Insanity Planned for Iraq

Insanity Watch

According to Seymore Hersch of the New Yorker, Bush has an ace up his sleeve that he hasn't been showing the public...

"A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."

This part of Bush's so-called "plan for winning" is absolutely insane. Basically, we're going to retreat to airplanes so that we can rain mechanized/remote death down on the Iraqi citizens!

This plan is going to kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens just because our bombers will be relying on whatever quality of intelligence can be provided (and not all of it will be good intelligence, I guarantee). And the first missile that goes off course is almost guaranteed to hit a hospital or a school or any other equally harmless civilian structure. The second missile that goes off course will probably hit an Iraqi newspaper or press organization (Al Jazeera, perhaps?). The third missile that goes off course will probably hit an Iraqi government building or police headquarters... You get my drift. It's a good thing that the US military doesn't give a rat's @ss about the Iraqi civilians (they're just collateral damage), because otherwise, our mission in Iraq might be viewed as being in jeopardy from a policy like this!

Furthermore, while the opportunity for the US to make a mistake is large, the opportunity for the Iraqi government to abuse this awesome power is even larger. Imagine being able to call in death to your political opponents! And if your opponent "accidentally" gets killed, you just say, "Whoops! Bad intelligence! So sorry!"

Now that I think about it, I can't think of any governments that police their citizens with bomber- or fighter-jet-power. Why? Because it's absolutely totally INSANE!!!

-John Locke