2500 yards swum, and um. Oh yes, and I did my 15 minute walk.
And we’re at war, oh yay. Apparently they saw Saddam going into a bunker a while ago, and dropped 2000 pounds of artillery on it. I said to Dad, “Why didn’t they just drop a Moab?”
I hadn’t realized they only had one.
And they used it to bomb Florida.
Okay. I get that it was a test bomb. But does anybody else think that, y’know, last week, with a war coming up this week, somebody might’ve said, “Hey, let’s save this for Iraq. If we don’t tell anybody about it, nobody’ll know if it’s a dud, and if it’s not a dud, it’ll be real impressive”?
Yes yes yes, shock and awe, I get that too, but again: wouldn’t it be rather more shocking and awesome if the Moab blew up in somebody /else’s/ country? Nevermind that 1. I don’t think the Iraqi people need to be shocked or awed, because I suspect overall they’re really not happy about the prospect of getting the hell bombed out of them, and 2. I don’t think anything’s going to shock or awe Saddam “Meglomaniac” Hussein into quitting his day job.
My point is that if they’re planning on using this thing, why not have one available to /drop/ on Saddam’s pointy little head when they know where he’s gone? Even if it’s the first and only one they’ve got, isn’t instituting a regime change what Bush is on about? Get rid of the bad nasty man in power (an excellent idea; America should consider it) and make the world safe for capitalism and wealthy people, I mean, democracy and the common man?
This whole thing pisses me off. Did you know that instituting a war of aggression is the #1 crime in the world War Courts? Raise your hand if you think Shrub is going to face a world court for his actions today.
Know what else pisses me off, while I’m on the topic? There’s a Patriot’s Rally in town here on Saturday. That doesn’t piss me off. What pisses me off is the hijacking of the word patriot. There is absolutely no correlation between patriotism and supporting the actions of the administration. I’m not a particularly patriotic person, although I’d rather live in the USA than any other country in the world, and I believe that overall, we’re the good guys, current events nonewithstanding. I support my country, although at the moment I’d like to see it get bitchslapped. I even support our troops, and I have no wish whatsoever to see /them/ bitchslapped. I’d far rather not a single American got hurt. I’d rather not a single Iraqi got hurt, too, but that seems even more unlikely than the former.
But the people crying ‘Patriots!’ aren’t seeing a difference between supporting our troops and supporting our government’s actions. Anything less than wholesale, unquestioning support of the President’s idiocy is apparently treasonous.
Patriotism is by no means swallowing whole the propaganda fed to us by the government. That very concept would be inconceivable to the men who founded this country. They would argue that it is in fact our patriotic duty to disagree, vocally and endlessly, with our government’s actions if we don’t support them. Even, in the most extreme cases, to take up arms and overthrow that government. This is an action to take when there is no other recourse, and at this point, we still have one–there is an election in eighteen months, and I’m not /quite/ sure Kaiser Shrub will find an excuse to extend martial law over the land and prevent the election. Those actions–voting, discourse, supporting troops even without supporting the government which orders them–define a patriot. Tossing loaded words around out of fear and anger do not.
“You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I read somewhere on the net (a citation second in weakness only to “Ari Fleisher said…”) that the MOAB isn’t actually all that useful, especially not for bunker-busting. Plus, sucks to have only one, try to use it for real, and find out that it doesn’t work…
Not that this has any bearing on the overall practicality or ethicality of the war, mind you, but my impression is that the US military is really quite competent and not evil, but because we regard civilian control as a fundamental democratic principle, they often get ordered to do stupid and evil things.
I don’t actually think the US military is blunderingly incompetent, really. And if the MOAB isn’t any good for dropping on bunkers, well, okay. This is a reasonable explanation for not dropping it on Saddam’s bunker.
I still think dropping a dud that nobody knew about wouldn’t be particularly embarrassing, and dropping a MOAB that worked would be real impressive. More impressive, as I said, than bombing Florida.
I don’t know anything about the MOAB and whether or not there was only one, but let me say something about dropping it on Baghdad.
Watch ABC. They have an arabic-speaking reporter, the only one I know of who was willing to stay in Baghdad (still there right now, I believe, and he staying partly because he’s the only one who doesn’t need a translator to ask the people around him what they think – I think the Iraqi civvies appreciate that alot, off-topic)… he says that there are still people around, and while there are very few stores open, you can see civvies walking the streets in daylight (they already know the cohilition bombs at night only, so they stay in their homes at night, since civvie homes are off-limits)….
Civvies are off-limits. It would be a war crime to knowingly bomb an area with non-military people in range of it (no matter how stupid they are for staying in a war zone – not too smart, but I gotta admire their defiance and faith that laser guided bombs won’t go haywire).
My comp is acting up, so I’m not going to provoke it by opening another window to look up MOAB’s destruction range, but if the targets they are blowing up is in the city, then they CAN’T use untested bombs there – wanna know why?
Because the tested bombs have known ranges that won’t hit the civvies.
An untested bomb might be the next Hiroshima – supposed to be super small, but just about decimated the civvie population.
So they skipped on MOABing Baghdad to prevent a War Crime.
Yes, they could have built another one earlier to have ready if the MOAB proved useful, but that’s a pretty penny to spend for a then-untested bomb. And right now? The US doesn’t have enough dough to foot the war and reconstruction bill any how – we’re in the hole already, now is NOT the time to grab a shovel!
Oh, and your right, the Shrub is an idiot. Or maybe he’s a puppet with his dad’s hand in his butt… which seems to be where his brain is, by the way.
Anywho, later!
Mm. Yes. I’m not actually personally in favor of dropping the Moab, or any other WMD, on a civilian population. I’m just bitter and snide and pushing Bush’s ‘shock and awe’ talk to what seems to me to be the logical (although why I’m trying to impose logic on the Bush regime at this late date, I don’t know) end.
Maybe I should’ve put an extra-snide warning on that posting. :)
And actually, I don’t think Bush Sr is running Shrub’s presidency. I don’t think Bush Sr has that much control over Shrub, and I think he wishes he did. There’ve been some articles around lately (on Salon, and a couple other places) where Sr is pretty strongly denouncing Jr’s actions.