical level weapon? We have 35,000 troops on the line and Kim has like 1 million ready to head south with about ten minutes notice. If they simply suited up and drove thru it some would get sick from being in the hole it knocked thru our formations, but they wouldnt die. It might be a stretch but this might be their plan of attack. Launch an attack by use of a tactical nuke. It would create a hole 15 to 20 miles across. Wait three hours and then release the dogs of war. Exploit that hole and then flank our troops and you have a rout. We wouldnt attack Pyongang with nukes because of proximity to the Chinese border. We WOULD though attack those formations behind the 38th parallel with nukes. I would only hope that they would use neutron weaponry to keep the collaterals down. That weapon technically doesnt exist even though its accepted that it does.
At that point in time the poop would be hitting the rotary grinder. We are as Tymp said getting ourselves into a bind and the only choice that we have now is to start killing on a high scale in Iraq to immobilize the enemy as they did in Lebanon. There will be civilians casualties. It might take a hit on Teheran to stop this ball from rolling any further. There will be civilian casualties. If left undone the inevitable becomes reality I think. There will be MANY civilian casualties. No fence mending if we leave. They will simply be on our heels as they were in the Crusades. Better push for alternative fuels because its about to get really scarce if this dog starts to hunt.
Revere is right, War is a public health hazard. Better to stop sniping and just vote than to demoralize troops and subvert the process thats underway. Unfetter the military and forget the Geneva Convention. Thats for civilized wars. This is the same fight that the Brits fought, Alexander, the Greeks, and the Romans. Those that were caught running insurgencies were not tried. They were put between two teams of horses and then their arms pulled out. There werent too many attacks after that. Those that speak of human rights should remember it falls on deaf ears when you are dead.
This war is being fought with people who have never heard of Geneva else they would know that IED's against civilian police officers is a human rights violation and a violation of the Geneva Convention. Anyone know the difference between a dead Iraqi and a live one?
A dead one doesnt shoot or blow you up.