Dear Iraqi People,
The Peace-loving and Freedom-loving people of the United States of America hereby introduce you to George Bush’s brand of Democracy, with the delivery of 800 cruise missiles and assorted other ordnance, aimed at your heart.
It’s the kind of war loved by armchair generals and trigger-happy cowboys. Hit them hard, hit them fast, and everything’s over. The attackers will “convince an adversary to accept our will.”
Will it work? Harlan Ullman, a proponent of the “Shock and Awe” strategy, thinks this is how the US won the war with Japan, by dropping A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a brilliant, instant coup de grace. He ignores previous months of US firebombing of most of the Japanese cities and blockades designed to deprive the Japanese people of food and fuel, and the horrible deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Japanese homeland before the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s what really brought about the Japanese surrender.
How is “Shock and Awe,” bringing the war to the homes of civilians, different from terrorism? David Isenberg, a careful and thoughtful analyst in the telecom biz, thinks it’s not:
Let’s call the U.S. strategy for the attack of Baghdad by its true name — it’s not “Shock and Awe,” it is Terrorism.
I know it is hard for some people, even some people who don’t like the idea of the coming war, to equate what happened in New York with what is likely to happen halfway around the world.
However, when I read about the United States’ “Shock and Awe” strategy I imagine 800 Boeing 757s, each one crashing into a New York building in a ball of fire, a new World Trade Center disaster every four minutes for two days — terrified people jumping from windows to escape certain death by fire, terrified people running from the dust clouds in panic as buildings collapse, grieving loved ones with pictures begging strangers for news, and the sickening smell afterwards. Only it will be 800 times worse, because airplanes are not designed to kill people, but the United States will drop weapons designed to kill. In addition to the fire and explosion, thousands of little daisy cutters will rip the flesh of office workers, janitors, restaurant workers, firemen, policemen, rescuers, people on the street.
If the U.S. “Shock and Awe” program is not Terrorism, we have lost the meaning of the word.
Some news articles on the plan:
- Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile Barrage, CBS News:
- “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad,” said one Pentagon official…
- 800 missiles to hit Iraq in first 48 hours, Sun-Herald:
- The US intends to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.
The Pentagon battle plan aims not only to crush Iraqi troops, but also wipe out power and water supplies in the capital, Baghdad.
- US mulls air strategies in Iraq, Christian Science Monitor:
- But key weaknesses may remain, warns Pape, who says he recently saw “the plan that’s floating around.” “The big continuity, that I think is unfortunate, is that the center of our strategy is leadership decapitation.” That strategy was an important part of the 1991 air campaign and a key to the 1998 Operation Desert Fox, but “failed” each time.
- Bloody Cowards, Mirror:
- Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of “endless war” and “full spectrum dominance” are a matter of record. All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle; and Powell, the false liberal.