| March
2, 2003
Meet
Harlan Ullman. Most Americans have never heard of this man, but
he is, in fact, one of the more influential thinkers in the Bush
Administration. A Pentagon planner and Senior Associate at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies; formerly the Navy's "Lead
of extended planning;" former professor at the National War
College, whose students include Colin Powell. Ullman is one of the
top minds among Bush's foreign policy, as well as the coming Gulf
War II.
Listen
to Ullman describe "Shock and Awe": "We want them
to quit, not to fight, so that you have this simultaneous effect,
rather like the nuclear weapons of Hiroshima, not taking days or
weeks but minutes."
You
may want to read that one again. The White House plan calls for
hurling 800 cruise missiles on Baghdad during the first 48 hours
of the war, more than all the missiles fired in the Gulf War; about
one missile every four minutes on a city of five million. The rational
is that by causing massive, immediate casualties, the will of the
Iraqi army to fight will be lost, for fear of complete destruction.
Ullman
continues, "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. You're
sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30
of you and division headquarters have been wiped out. You also have
to take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power,
water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally,
psychologically exhausted."
A
modern-day version of Hiroshima. This is from the same Administration
that claims to "liberate" the Iraqi people from the dictator
they propped up. Just how many civilians will die in this campaign?
The UN suggests casualties as high as 500,000 if Iraq's fragile
infrastructure is destroyed; admittedly, this is a worst-case scenario,
but the fact of high civilian casualties cannot be ignored.
Harlan
Ullman also explained to the Financial Times why "information-age
equivalents of the atomic bomb" need to be developed. "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
for terrorism and its place."
You
may think that this policy was formed out of desperation, after
the September 11 attacks. But, like much of the Bush Administration's
policy, "Shock and Awe" was conceived years before 9/11.
Ullman first described his policy in 1996, published by the Pentagon's
National Defense University under the title "Shock and Awe:
Achieving Rapid Dominance."
Here's
a passage: "The intent here is to impose a regime of shock
and awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels
of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large,
meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly
military or strategy objectives."
Sure
makes you want to jump on board Bush's war. Nothing will make the
people of the Middle East greet our soldiers with flowers and kisses
than the sudden, violent deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.
It
gets better. Donald Rumsfeld revealed more of the Administration's
plans to the House Armed Services Committee on February 5. American
forces are planning to use so-called "non lethal" biochemical
weapons in Iraq, including anti-riot gases and crowd control agents,
similar to the "non lethal" gases used by the Russian
army to end a Chechen hostage crisis.
The
only problem (not counting all those dead Russian civilians) for
Rumsfeld is that such weapons are banned under the 1992 Chemical
Weapons Convention and the 1928 Geneva Protocol. Unfortunately,
the White House hasn't found an international treaty it couldn't
scrap or ignore..
Finally,
take a look at MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Burst. This bomb is
a modern version of the Daisy Cutters used in Vietnam; a 21,000
pound weapon that is comparable to a small nuclear bomb. Of course,
we are assured that this will only be used against military targets,
not civilians. Civilians don't get hurt when 21,000-pound bombs
are dropped on their cities.
But
these things never matter when one is determined, even desperate
to start a fight. Bomb the cities, rain fire on living beings, rape
the environment. |
