Thought of the day
You know, if the US has been dropping bombs on a city populated by 5 million people for a couple of days, where the fuck are the dead people?
It's not like I get kicks out of seeing dead bodies (not after reviewing the results of the last Gulf War and the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989), but I have the sinking feeling that someone's not telling us something. I mean, common skepticism asks, "Gee, think anyone might've been hurt?" I mean, come on, a Tomahawk, a Patriot, these are fucking missiles and bombs that're meant to kill lots of people, not little homing drones that have a picture of Saddam with the little caption "Just kill this guy" nailed to the bottom like a subtitle. Either people died - proving that these weapons are worth the tax money (heh) the civilian population has spent on them - or people didn't die - proving that the shit's not worth shit and our military is ultimately a bunch of incompetents who couldn't hit a city with a payload of guided bombs.
Or is it because the Iraqi people (unlike the French) aren't The Enemy just yet? And just like Afghanistan, the US has dropped bomb after bomb to get at one guy, and surprise, surprise, nothing's turned up. Gee, who'da thunk it?
The oil fields of Iraq are evidently going to be held in by UN trust, to be used only by the Iraqi people. Chalk one up for the people who calculated that blood is not worth more than oil: simplistic little slogan, yes, but one that pissed off Washington enough that they caved and said, "No, look what we're doing for the Iraqi people! We're nice, yes?" Not the plan from the beginning, but a last-minute adjustment, which is a victory for the peace movement of sorts.
For years America's been very brave, dropping tons of bombs from 15,000 feet up instead of sending in the more precise (hopefully more humane) troops and exposing themselves to the dangers of ground battle, what critics might call a "coward's battle." Evidently, someone was listening because American troops are finally risking their necks en masse - this shocked the shit out of me (I assumed they'd do a lot more softening up from the air first) - either because Rumsfeld wants to show how brave the Americans can be when it's time to dig into trenches or because the US couldn't get some other poor slobs to do it for them. Either way, this is not going to be a media event for long, not if troops start coming home in body bags by the hundreds fighting a war for the coward with a messianic complex.
On the upside, student protests are up: I was late for a Tuesday class and couldn't hear shit anyways because of the clamor outside - we have a large Arabic population here, one that is justifiably pissed off at the US government. This is good - young people of today eventually become voters (and hopefully leaders) of tomorrow. It's not so much the blinding idealism that teenagers display that has stunned their parents (gee, the world really can be cut into clear terms of right and wrong, who'da thunk it?), but the thought that when parents wished their kids would act like adults and care a bit more about the world, this might not have been what they had in mind.
It's not like I get kicks out of seeing dead bodies (not after reviewing the results of the last Gulf War and the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989), but I have the sinking feeling that someone's not telling us something. I mean, common skepticism asks, "Gee, think anyone might've been hurt?" I mean, come on, a Tomahawk, a Patriot, these are fucking missiles and bombs that're meant to kill lots of people, not little homing drones that have a picture of Saddam with the little caption "Just kill this guy" nailed to the bottom like a subtitle. Either people died - proving that these weapons are worth the tax money (heh) the civilian population has spent on them - or people didn't die - proving that the shit's not worth shit and our military is ultimately a bunch of incompetents who couldn't hit a city with a payload of guided bombs.
Or is it because the Iraqi people (unlike the French) aren't The Enemy just yet? And just like Afghanistan, the US has dropped bomb after bomb to get at one guy, and surprise, surprise, nothing's turned up. Gee, who'da thunk it?
The oil fields of Iraq are evidently going to be held in by UN trust, to be used only by the Iraqi people. Chalk one up for the people who calculated that blood is not worth more than oil: simplistic little slogan, yes, but one that pissed off Washington enough that they caved and said, "No, look what we're doing for the Iraqi people! We're nice, yes?" Not the plan from the beginning, but a last-minute adjustment, which is a victory for the peace movement of sorts.
For years America's been very brave, dropping tons of bombs from 15,000 feet up instead of sending in the more precise (hopefully more humane) troops and exposing themselves to the dangers of ground battle, what critics might call a "coward's battle." Evidently, someone was listening because American troops are finally risking their necks en masse - this shocked the shit out of me (I assumed they'd do a lot more softening up from the air first) - either because Rumsfeld wants to show how brave the Americans can be when it's time to dig into trenches or because the US couldn't get some other poor slobs to do it for them. Either way, this is not going to be a media event for long, not if troops start coming home in body bags by the hundreds fighting a war for the coward with a messianic complex.
On the upside, student protests are up: I was late for a Tuesday class and couldn't hear shit anyways because of the clamor outside - we have a large Arabic population here, one that is justifiably pissed off at the US government. This is good - young people of today eventually become voters (and hopefully leaders) of tomorrow. It's not so much the blinding idealism that teenagers display that has stunned their parents (gee, the world really can be cut into clear terms of right and wrong, who'da thunk it?), but the thought that when parents wished their kids would act like adults and care a bit more about the world, this might not have been what they had in mind.