(no subject)

[geekchick]

Today is Setting Orange, day 7 in the season of Discord, 3269.


I hope everyone who's all gung-ho about bombing Iraq into oblivion watches the video footage of downtown Baghdad in flames and tries to imagine their own homes and families being destroyed. It's absolutely horrifying.

[Edit 8 pm: About seven minutes of bombing, they said. I can't imagine seven minutes of that kind of terror, and I hope to god I never have to.]

Comments

[sol3.livejournal.com]

When the announcers are talking over the footage, going on about how amazing it is that we can watch this in real time, and wow, wasn't that a big bang over there, yadda yadda yadda...

don't hold your breath on the average american making that connection.

(what, me cynical?)

[geekchick]

(what, me cynical?)

NooooOOOOOOOooooo. ;) (Me neither.) I was watching footage from what looked like it might've been al-Jazeera until it cut to a test pattern, so I couldn't catch what was actually being said. I think I probably preferred it that way.

[geminigirl]

I didn't have to watch the footage to think about that.

[geekchick]

I didn't either. I was completely chilled last night when the air raid sirens in Kuwait City went off while they were talking to one of the CNN reporters, and that was just watching on TV from the safety of my house. I can't imagine what it would be like to actually be there.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Mike Malloy on http://www.ieamericaradio.com is broadcasting the audio portion as I write this. No overtalk, no commentary, just the sounds of planes and bombs and devastation.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Sitting in a meeting at Northrop today... around 11am PT, a woman came in and said (with obvious pride) "Our B-2's are in the air over Iraq." I felt queasy, being there.

[geekchick]

I'm not terribly surprised, considering you were sitting at Northrop Grumman.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's more like the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon being bombed.
The only house that has been targeted so far belongs to Saddam Hussein.

So far, the Iraqi government is claiming 200 casualties and 3 deaths. The power is still on in Baghdad, and traffic is still moving. None of this exactly indicates that the civilians of Baghdad are having their homes and families destroyed.

If you have the time, go to www.globalsecurity.org and check out their Public Eye photos of Baghdad. A good chunk of central Baghdad is reserved for government buildings and employees.

As a comparison, if someone was using bombing of the precision being used in Baghdad on central DC, at a time when central DC was totally evacuated, how many civilian casualties would there be?

As an example, check out this (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/images/dg-leadership-villa.jpg). Every building in that picture is set aside for the Ba'ath party leadership. (And yes, that is a swimming pool...compare it to the car you can see in the top right hand of the picture, and you'll see why that gets called the Mother of all Swimming Pools). This is a massive area.

I won't lose much sleep about wrecking the homes in that picture.

As for knowning how it feels..I think a chunk of the population of New York and DC has an idea, yes?

Terror..well, most of the Iraqi population has to worry about the midnight knock on the door, followed by a visit to the local Mukhabarat torture chamber, and has had to do so for their entire lives. (And this goes way up the line, Saddam having learned the Joe Stalin trick of periodically flinging his ministers' relatives into the Gulag as a means of keeping them in check).

I'd prefer none of this had to happen at all, but I can't think of any other way we're going to resolve this issue. At list this terror will end and take another source of fear an destruction with it.

[geekchick]

As for knowning how it feels..I think a chunk of the population of New York and DC has an idea, yes?

Yes. (I live outside DC myself.) And I can't possibly imagine how anyone who'd experienced that could in good conscience wish for anyone else to have to experience anything like it either. It's a national tragedy when it happens to us, but it's good TV when it happens to someone else? (I'm not claiming that's what you're saying, just to be clear; I've heard more than enough "let's just flatten the whole place and be done with it" and gloating about the bombing floating around here.) I know that we're not trying to indiscriminately level the city, if we were it would be close to done already (and world opinion would be even more against us than it already is). I don't think though that the guys sweeping the floors of the palaces or the ones left to sit at the gates while the real human targets go hide away elsewhere have any less right to not have cruise missiles land on them than their counterparts at the White House. I'm also not trying to say that Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son are not evil men who don't deserve anything they're going to get, but I'd much prefer to have seen them removed via some more selective means that don't risk non-combatants. Even better, I'd like to see the US not get itself involved in the internal affairs of other sovereign nations without a UN mandate, but that's just wishful thinking.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

It's not just Saddam and his sons. It's a lot of the people high up in the regime.

When the ultimatum was given for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave town, my big worry was that Saddam would come on TV and announce that he, Uday and Qusay were movig to the French Riveria, where they would a life of decadence Caligula would envy, funded by their Swiss bank accounts..and "Chemical" Ali Hussein al Majid would take over. (He earned his nickname by running every major Iraqi use of poison gas.) I mean, what could we do then? The terms would have been met, but we'd still have the WMD problem to worry about.

I'd like it if we could just target Saddam Hussein. (And we did try that on day one of the war...didn't work.) But the reality of things is that there are thousands of people involved in the real nastiness of regime, and they're going to want to fight to keep it going. After all, if it goes away, they'll lose their priveleges (and probably their lives, at the hands of their countrymen).

Flattening the whole place..I've heard people say that, too. In addition to being immoral, it's militarily counterproductive. As you note, it'd really get world opinion against us..and deservedly so. It'd also undermine any claims we had to be liberators.

As for the UN..every permanent Security Council member has involved itself in the internal affairs of other nations without a UN mandate since the UN was created. Heck, France is in the Ivory Coast right now, and you can be damned sure they aren't going to ask the UN for permission to do that.

The issue in Iraq isn't simply a government we dislike. It's a direct threat to the US. A small one at this point (unless the Iraqi government starts handing out WMD to terrorists, in which case it's a big one..and given their past history of sheltering and supporting just about every major terror group in the Middle East, not an unlikely possibility), but it's there.

Then there is the indirect threat. We can talk about not wanting to shed blood for oil, but the fact of the matter is that oil is one of he most important commodities in the world. There is little doubt that they would invade Kuwait again if we weren't there, and they'd probably make a go for Saudi. (If we backed down from this, I don't see how we could maintain containment of Iraq for much longer.) Do we really want to live in a world where the Iraqi regime dictates the price of oil? And where they can use the funds from sales of oil to fund a massive rearmament campaign? How about a world where a violent fascist (and that is what Saddam is) has shown that the most powerful country in the world can dislodge him? This effects elsewhere, after all..witness how the retreat from Mogadishu (where we never should have been in the first place, but that's a different matter) made Ossama bin Laden think we were weak.

I do wish it hadn't come to this, and that some of the other solutions attempted had worked.

But all the probelms in Iraq boil down to one thing: the Ba'ath regime, and Saddam's rule in particular. They've got to go. Given the circumstances (weak and dividded opposition, very powerful secret police, totalitarian regime that shows no signs of softening or moderating, and the potential for danger), they aren't going to go without us getting rid of them.

The good TV isn't the bombings, IMHO. It's the people ripping down posters of Saddam and cheering because they won't have to put up with him anymore. Without that as an end result, the bombing would be pointless. And I do think that is the result intended.