Friday, March 21, 2003
Nothing Personal It's Just Collateral Damage
Collateral damage, sounds like what happens when two cars have a fender bender on the expressway. Unfortunately we are faced with the War time definition which means innocent people are going to die in this war. These deaths are unavoidable during a war. So we are killing Iraqi people to free other Iraqi people. We must rationalize this by saying that if you are unlucky enough to be near where a bomb falls, you don't deserve to be free?
Then there is the question of hitting what the military calls "dual-use targets," like installations that are critical both to the military and to civilians. These targets are bridges, roads, tunnels, or electric power grids. In the 1991 Persian Gulf war, for example, the United States destroyed Iraq's power grid, crippling its military communications. That also created severe food shortages, destroyed water-purification and sewage-treatment plants and disrupted medical care, which violated the Geneva Conventions. The United States defended hitting the targets, arguing that it was crucial to defeating the enemy. Geneva Convention! We don't need no stinking Geneva Convention we are the US of A boy!
We keep hearing about how smart the weapons are, but has anyone seen a demolition of a large building? It takes engineers quite a while to figure out how to set up the explosives to bring the building without hitting any other buildings. So, does anyone really believe that a bomb falling out of the sky can do the same thing? You know that pieces are going to fly everywhere, even if it hits right on target. Remember the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11? As the wars in Serbia and Afghanistan showed, air strikes cause collateral damage. "There are always intelligence errors or missiles fall short and go wrong,"
Here is a riddle for you. If intelligent people make occasional intelligent errors what kind of errors do you think Bush makes? That was a cheap shot, sorry about that, but the word "intelligent" in relationship to this war, made be think about the "lack of intelligence" and the image of Bush just popped up. I couldn't help it.
Work Cited:
New York Times
DAPHNE EVIATAR
Then there is the question of hitting what the military calls "dual-use targets," like installations that are critical both to the military and to civilians. These targets are bridges, roads, tunnels, or electric power grids. In the 1991 Persian Gulf war, for example, the United States destroyed Iraq's power grid, crippling its military communications. That also created severe food shortages, destroyed water-purification and sewage-treatment plants and disrupted medical care, which violated the Geneva Conventions. The United States defended hitting the targets, arguing that it was crucial to defeating the enemy. Geneva Convention! We don't need no stinking Geneva Convention we are the US of A boy!
We keep hearing about how smart the weapons are, but has anyone seen a demolition of a large building? It takes engineers quite a while to figure out how to set up the explosives to bring the building without hitting any other buildings. So, does anyone really believe that a bomb falling out of the sky can do the same thing? You know that pieces are going to fly everywhere, even if it hits right on target. Remember the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11? As the wars in Serbia and Afghanistan showed, air strikes cause collateral damage. "There are always intelligence errors or missiles fall short and go wrong,"
Here is a riddle for you. If intelligent people make occasional intelligent errors what kind of errors do you think Bush makes? That was a cheap shot, sorry about that, but the word "intelligent" in relationship to this war, made be think about the "lack of intelligence" and the image of Bush just popped up. I couldn't help it.
Work Cited:
New York Times
DAPHNE EVIATAR
# posted by Thomas @ 11:47 PM 
