Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 03:35:17 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> Cc: "Pedro F. Giffuni" <giffunip@yahoo.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: WTC Payoff [11 september] (was Re: oh my god the nasa shuttle blewup) Message-ID: <3E3FA575.92A5B49@mindspring.com> References: <20030204005427.Q63914-100000@pogo.caustic.org>
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"f.johan.beisser" wrote: > uh. no. > > the US hasn't chosen to "live with terrorism." > > not any more than the Germans did in the 70s, or for that matter, how they > did in the 40s, after taking over most of France. Respectfully, the Germans really don't have the option of carpet bombing the country their terrorists come from out of existance, if they decide that world opinion doesn't matter to them. If they had been willing to kill everyone (scortched earth), they could have avoided the problems in occupied France, as well (though it would have made another country harder to invade, what with any country the came into after that fighting for their lives, rather than just to maintain their government). > Terrorism is not a standup war. anyone who's lived with it at any point in > their lives knows this. You can't drop bombs on terrorists. You handle > them the same way you deal with any other extremist group: you arrest > them, or you kill them. > > many european countries learned this lesson years and years ago, and have > kept special anti-terrorist police forces since then. You *can* bomb terrorists, if you are willing to accept sufficient collateral damage. It all depends on the level you set for what's an acceptable amount of collateral damage. > > Some people in the world don't seem to understand the concept > > of "Total War". Israel does, and the incompletely occupied > > nations that fought the Axis in World War II do, and most > > certainly the former Soviet Republics do. Others do as well, > > but those are the ones which are certain. > > "Total War" works only when all other options have been exausted. > Inevitably, it leads to escalation. There is no escalation, if the other side no longer exists. > we don't use nukes in "this war" because they'd be inneffective. while we > can be the 800lb gorilla for a while, we have other sub-super-powers to > respect (china, for example), and we have to tip toe around them, like it > or not. we're not the only 800lb gorilla annymore. we're just one, and > there are a couple 600lb ones hanging out, watching what we'll do. We didn't use nuclear weapons in the gulf war because we wanted to test out our gadgets, under battlefield conditions. There was always the option of using them, if things "got out of hand", and Iraq had started using the same chemical weapons they used on their own minority populations on allied troops. This is well known from histories of the Gulf War. The option was called "silver bullet", and consisted of multiple aircraft, two of whose engines were running at all times. If we hadn't wanted to play with the new toys, it's possible that we could have pressured the Russians at the time, who needed U.S. support to maintain internal stability, and who were trying to change their "bad guy" image, after realizing that capitalism in theory isn't the same thing as capitalism in practice, into a joint nuclear strike. No one else would have blinked, because no one else had the long range missles to blink with. There would have been a lot of bad press over Baghdad, for a while, but "the Saddam problem" would have been resolved, once and for all. More likely, we would have used fuel-air explosives. They have the benefit of being in the same tonnages as small nuclear weapons, without the nasty stigma of radioactivity, or the political problems from people who are or think they are down wind. We dropped so much tonnage on Dresden in WWII trying to destroy German industrial capacity that the destruction was much worse than Hiroshima, but we keep appologizing for Hiroshima, and not for Dresden. > no. if we were protecting them from isreal these days, we'd have a > "peacekeeping" force in palestine. we don't. the only "protecting from > isreal's reaction" was our work in keeping the isreali's out of the first > Gulf War. this was more to keep support of the Saudis and the various > other Muslim countries. First of all, Palestine is not a recognized nation. Second of all, even if it were, it's a government in exile, more than something you can put borders around. Third, the land claimed by Palestinians was lost to Israel in a war. You might as well ask that the U.S. give the Eastern seaboard of North America back to England, or part of China back to Tibet, etc.. Any piece of land can be claimed to have been owned by someone's ancestors, usually multiple someone's. It's all about how long you are willing to hold a grudge. > we have more of a military presence in korea than we do near or in isreal, > anymore. hell, we don't even have isreal's permission to use their > airspace to attack/invade iraq. They want to be a non-combattant nation, as in the Gulf War. Otherwise, they are a nearby target. You will not see any states that are within Scud-range backing the U.S. in this one, if it comes to combat. One of the interesting facts is that the U.S. was not permitted by any of it's allies to launch a first strike from their air space, nor by the U.N. to launch from international waters. The first cruise missles that were launched in the last Gulf War came from a B52 Bomber launched in Loiusiana and refueled twice over the ocean on it's way to Iraq. The bomber is now an exhibit at the Pima County Air Museum, in Pima County, just outside of Tucson, AZ. > > If it comes down to "us or them", I have no doubt the U.S. *will* "solve > > the problem"; perhaps by engineering an enthnicity specific class 5 > > pneumo-virus, most likely targetting mitochondrial DNA, which is > > inherited matrilineally, using information obtained from the human > > genome project, to destroy its enemies utterly, down to the last living > > cell, before letting them destroy the U.S.. Total War is serious > > business. > > this is much to dangerous. even the germans wouldn't use gas warfare > against Alied forces during the invasion of normandy due to the extreme > risk for their own forces. claiming they weren't of the Total War mindset > is really fairly foolish. > > while i don't doubt that the US will happily go about killing many > enemies, i do seriously doubt they'll be that genocidal. we aren't, after > all, monsters. I guess you could aerosolize it, but it's not gas warfare. It's biological warfare. And if the U.S. were to get to the point it felt it needed to do this, it would be an act of self-defense, to preserve the nation. It's just one example of a possible "Manhattan Project" type weapon. There are others that are "less horrible". For example, instead of killing, it could merely sterilize. If you want to consider others, that don't involve killing or mass sterilization, there are other potential weapons which, in the same life-or-death-of-the-nation situation as WWII was considered to be, are probably the same 3-4 years out as the original atomic bomb. For example, molecular nanotechnology based weaponry could target people with specific thoughts. If we were in a time crunch, we could debilitate them without killing them. It's even possible to do something reversible. Or we could simply rewrite the neurons of all terrorists, and they will become red cross workers, instead. No one dies, and it's an arguable benefit to humanity (this is the one that terrifies me). > > All I can say is God help the terrorists, if they ever succeed in > > becoming a credible threat to the continued existance of the U.S., > > because the U.S. believes in Total War. > > no, god help all of us if the US ever thrashes around that blindly. God help all of us, if terrorists ever force the U.S. to "thrash around that blindly". -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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