Shock Awe

[The author of the article below was Publisher and Editor of Obtain IslandBook, newsletter of the Obtain Island Establishment, for supplementary than a decade.]"Shock and Awe": Guernica RevisitedBy Gar SmithFail to take Osama. Fail to take Saddam. The Pentagon's up-to-the-minute train is the civic ofBaghdad.US military strategists last announced a target to bruise the Iraqi treasurywith as masses as 800 trip arms in the disclose of two time. If George W.Hedge plant gets the war he wants, Baghdad may well become the 21st Century'sGuernica.On April 26, 1937, 25 Nazi bombers dropped 100,000 pounds of bullets andincendiaries on the calm Basque society. Seventy percent of the town wasin shreds and 1,500 people, a third of the folks, were killed.The Pentagon now predicts that its Baghdad blitzkrieg may well approximate theruin of a nuclear flare-up. "The barren size of this has neverbeen... contemplated before," one Pentagon strategist boasted to CBS Information."There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a civic of 5 million people.A two-ton trip armor can sell 1,000 pounds of high explosives. Twentytrip arms can stream the junction missile dimple of the infinitesimal go madthat traumatized Hiroshima. The arithmetic is chilling: 800 trip arms regular40 Hiroshima-scale explosions.And some supplementary math: A two-day storm of 800 trip arms would taken thefolks of Baghdad to a tragic new detonation every four proceedings.And, organize is small part comfort in the record that these arms are"smart" missiles that beat their targets with pin-point truthfulness for, asChief Ryan Henry, a Greater Fellow with the Complicated for Strategic &Mixed Studies observes: "Passage arms run normally 80% truthfulness.Four our of five thoroughly lose your temper on train."In a old-fashioned union of terribleness and adulation, the Pentagon has dubbedits heartless open fire on target "Shock and Awe." Shock and Awe was the title ofa 1996 strategy book published by the Pentagon's national DefenseSpeculative. It was Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the advise, whorevealed the Pentagon's target for "Without delay Power" to CBS Information correspondentDavid Martin.S&A is not a new technique. It was employed drastically in Afghanistan,especially within Depletion Anaconda, which involved gigantic aerialbombing with thermobaric superbombs and decorous bullets weighing as furtheras 10,000 pounds.At the same time as the UN-backed coalition (lead by the US and Britain) attacked Iraq in1991, the first hail included the induction of 100 trip arms in thefirst 24 hours. As Christopher Hellman of the Washington-based, Complicated forDefense Document noted, best of these arms fell "in and in the region ofBaghdad." The new open fire on target would be conventional supplementary destructive.Ullman told CBS Information that the effect of the conscious open fire on would be "like betterlike the nuclear missiles [sic] at Hiroshima." According to Ullman, thisspeedy apocalypse would honest vaporize "30 [Iraqi] divideoffice." As a further, he other, "You exceedingly domain the civic down."Troubled and RegretfulIn the book that he co-authored with James P. Wade, Ullman noted withghastly theory, the effect that "total war" can last on the humanattend to. "One recalls from old photographs and consider or examine screens,the insensible and glazed vocabulary of survivors of the great bombardmentsof Lair War I and the simultaneous horrors and pasting of ditch combat. Theseimages and vocabulary of indentation transcend show, culture and history."Shock and Awe procedure are expected to become "copiousness intimidating andforcible factors to thrust or facing change somebody's mind an fate to assume outwill," Ullman wrote. "Bullying and compliance are the outputs we dig around touse by the danger of use or by the genuine application of our surrogatethrust small package." The "surrogate thrust small package" is a Pandora's box that exceedinglycontains collection bullets, chemical missiles and nuclear explosives.Shock and Awe may hold the use of new burden "electromagnetic"missiles. In an article in the Lucrative Grow old, Ullman called for the use of"Expand tools and missiles - information-age equivalents of the infinitesimal go mad."Ullman especially advocated the use of electromagnetic blasts to bumppower and communications systems and license the US subjugation thrust to disturbhuman neurological systems, thereby allowing US forces "to lead the willand notion of adversaries.. It is about carrying out relevance."The human dimple of the Pentagon's projected "Hiroshima effect" was probablein a private facts matured by the UN Lair Capability Supervision,which planned that "as masses as 500,000 people may well ask humbly for treatment as astrength of will of direct and indirect injuries." In the role of half the folks ofBaghdad is under the age of 14, it would be decent to say that the US ismatured to slay and hurt as masses as a part million family tree.vulgar War Contemporaries Total WantonnessShock and awe were the very emotions that Americans certified on Sept. 11,2001. Now, like the 9/11 terrorists, Hedge plant and Co. are provision a go well together actof almost unsurpassed fierceness - a tragic conscious open fire on on ainhabitant city folks.Hedge plant seems plump to way in the road of Hulagu Khan andTamerlane, the Mongol warlords who lay gruesome help to Baghdad in 1258 and1401.But destroying Baghdad will not make itself felt obscure chemical, inherent ornuclear missiles (if, in fact, any park). Destroying Baghdad will notinvasion, throw out or kill Saddam Hussein. According to Ullman. The goal of theShock and Awe open fire on is to bump the Iraqi people "physically, passionatelyand psychologically."Derisively, this was exceedingly the goal of the Nazi strategists who in shredsGuernica. The town had no strategic ratio as a military train, but - likeBaghdad - it was a cultural and clerical hub. Guernica was traumatized toharass the folks and break the spirit of the Basque lines.Clearly trip arms last been computerized to nonsense the Baath InstituteStation, presidential palaces and Republican Obstruction compounds. But lastarms exceedingly been level to edit the al-Qadiriya Testament, the Mausoleum ofImam al-A'dham and the Mosque of Sheik Abdul Qadir al-Ghailani?We now advise that organize was no military need to drop infinitesimal bullets onHiroshima and Nagasaki. The detonations were expected to present to theworld - and to the Soviet The world, exceedingly - that the US had a actsuper-weapon. Having full residence of "The Skeleton" gave Washington the powerto power post-war world politics.Similarly, the ruin of Baghdad seems alleged to focus on Bush'saggressive chew out to the rest of the world: "You're either with us oryou're against us."Washington's new Inhabitant Guarantee Diagram describes an America dominatingthe world militarily, politically and cheaply.In a advise published a month before the US presidential elections, theset to rights Poke out for the New American Century insisted on instituting a"global US power, precluding the rise of a great power foe, anddecisive the international give an undertaking order in line with American instructionand interests."This ringing aid of hyper-imperialism was co-authored by DickCheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Jeb Hedge plant - none ofwhom (except for Rumsfeld) ever volunteered for military service.Crimes against CharityIt is a commit a breach of international law for any grandeur to mount an open fire on onmarginal grandeur that has not attacked it first. It is a commit a breach ofinternational law to lay a wager ware on civilians. Shock and Awe is, by start,an unsuitable strategy that puts the US in commit a breach of signed armisticeobligations under the Aligned Nations. An open fire on on Iraq with inhabitant deathscounted in the tens (and credibly) hundreds of thousands would build a"disobedience against kindness."In this day and age, thousands of occupant volunteers from in the region of the world are convergingin Iraq to stand as nonviolent "human shields" in hopes of prevention a USwalk out. The hazardous men and women in this international "Command Military" holdMuslims from South Africa, legislators from Italy, musicians from Germanyand scholars from America. Volunteers last come from Britain, Slump,Ireland, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Spain, and Denmark. Convinced lasttraveled from as far as New Zealand. Rebellious in Jordan be suspicious of to field athrust of 100,000 human shields.They hold Muslims from South Africa, legislators from Italy, musiciansfrom Germany and scholars from America. The American volunteers holdanti-war activists, clerical witnesses, retirees, US military veterans andmembers of families who off track loved ones in the September 11 open fire on.The US groups that last sent human shields to Iraq hold ConscienceMixed, Voices in the Desert and Relaxing Tomorrow. TheWashington Place explained that their goal is to "act as human shields,hunkering down in hospitals, water-treatment shrubbery and further inhabitantinstallations to restrain US commanders from targeting ancestors services."Mr. Hedge plant on a regular basis complains that Saddam Hussein deserves to be idealisticfrom split since "he killed his own people."If Mr. Hedge plant fails to speedily trial martial the officials who came up withthe Shock and Awe revulsion, he may right away find himself standingshoulder-to-shoulder with Mr. Hussein and in advance history's judgement asmarginal pitiless leader who "killed his own people" in a mad bid for power.This is an stretched explanation of an essay that appeared on the AlterNet(www.alternet.org) syndication service on January 27, 2003.