licentious radio

Friday, January 24, 2003
[5:30:04 PM]

It's a Pro-American World [thenation.com].

[5:09:11 PM]

The brilliant, shining light that came from the September 11, 2001 attacks was the spontaneous support of the people of Europe. The saddest element of punk Bush's time of power is the way he abused and poisoned that good will.

[4:23:19 PM]

licentious minds are fascinated by political leaks, especially spook political leaks.

Here's a story that Iraq is preparing to use chemical weapons [guardian.co.uk].

But the source is claimed to be Republican Guard leaking to Iraqi opposition. And interpretation includes that the Republican Guard is ready to oust Saddam. Frankly, that looks like a double-whammy bit of Bush propaganda.

But when you think about it, maybe it's Saddam's way of making some noise at US military planners. The Iraqi wanna-bes certainly have incentive to make themselves look connected.

It's not like a citizen can see through this, when we know Rumsfeld is out there planting lies in the foreign media to increase public support for the war.

[4:03:17 PM]
Axle of Evil [tnr.com]. The full scoop on how bad SUVs are.

[1:36:39 PM]
I know people who use Operation Northwoods as an example that the government makes all kinds of weird contingency plans that it would never actually carry out. Since I wasn't involved in the planning, I don't really know what the people were thinking. But somehow the argument would seem a lot stronger if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated a year after not implementing the plan.

[11:13:18 AM]
What if Iraq bombed your neighborhood? Americans would be fighting mad -- even Americans who dislike Bush. Don't expect Iraqis to be overjoyed by B52 bombers over Baghdad. And Poppy Bush already used up the "internal rebellion" card. He left the poor dumb Iraqis who trusted the President of the United States to be murdered by the thousands by the Revolutionary Guard.

Everybody's pretending like conquering Iraq will be as easy as Poppy's Gulf War, and further pretending that occupying Iraq will be like occupying Germany as opposed to Afghanistan.

What if the Iraqis put up a fight? The US is known to be cowardly in the face of casualties. That is, politicians consistently cut and run after a few Americans are killed -- Reagan set the precedent in Lebanon, Clinton used casualties to escape Poppy Bush's Somalia trap. Junior has pretty much abandoned Afghanistan -- probably in part to avoid a higher US body count.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine the US stopping a war because of casualties, but it could happen. Once the war starts, what does Iraq have to lose by trying?

What could Iraq do? Iraq used some unorthodox tactics in Poppy's war. Might they think up some more?

A US general playing Saddam in war games last year sank the American fleet [guardian.co.uk] using unorthodox tactics. The Persian Gulf is a small, dangerous space for five or six aircraft carriers.

In Poppy's Gulf War, Saddam lit the Kuwait oil fields on fire, and left nasty chemical weapons behind that the US forces -- astonishingly -- exploded into the air. Some people think Saddam would be less likely to burn his own oil fields, but countries have done that kind of thing before -- think of Russia against Napolean's invasion. The oil well fire fighters developed new technology in Kuwait to put out fires quickly. Saddam's people will probably have thought up new oil-fire tactics.

The worst nightmare is that US soldiers are forced to fight in Basra and Baghdad, and the Revolutionary Guard uses urban guerilla techniques like the Chechens in Grosny. The US can't very well use B52 carpet-bombing on cities full of Iraqi citizens. Bombing cities has generally proved to be ineffective. The people like you less for it, and the rubble makes life easier for defenders. Imagine Grosny, but with tens of thousands of enemy soldiers with shoulder-fired missiles.

And once we've overcome military resistance, what if the Iraqi army devolves into guerilla/terrorist fighters? And with all the army's small arms in the hands of three ethnic/religious factions fighting for power, how many American soldiers will it take to occupy a country of sixteen or twenty million? Raise your hand if you think chocolate bars will make them glad to have US soldiers arresting people by the thousands.

No. There were *good* reasons for Poppy to call off Gulf War I, and there are even better reasons to avoid Junior's Gulf War II. War is butchery on a vast scale. It is an absolute last resort. Saddam may *deserve* to be regime-changed, but that is not a good enough reason for us to *initiate* a war of conquest.

[9:40:46 AM]
The mythic scale of the US late entry and success in two World Wars seems to blind the average American to the fact that *we* are initiating the new Iraq war. Saddam isn't nice, but he hasn't attacked *us*.

Suddenly, a man defeated in the democratic election process has turned our military strategy upside down. Now *we* will strike first, smiting our enemies when and where he chooses.

Yet Americans keep writing letters to the editor about how we defended France, and what jerks they are not to help us now. Can they see the difference between helping a country that was invaded by the dominant military power of the day, versus *being* the dominant military power of the day and invading a third world country that isn't attacking anyone?

Americans are woefully and deliberately misinformed about Iraq and the "war on terror". If you give Americans a multiple choice question about how many of the infamous September 11 hijackers were Iraqis, almost no one guesses the right answer -- zero, none, zilch. Answers to polls are clearly tied to the wording of the questions, and the wording is generally rigged.

[9:19:32 AM]
The message from the Bush camp: 'It's war within weeks' [guardian.co.uk]: "They're talking about weeks, not months. Months is a banned word now."

[9:16:15 AM]
Roger Ebert: "Dissent protects the body politic from the virus of totalitarianism."