So it's official.
Nov. 16th, 2005 05:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaotic_nippleWe used White Phosporus as an anti-personnel weapon in Fallujah after all. Of course the Pentagon had to deny it first, just in case there are one or two people out there who still actually trust anything our current administration says.
FWIW, I, personally, don't really object to using incendiary weapons against enemy troops. The whole point of going into battle is to kill the other side and keep killing them until the survivors surrender. The more casualities you can inflict in a given amount of time, the quicker they'll surrender, and, hopefully, the more they'll think about it before shooting at you the next time. Using any indiscriminate weapon in a area heavily populated with civilians is a bad idea, for publicity reasons if nothing else, but I don't think incendiary weapons are uniquely "evil" in that regard (Unlike, say Depleted Uranium, which really should be banned as a chemical weapon).
The real problem here is, don't those morons in Washington realize that lying about something that's so easily checked on is a bad idea? Granted, the average American voter has the attention span of a gnat, and will fall for just about any fabrication provided you say it with enough conviction; They'll have forgotten this little bit of chicanery within the week. But, that creaking sound you hear? That's a little bit more of what little credibility we still had with the international community, shuffling off this mortal coil.
FWIW, I, personally, don't really object to using incendiary weapons against enemy troops. The whole point of going into battle is to kill the other side and keep killing them until the survivors surrender. The more casualities you can inflict in a given amount of time, the quicker they'll surrender, and, hopefully, the more they'll think about it before shooting at you the next time. Using any indiscriminate weapon in a area heavily populated with civilians is a bad idea, for publicity reasons if nothing else, but I don't think incendiary weapons are uniquely "evil" in that regard (Unlike, say Depleted Uranium, which really should be banned as a chemical weapon).
The real problem here is, don't those morons in Washington realize that lying about something that's so easily checked on is a bad idea? Granted, the average American voter has the attention span of a gnat, and will fall for just about any fabrication provided you say it with enough conviction; They'll have forgotten this little bit of chicanery within the week. But, that creaking sound you hear? That's a little bit more of what little credibility we still had with the international community, shuffling off this mortal coil.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-11-16 05:09 pm (UTC)We ought to be responsible and humble with our power. Instead we are arrogant with it and therefore cause so much unnecessary death. We are continuing to develop landmines though the vast majority of landmine victims are civilians, and we have the largest nuclear weapons program in the world. We count insurgent deaths as if they were Americans but we "don't do body counts" when the dead are civilians. Tobias Wolff said "War isn't a contest between champions. It isn't even a contest between armies. War is mostly violence -- economic, emotional, physical -- against civilians." Sadly, he's right. Which is why the question shouldn't be about which weapon we used but why we used any at all.
-- Kate, Broken Windows