I’m in one of those moods today. I think I’m going to go home and just get completely tanked — falling-down, sloppy drunk. Then I’m gonna borrow my friends Hummer and drive down to the Farmer’s Market in Santa Lucia, honking my horn the whole way and screaming obscenities out the window. I think I’ll ignore some stop signs, and of course the speed limit is only for people who care. It sounds dangerous, I know, but I promise to do this in a way that minimizes civilian casualties…
Of the war in Iraq, Colin Powell tells us that “the United States and our coalition partners will do our utmost to do it quickly and do it in a way that minimizes the loss of civilian life and destruction of property.”
Can someone give this man a sense of shame? If you want to minimize casualties to civilians, you can start by not throwing explosives into the countries they live in.
Have you been keeping track of how many of our “precision” weapons have missed the country of Iraq? So far, I’ve read reports of these sophisticated devices hitting Turkey, the Persian Gulf, and Iran (not to mention the ones that took out a British bomber and a bus full of fleeing Syrians). If you can’t even hit the country you’re aiming at, you sure as hell can’t be confident you’re going to hit the barracks instead of the elementary school.
And of course, even when they hit exactly what they intended to hit, what they intended to hit sometimes turns out to be a civilian bomb shelter or the Chinese embassy.
Here’s another good piece of doubletalk from Powell in today’s news: “[A]fter we have defeated this regime… I think at that point, the Arab public will realize that we came in peace, we came as liberators, not conquerors.”
You heard it here first: the United States military, backed by a “shock and awe” bombing campaign, intending to defeat the Iraqi military, overthrow its government and install another in its place, “came in peace.”
