Reply #66: Oh give me a break [View All]

[Frederik]

You think the bombing of the Chinese embassy wasn't intentional? It is generally understood to have been bombed because the Chinese were aiding the Serbs with some kind of intelligence, satellite pictures or whatever. It's not a very well-kept secret.

Funny you should mention Serbia, I spent that war in Croatia with Serb expats and we got our news from Serb national television until it was BOMBED by Wesley Clark's fighter jets in the middle of a broadcast, killing a dozen journalists or more. Is that not a civilian target?

The purpose of Shock & Awe is to terrorize the population to the point where they believe resistance is futile. That means targets aren't just military, even though that's what they tell you on CNN.

What Powell and everyone in the Bush administration sees now is Ullman’s vision for high-tech war. He calls it “rapid dominance,” or “shock and awe.” The idea is to scare the enemy to death. To win, you don’t need to inflict physical pain and destruction. Just the fear of pain, and the massive confusion it creates, is enough.

Ullman wants the U.S. to (in his words) “deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary’s perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility.” “This ability to impose massive shock and awe, in essence to be able to 'turn the lights on and off' of an adversary as we choose, will so overload the perception, knowledge and understanding of that adversary that there will be no choice except to cease and desist or risk complete and total destruction."

Ullman is ready to use every kind of weapon to create shock and awe. He once said it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves that attack peoples’ neurological systems, “to control the will and perception of adversaries, by applying a regime of shock and awe. It is about effecting behavior."

When it comes to Iraq, Ullman likes the idea of cruise missiles -- lots of them, right away. CBS News reports that Ullman’s ideas are the basis for the Pentagon’s war plan. The U.S. will smash Baghdad with up to 800 cruise missiles in the first two days of the war. That’s about one every four minutes, day and night, for 48 hours.

The missiles will hit far more than just military targets. They will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad livable. "We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin. So “you take the city down. You get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."

Ullman is sure it will work as well in 2003 as it did in 1945: “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." "Super tools and weapons -- information-age equivalents of the atomic bomb -- have to be invented," he wrote in the Economic Times. "As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed towards a similar outcome.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm

Which targets were military in Falluja? That's a flattened city after November 2004.