Aerial Bombardment of Iran would Eclipse 'Shock and Awe' of 2003

"Military action has been in planning since before the wars with
Afghanistan and Iraq. This could come in any one of three forms or
some combination of them: A US attack by air power alone, a ground
invasion as in the 1991 and 2003 attacks on Iraq, or the encouragement
of an Israeli attack.

The National Security Doctrine form of "Preventive Action" now
under the most intense study is aerial bombardment. This is attractive
because America does not have sufficient combat troops for a land
invasion. Moreover, allegedly the U.S. Air Force generals have said
that even alone air power could "take out" (destroy) all suspected
Iranian nuclear installations and so devastate Iran that the regime
would collapse.

What would aerial bombardment entail? What it involved in Iraq gives
at least a starting point: in some 37,000 sorties the US Air Force
dropped 13,000 "cluster munitions" that exploded into 2 million
bombs, wiping out whole areas, and fired 23,000 missiles. Naval ships
launched 750 Cruise missiles with another 1.5 million pounds of
explosives. More powerful weapons are now available. Air Force General
Thomas McInerney gave the Neoconservative Weekly Standard in April an
inventory of "improved" weapons. They include vastly larger
"bunker buster" bombs and greater targeting ability. McInerney
pointed out that a B-2 bomber can drop 80 500 pound bombs independently
targeted on 80 different aim points. In effect, this aerial
bombardment would eclipse the "shock and awe" of 2003 and be far
more destructive than the 1991 campaign or the devastating air war on
Vietnam."


http://www.hnn.us/articles/31051.html

AirRaid wrote:
"Military action has been in planning since before the wars with
Afghanistan and Iraq. This could come in any one of three forms or
some combination of them: A US attack by air power alone, a ground
invasion as in the 1991 and 2003 attacks on Iraq, or the encouragement
of an Israeli attack.

The National Security Doctrine form of "Preventive Action" now
under the most intense study is aerial bombardment. This is attractive
because America does not have sufficient combat troops for a land
invasion. Moreover, allegedly the U.S. Air Force generals have said
that even alone air power could "take out" (destroy) all suspected
Iranian nuclear installations and so devastate Iran that the regime
would collapse.

What would aerial bombardment entail? What it involved in Iraq gives
at least a starting point: in some 37,000 sorties the US Air Force
dropped 13,000 "cluster munitions" that exploded into 2 million
bombs, wiping out whole areas, and fired 23,000 missiles. Naval ships
launched 750 Cruise missiles with another 1.5 million pounds of
explosives. More powerful weapons are now available. Air Force General
Thomas McInerney gave the Neoconservative Weekly Standard in April an
inventory of "improved" weapons. They include vastly larger
"bunker buster" bombs and greater targeting ability. McInerney
pointed out that a B-2 bomber can drop 80 500 pound bombs independently
targeted on 80 different aim points. In effect, this aerial
bombardment would eclipse the "shock and awe" of 2003 and be far
more destructive than the 1991 campaign or the devastating air war on
Vietnam."


http://www.hnn.us/articles/31051.html

Describe in detail, citing examples that others can see, that "Shock
and Awe" was anything more than buzzword and a means of getting rid of
a lot of explosives.

This has been a war of slogans and buzzwords with little tangible
results.

"Jack Linthicum" wrote in message
oups.com...

Describe in detail, citing examples that others can see, that "Shock
and Awe" was anything more than buzzword and a means of getting rid of
a lot of explosives.

It did make for some good TV, though I kinda doubt the Iraqis thought much
of it..

This has been a war of slogans and buzzwords with little tangible
results.


I dunno 'bout that Jack, I hear the 5th and 6th amendments to our
Constitution took a fairly good sized hit the other day..

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com

http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html


[Notebook]
The Next War
http://harpers.org/TheNextWar.html

Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006. Originally from Harper's
Magazine, October 2006. By Daniel Ellsberg.

Sources

A hidden crisis is under way. Many government insiders are aware of
serious plans for war with Iran, but Congress and the public remain
largely in the dark. The current situation is very like that of 1964,
the year preceding our overt, open-ended escalation of the Vietnam War,
and 2002, the year leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In both cases, if one or more conscientious insiders had closed the
information gap with unauthorized disclosures to the public, a
disastrous war might have been averted entirely.
My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out
to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only
two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August
7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson
would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His
colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president
sought "no wider war" and had no intention of expanding hostilities
without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply
expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam
three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara had told them were in "retaliation" for the
"unequivocal," "unprovoked" attack by North Vietnamese torpedo
boats on U.S. destroyers "on routine patrol" in "international
waters."
Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they
were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years
later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand
pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I
had released to the press. The very first installment, published by the
New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the
Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.
When we met in September, Morse had just heard me mention to an
audience that all of that evidence of fraud had been in my own Pentagon
safe at the time of the Tonkin Gulf vote. (By coincidence, I had
started work as a special assistant to an assistant secretary of
defense the day of the alleged attack-which had not, in fact,
occurred at all.) After my talk, Morse, who had been a senior member of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1964, said to me, "If you
had given those documents to me at the time, the Tonkin Gulf resolution
would never have gotten out of committee. And if it had somehow been
brought up on the floor of the Senate for a vote, it would never have
passed."
He was telling me, it seemed, that it had been in my power, seven years
earlier, to avert the deaths so far of 50,000 Americans and millions of
Vietnamese, with many more to come. It was not something I was eager to
hear. After all, I had just been indicted on what eventually were
twelve federal felony counts, with a possible sentence of 115 years in
prison, for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public. I had
consciously accepted that prospect in some small hope of shortening the
war. Morse was saying that I had missed a real opportunity to prevent
the war altogether.
My first reaction was that Morse had overestimated the significance of
the Tonkin Gulf resolution and, therefore, the alleged consequences of
my not blocking it in August. After all, I felt, Johnson would have
found another occasion to get such a resolution passed, or gone ahead
without one, even if someone had exposed the fraud in early August.
Years later, though, the thought hit me: What if I had told Congress
and the public, later in the fall of 1964, the whole truth about what
was coming, with all the documents I had acquired in my job by
September, October, or November? Not just, as Morse had suggested, the
contents of a few files on the events surrounding the Tonkin Gulf
incident-all that I had in early August-but the drawerfuls of
critical working papers, memos, estimates, and detailed escalation
options revealing the evolving plans of the Johnson Administration for
a wider war, expected to commence soon after the election. In short,
what if I had put out before the end of the year, whether before or
after the November election, all of the classified papers from that
period that I did eventually disclose in 1971?
Had I done so, the public and Congress would have learned that
Johnson's campaign theme, "we seek no wider war," was a hoax.
They would have learned, in fact, that the Johnson Administration had
been heading in secret toward essentially the same policy of expanded
war that his presidential rival, Senator Barry Goldwater, openly
advocated-a policy that the voters overwhelmingly repudiated at the
polls.
I would have been indicted then, as I was seven years later, and
probably imprisoned. But America would have been at peace during those
years. It was only with that reflection, perhaps a decade after the
carnage finally ended, that I recognized Morse had been right about my
personal share of responsibility for the whole war.
Not just mine alone. Any one of a hundred officials-some of whom
foresaw the whole catastrophe-could have told the hidden truth to
Congress, with documents. Instead, our silence made us all accomplices
in the ensuing slaughter.
* * *
The run-up to the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution was almost exactly
parallel to the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war resolution.
In both cases, the president and his top Cabinet officers consciously
deceived Congress and the public about a supposed short-run threat in
order to justify and win support for carrying out preexisting offensive
plans against a country that was not a near-term danger to the United
States. In both cases, the deception was essential to the political
feasibility of the program precisely because expert opinion inside the
government foresaw costs, dangers, and low prospects of success that
would have doomed the project politically if there had been truly
informed public discussion beforehand. And in both cases, that
necessary deception could not have succeeded without the obedient
silence of hundreds of insiders who knew full well both the deception
and the folly of acting upon it.
One insider aware of the Iraq plans, and knowledgeable about the
inevitably disastrous result of executing those plans, was Richard
Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for George W. Bush and adviser to
three presidents before him. He had spent September 11, 2001, in the
White House, coordinating the nation's response to the attacks. He
reports in his memoir, Against All Enemies, discovering the next
morning, to his amazement, that most discussions there were about
attacking Iraq.
Clarke told Bush and Rumsfeld that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, or
with its perpetrator, Al Qaeda. As Clarke said to Secretary of State
Colin Powell that afternoon, "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for
us now to go bombing Iraq in response"-which Rumsfeld was already
urging-"would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese
attacked us at Pearl Harbor."
Actually, Clarke foresaw that it would be much worse than that.
Attacking Iraq not only would be a crippling distraction from the task
of pursuing the real enemy but would in fact aid that enemy: "Nothing
America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new
generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our
unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."
I single out Clarke-by all accounts among the best of the best of
public servants-only because of his unique role in counterterrorism
and because, thanks to his illuminating 2004 memoir, we know his
thoughts at that time, and, in particular, the intensity of his anguish
and frustration. Such a memoir allows us, as we read each new
revelation, to ask a simple question: What difference might it have
made to events if he had told us this at the time?
Clarke was not, of course, the only one who could have told us, or told
Congress. We know from other accounts that both of his key
judgments-the absence of linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam and his
correct prediction that "attacking Iraq would actually make America
less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist
movement"-were shared by many professionals in the CIA, the State
Department, and the military.
Yet neither of these crucial, expert conclusions was made available to
Congress or the public, by Clarke or anyone else, in the eighteen-month
run-up to the war. Even as they heard the president lead the country to
the opposite, false impressions, toward what these officials saw as a
disastrous, unjustified war, they felt obliged to keep their silence.
Costly as their silence was to their country and its victims, I feel I
know their mind-set. I had long prized my own identity as a keeper of
the president's secrets. In 1964 it never even occurred to me to
break the many secrecy agreements I had signed, in the Marines, at the
Rand Corporation, in the Pentagon. Although I already knew the Vietnam
War was a mistake and based on lies, my loyalties then were to the
secretary of defense and the president (and to my promises of secrecy,
on which my own career as a president's man depended). I'm not
proud that it took me years of war to awaken to the higher loyalties
owed by every government official to the rule of law, to our soldiers
in harm's way, to our fellow citizens, and, explicitly, to the
Constitution, which every one of us had sworn an oath "to support and
uphold."
It took me that long to recognize that the secrecy agreements we had
signed frequently conflicted with our oath to uphold the Constitution.
That conflict arose almost daily, unnoticed by me or other officials,
whenever we were secretly aware that the president or other executive
officers were lying to or misleading Congress. In giving priority, in
effect, to my promise of secrecy-ignoring my constitutional
obligation-I was no worse or better than any of my Vietnam-era
colleagues, or those who later saw the Iraq war approaching and failed
to warn anyone outside the executive branch.
Ironically, Clarke told Vanity Fair in 2004 that in his own youth he
had ardently protested "the complete folly" of the Vietnam War and
that he "wanted to get involved in national security in 1973 as a
career so that Vietnam didn't happen again." He is left today with
a sense of failu
It's an arrogant thing to think, Could I have ever stopped another
Vietnam? But it really filled me with frustration that when I saw Iraq
coming I wasn't able to do anything. After having spent thirty years
in national security and having been in some senior-level positions you
would think that I might be able to have some influence, some tiny
influence. But I couldn't have any.
But it was not too arrogant, I believe, for Clarke to aspire to stop
this second Vietnam personally. He actually had a good chance to do so,
throughout 2002, the same one Senator Morse had pointed out to me.
Instead of writing a memoir to be cleared for publication in 2004, a
year after Iraq had been invaded, Clarke could have made his knowledge
of the war to come, and its danger to our security, public before the
war. He could have supported his testimony with hundreds of files of
documents from his office safe and computer, to which he then still had
access. He could have given these to both the media and the then
Democratic-controlled Senate.
"If I had criticized the president to the press as a special
assistant" in the summer of 2002, Clarke told Larry King in March
2004, "I would have been fired within an hour." That is undoubtedly
true. But should that be the last word on that course? To be sure,
virtually all bureaucrats would agree with him, as he told King, that
his
only responsible options at that point were either to resign quietly or
to "spin" for the White House to the press, as he did. But that is
just the working norm I mean to question here.
His unperceived alternative, I wish to suggest, was precisely to court
being fired for telling the truth to the public, with documentary
evidence, in the summer of 2002. For doing that, Clarke would not only
have lost his job, his clearance, and his career as an executive
official; he would almost surely have been prosecuted, and he might
have gone to prison. But the controversy that ensued would not have
been about hindsight and blame. It would have been about whether war on
Iraq would make the United States safer, and whether it was otherwise
justified.
That debate did not occur in 2002-just as a real debate about war in
Vietnam did not occur in 1964-thanks to the disciplined reticence of
Clarke and many others. Whatever his personal fate, which might have
been severe, his disclosures would have come before the war. Perhaps,
instead of it.
* * *
We face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis
hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles by
Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those earlier
cases, the president has secretly directed the completion, though not
yet execution, of military operational plans-not merely hypothetical
"contingency plans" but constantly updated plans, with movement of
forces and high states of readiness, for prompt implementation on
command-for attacking a country that, unless attacked itself, poses
no threat to the United States: in this case, Iran.
According to these reports, many high-level officers and government
officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about
regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president
have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than they were
to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense is as madly
optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military success there
as he was in Iraq.
Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in
The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney's
office had directed contingency planning for "a large-scale air
assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear
weapons" and that "several senior Air Force officers" involved in
the planning were "appalled at the implications of what they are
doing-that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear
attack-but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any
objection."
Several of Hersh's sources have confirmed both the detailed
operational planning for use of nuclear weapons against deep
underground Iranian installations and military resistance to this
prospect, which led several senior officials to consider resigning.
Hersh notes that opposition by the Joint Chiefs in April led to White
House withdrawal of the "nuclear option"-for now, I would say.
The operational plans remain in existence, to be drawn upon for a
"decisive" blow if the president deems it necessary.
Many of these sources regard the planned massive air attack-with or
without nuclear weapons-as almost sure to be catastrophic for the
Middle East, the position of the United States in the world, our troops
in Iraq, the world economy, and U.S. domestic security. Thus they are
as deeply concerned about these prospects as many other insiders were
in the year before the Iraq invasion. That is why, unlike in the
lead-up to Vietnam or Iraq, some insiders are leaking to reporters. But
since these disclosures-so far without documents and without
attribution-have not evidently had enough credibility to raise public
alarm, the question is whether such officials have yet reached the
limit of their responsibilities to our country.
Assuming Hersh's so-far anonymous sources mean what they say-that
this is, as one puts it, "a juggernaut that has to be stopped"-I
believe it is time for one or more of them to go beyond fragmentary
leaks unaccompanied by documents. That means doing what no other active
official or consultant has ever done in a timely way: what neither
Richard Clarke nor I nor anyone else thought of doing until we were no
longer officials, no longer had access to current documents, after
bombs had fallen and thousands had died, years into a war. It means
going outside executive channels, as officials with contemporary
access, to expose the president's lies and oppose his war policy
publicly before the war, with unequivocal evidence from inside.
Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political
responsibilities of officials rightly "appalled" by the thrust of
secret policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the sober
decision-accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk of
prison-to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably,
official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the
military plans being considered. What needs disclosure is the full
internal controversy, the secret critiques as well as the arguments and
claims of advocates of war and nuclear "options"-the Pentagon
Papers of the Middle East. But unlike in 1971, the ongoing secret
debate should be made available before our war in the region expands to
include Iran, before the sixty-one-year moratorium on nuclear war is
ended violently, to give our democracy a chance to foreclose either of
those catastrophes.
The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as
great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over
130,000 young Americans-with many yet to join them-in an unjust
war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and
civil courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before
the next war begins.
This is The Next War, originally from October 2006, published Thursday,
October 19, 2006. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

Navigate by Hierarchy
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---------------------------------------------------------------------

Iran: A Bridge too Far:

http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle7147.htm

Iran: The Next War (for Israel):

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0...ic.php?t=56761

----------------------------------------------------------------
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

--------------------------------------------------------

Last update - 02:01 22/10/2006
Putin to Olmert: No military action against Iran
By Yossi Melman
Russian president Vladimir Putin denounced any military operation
against Iran in a meeting last week with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Putin told Olmert in the Moscow meeting that foiling Iran's nuclear
program could end in disaster for the world. Russian sources attached
great importance to the Russian president's first mention of a military
option in talks with an Israeli leader.
Olmert also discussed the Iranian nuclear program with Foreign Minister
Sergey Lavrov and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, in the first
meeting in eleven years between an Israeli premier and a Russian
defense minister.
During his meeting with Putin, Olmert didn't talk about a military
operation, but emphasized that not only the U.S. but also Russia holds
responsibility for handling Tehran. Putin recounted that in past talks
with U.S. President George W. Bush and his aides, he had discussed how
to prevent Iranian acquisition of nuclear arms. Putin asked if the U.S.
could conduct a military operation and had a clear plan. He said the
Americans didn't answer.
Putin's comments can be interpreted in two ways. One is that the
Americans evaded the question, the other is that they didn't answer
because they do not have effective military capability or an organized
plan to substantially harm the Iranian nuclear program. In any case,
Russia rejects an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Putin
administration believes that only negotiations will prevent or at least
delay Iranian nuclear ambitions.
Olmert asked Putin to join an American-European move to impose severe
sanctions on Iran, which he referred to in a press briefing saying,
"The Iranians need to be afraid something will happen that they don't
want to have happen."
The Prime Minister's Office declined to provide a statement and said
they do not comment on the content of the premier's meetings in Moscow.

Israel hopes that if Iran does not obey international demands and does
not stop enriching uranium, Russia will threaten not to complete
construction of the Bushehr nuclear reactor and not to supply the
uranium needed to fuel it. The Bushehr reactor, slated to generate
electricity, is about four years behind schedule in starting
operations, a delay Russian and Western sources attribute both to
technical problems in the construction of the reactor and to Russian
government decisions. Israeli and American experts do not believe
Moscow is interested in Iran having nuclear weapons.
The UN Security Council is continuing in its efforts to draft a formula
for sanctions that is acceptable to all five permanent members.

------------------------------------------------------------

/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=777566


AirRaid wrote:
"Military action has been in planning since before the wars with
Afghanistan and Iraq. This could come in any one of three forms or
some combination of them: A US attack by air power alone, a ground
invasion as in the 1991 and 2003 attacks on Iraq, or the encouragement
of an Israeli attack.

The National Security Doctrine form of "Preventive Action" now
under the most intense study is aerial bombardment. This is attractive
because America does not have sufficient combat troops for a land
invasion. Moreover, allegedly the U.S. Air Force generals have said
that even alone air power could "take out" (destroy) all suspected
Iranian nuclear installations and so devastate Iran that the regime
would collapse.

What would aerial bombardment entail? What it involved in Iraq gives
at least a starting point: in some 37,000 sorties the US Air Force
dropped 13,000 "cluster munitions" that exploded into 2 million
bombs, wiping out whole areas, and fired 23,000 missiles. Naval ships
launched 750 Cruise missiles with another 1.5 million pounds of
explosives. More powerful weapons are now available. Air Force General
Thomas McInerney gave the Neoconservative Weekly Standard in April an
inventory of "improved" weapons. They include vastly larger
"bunker buster" bombs and greater targeting ability. McInerney
pointed out that a B-2 bomber can drop 80 500 pound bombs independently
targeted on 80 different aim points. In effect, this aerial
bombardment would eclipse the "shock and awe" of 2003 and be far
more destructive than the 1991 campaign or the devastating air war on
Vietnam."


http://www.hnn.us/articles/31051.html

Jack Linthicum wrote:
AirRaid wrote:

"Military action has been in planning since before the wars with
Afghanistan and Iraq. This could come in any one of three forms or
some combination of them: A US attack by air power alone, a ground
invasion as in the 1991 and 2003 attacks on Iraq, or the encouragement
of an Israeli attack.

The National Security Doctrine form of "Preventive Action" now
under the most intense study is aerial bombardment. This is attractive
because America does not have sufficient combat troops for a land
invasion. Moreover, allegedly the U.S. Air Force generals have said
that even alone air power could "take out" (destroy) all suspected
Iranian nuclear installations and so devastate Iran that the regime
would collapse.

What would aerial bombardment entail? What it involved in Iraq gives
at least a starting point: in some 37,000 sorties the US Air Force
dropped 13,000 "cluster munitions" that exploded into 2 million
bombs, wiping out whole areas, and fired 23,000 missiles. Naval ships
launched 750 Cruise missiles with another 1.5 million pounds of
explosives. More powerful weapons are now available. Air Force General
Thomas McInerney gave the Neoconservative Weekly Standard in April an
inventory of "improved" weapons. They include vastly larger
"bunker buster" bombs and greater targeting ability. McInerney
pointed out that a B-2 bomber can drop 80 500 pound bombs independently
targeted on 80 different aim points. In effect, this aerial
bombardment would eclipse the "shock and awe" of 2003 and be far
more destructive than the 1991 campaign or the devastating air war on
Vietnam."


http://www.hnn.us/articles/31051.html


Describe in detail, citing examples that others can see, that "Shock
and Awe" was anything more than buzzword and a means of getting rid of
a lot of explosives.

This has been a war of slogans and buzzwords with little tangible
results.

Apart from lots of dead, innocent people!

Ricardo

--
"Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice, and fear, walk hand in hand ..."

Ricardo writes:

Jack Linthicum wrote:
AirRaid wrote:

"Military action has been in planning since before the wars with
Afghanistan and Iraq. This could come in any one of three forms or
Describe in detail, citing examples that others can see, that
"Shock
and Awe" was anything more than buzzword and a means of getting rid of
a lot of explosives.
This has been a war of slogans and buzzwords with little tangible
results.

Apart from lots of dead, innocent people!

As I have never served in the military (and I say that proudly, with
similar respect given to those that did) I took the opportunity to
educate myself a little (being half-Austrian) by watching joint
German-Russian and German-British-US documentaries of the last part of
the war (on German soil) in the West, and the Russian campaign up
until the end of the war. When I was growing up a lot of that was
still unknown before Perestroika. It was enlightening, horrifying and
downright frightening, but at the same time immensely gratifying to
see action footage (only the US cameramen were unable to show their
own dead, still I weak point of the US nowadays I consider, a
manipulation of public opinion just as bad as that of the Nazis) and
honest interviews with participants. Especially interesting was how
ex-soldiers and civilians on all sides (but particularly German and
Russian from the Eastern Front) could look at their past and
categorically state that what they did was criminal in today's view,
but at the time was considered either morally correct (based on their
indoctrination) or necessary (such as the measures taken to prevent
civilians fleeing cities, or soldiers retreating instead of holding
their lines to the death).

I don't know why I never saw this footage before, certainly having P2P
helps a lot, but in my country of birth (South Africa) we did not have
access to anything like this direct education when I was growing up. I
remember my mother taking me to see "Platoon" when I was about 14 or
so, to encourage me to get an idea of what war meant - certainly she
had first-hand experience of the civilian side of it, born near Vienna
in that fatal year of 1933, living through the war and having
classmates killed by strafing attacks, and then subsisting until 1955
under the Russian occupation.

What all this boils down to is, a) there is for me no reason to
categorically denounce as evil people who do evil deeds during
wartime, b) the war waged by Western powers today, including friendly
fire incidents, is no worse than that of the past, c) people forget
through not having a tradition of remembrance. For those that cannot
get personal transmission from their relatives, I recommend spending
time looking at film reels and documentaries. Preaching to the
converted here, I suspect. But I say this as someone who for a long
time had an overriding interest in things naval and aeronautical, and
had almost no contact with the ground side of things, or the human
dimensions of conflict.

In humility,
--
Gernot Hassenpflug ) Tel: +81 774 38-3866
JSPS Fellow (Rm.403, RISH, Kyoto Uni.) Fax: +81 774 31-8463
http://www.rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp/radar-...members/gernot Mob: +81 90 39493924

"Gernot Hassenpflug" wrote in message
...

As I have never served in the military (and I say that proudly, with
similar respect given to those that did) I took the opportunity to
educate myself a little (being half-Austrian) by watching joint
German-Russian and German-British-US documentaries of the last part of
the war (on German soil) in the West, and the Russian campaign up
until the end of the war. When I was growing up a lot of that was
still unknown before Perestroika. It was enlightening, horrifying and
downright frightening, but at the same time immensely gratifying to
see action footage (only the US cameramen were unable to show their
own dead, still I weak point of the US nowadays I consider, a
manipulation of public opinion just as bad as that of the Nazis) and
honest interviews with participants. Especially interesting was how
ex-soldiers and civilians on all sides (but particularly German and
Russian from the Eastern Front) could look at their past and
categorically state that what they did was criminal in today's view,
but at the time was considered either morally correct (based on their
indoctrination) or necessary (such as the measures taken to prevent
civilians fleeing cities, or soldiers retreating instead of holding
their lines to the death).

I don't know why I never saw this footage before, certainly having P2P
helps a lot, but in my country of birth (South Africa) we did not have
access to anything like this direct education when I was growing up. I
remember my mother taking me to see "Platoon" when I was about 14 or
so, to encourage me to get an idea of what war meant - certainly she
had first-hand experience of the civilian side of it, born near Vienna
in that fatal year of 1933, living through the war and having
classmates killed by strafing attacks, and then subsisting until 1955
under the Russian occupation.

What all this boils down to is, a) there is for me no reason to
categorically denounce as evil people who do evil deeds during
wartime, b) the war waged by Western powers today, including friendly
fire incidents, is no worse than that of the past, c) people forget
through not having a tradition of remembrance. For those that cannot
get personal transmission from their relatives, I recommend spending
time looking at film reels and documentaries. Preaching to the
converted here, I suspect. But I say this as someone who for a long
time had an overriding interest in things naval and aeronautical, and
had almost no contact with the ground side of things, or the human
dimensions of conflict.

You would seem to expect people to be rational, to show detachment and to use
perspective! Heaven forefend!
--
Andrew Chaplin
SIT MIHI GLADIUS SICUT SANCTO MARTINO
(If you're going to e-mail me, you'll have to get "yourfinger." out.)

"Shock and Awe" - I read the original paper, and all I can say is that
instead of S and A all that is accomplished is to really PO the
recipient and make him lock and load or, if he doesn't have a gun
handy, to hone his knife to a very sharp edge. One would hope that
someone at a decision-making level would read some history to see that
S and A has never worked. Well, maybe Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but let's
not go there.
Walt BJ

On 25 Oct 2006 20:15:33 -0700, "WaltBJ"
wrote:

"Shock and Awe" - I read the original paper, and all I can say is that
instead of S and A all that is accomplished is to really PO the
recipient and make him lock and load or, if he doesn't have a gun
handy, to hone his knife to a very sharp edge. One would hope that
someone at a decision-making level would read some history to see that
S and A has never worked. Well, maybe Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but let's
not go there.
Walt BJ

You must have been watching a different channel.

I watched the fixed camera that was usually displayed on CNN, FOX,
MSNBC and others, at the Iraqi Ministry of Information. It showed the
street in front of the building and swapped with one that showed a
main downtown intersection and parkway.

During the raids, the traffic lights continued to operate, traffic
flowed and life went on as usual for the working citizens. Movement
into and out of the parking garage across the street from the ministry
continued. IOW, the innocent citizenry was not targeted.

Also seen was the intense AAA and missile fire, apparently discharged
at random, with little apparent effect. What goes up, must come down.
Random damage from expended flak and missiles is inevitable in those
situation.

Targeting was of military installations, C3I facilities and Sadaam's
palaces/headquarters. Places like Republican Guards Hq, main
thoroughfare bridges, military supply dumps, communications facilities
and missile batteries were hit with PGMs and generally without
collateral damage. Target servicing rates were high, coalition losses
were low and Pk was incredible compared to earlier conflicts with
which both you and I, Walt are familiar.

I wasn't particularly shocked, but I sure was awed.

It was definitely not a carpet bombing campaign. It was counter-force,
not counter-value. It was precise and although there is no doubt that
innocents died, it was well focussed. It was also well observed by
media which is not necessarily favorable to the operation.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
www.thunderchief.org
www.thundertales.blogspot.com

Ed Rasimus wrote:
On 25 Oct 2006 20:15:33 -0700, "WaltBJ"
wrote:

"Shock and Awe" - I read the original paper, and all I can say is that
instead of S and A all that is accomplished is to really PO the
recipient and make him lock and load or, if he doesn't have a gun
handy, to hone his knife to a very sharp edge. One would hope that
someone at a decision-making level would read some history to see that
S and A has never worked. Well, maybe Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but let's
not go there.
Walt BJ

You must have been watching a different channel.

I watched the fixed camera that was usually displayed on CNN, FOX,
MSNBC and others, at the Iraqi Ministry of Information. It showed the
street in front of the building and swapped with one that showed a
main downtown intersection and parkway.

During the raids, the traffic lights continued to operate, traffic
flowed and life went on as usual for the working citizens. Movement
into and out of the parking garage across the street from the ministry
continued. IOW, the innocent citizenry was not targeted.

Also seen was the intense AAA and missile fire, apparently discharged
at random, with little apparent effect. What goes up, must come down.
Random damage from expended flak and missiles is inevitable in those
situation.

Targeting was of military installations, C3I facilities and Sadaam's
palaces/headquarters. Places like Republican Guards Hq, main
thoroughfare bridges, military supply dumps, communications facilities
and missile batteries were hit with PGMs and generally without
collateral damage. Target servicing rates were high, coalition losses
were low and Pk was incredible compared to earlier conflicts with
which both you and I, Walt are familiar.

I wasn't particularly shocked, but I sure was awed.

It was definitely not a carpet bombing campaign. It was counter-force,
not counter-value. It was precise and although there is no doubt that
innocents died, it was well focussed. It was also well observed by
media which is not necessarily favorable to the operation.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
www.thunderchief.org
www.thundertales.blogspot.com

Please describe the effects of this event, did anyone surrender? Did
the populace flee in the streets seeking shelter? Did any of the
"bunker busters" bunk a buster? Were any of the "precision targets"
actually targets, or just guesses based on those people who were
waiting with the flowers?