Jinn of Current Events

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel says the US officials who planned the war in Iraq lack professionalism. Were Belgian behaviours in Congo (performing a genocide of 10 million) and in Rwanda (watching the massacre start) examples of professionalism? what about the quick surrender to Nazi Germany at the beginning of WW II? 

Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan told Saudi Arabia's foreign minister to go to hell. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal earlier on Monday told ABC News Saddam should be the first to sacrifice for his country by stepping aside to end the war in Iraq. At a news conference, Ramadan responded: You loser, you are too small to talk to the leader of Iraq and those who will be swept away from the land of the Arab world are people like you. You are a minion and a lackey. 

Brig.Gen. Vincent Brooks: There will be tactical surprises that happen on the battlefield. We are going to deliver a whole lot of them. And there may be some that come our way as well. But the key to a force that can adapt itself to the realities of the battlefield is knowing what could be happen and be able to deal with it when it does happen, and ideally to cause the circumstances to be advantageous to us before they happen. That's the way we do our work, and we'll continue to do it that way. — We do our work in a way that in some cases is sequential, in some cases simultaneous. What we're seeking is a broad effect on this regime, but we can operate in a variety of areas, with a variety of effects in the time and place of our choosing. (2003-Apr-01)

General Tommy Franks: This military campaign will be like no other before. We will attack the enemy, have and will continue to attack the enemy, at times and at places of coalition choosing. Sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially. (2003-Mar-31) 

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News: The white-flag Iraqi irregulars, who pretend to surrender and then open fire on our men and women exercising humanitarian restraint, are despicable. Sooner, rather than later, the treacherous will get what they deserve. So it must be for the others who have betrayed our restraint and practiced a lethal deceit: What Saddam's thugs are doing on the field of battle is what France, under the leadership of President Chirac, did on the field of diplomacy. Any slim chance that Saddam would come clean or quit was lost while the French played their games. When the fog of war has lifted, we will remember how innocent blood came to be shed. 

Tech Central Station: For centuries, war planners have used basic economic concepts to their advantage. American military superiority goes far beyond training and equipment. U.S. forces exploit the economic lessons learned in a capitalist society. 

NYT: From redesigned first-aid kits to a radically new kind of surgery on the front lines, battlefield medicine has changed markedly and, as a result, doctors in the war in Iraq hope to significantly reduce the death rate from battlefield wounds — a rate that has not budged for 150 years. Since the Civil War, experts in military medicine say, one of five wounded soldiers has died, half from profuse bleeding. Pentagon doctors hope to change that, and have mobilized an array of innovations. 

John Keegan (Telegraph): In a conventional military environment, not so heavily influenced by the surveillance of the media, any commanding general might reckon the campaign had made highly satisfactory progress so far. It has secured most of the territory and facilities over which it needs to operate, has a secure base, has acquired its own resupply port, dominates the enemy and is not threatened by large-scale civilian disorder. The critical phase, the battle for Baghdad, has still to be reached. It is inconceivable, however, that the American Army will not defeat the Republican Guard outside the city and such a defeat, in all likelihood, will rapidly bring about the city's fall.