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Undertoad · 04-29-2002, 07:56 AM

I should think it would be much harder to stop the kid in that circumstance. Wouldn't you? Working on their own, no announcement of what they're going to do, no evidence of what they're going to do, no Iraqi, Syrian, or Saudi payments for their family, no tracking of shipments of explosives for the organization.

And since all evidence says there was no massacre, of course -- of COURSE they want military experts and not politicians to examine the evidence. (That's what this delay is all about.) Because they feel the UN has recently been used as a wedge against them. Because the first UN guy in stupidly painted the bleakest picture he could paint, participating in the propaganda war instead of ending it pointedly. "It smells bad," he said. "It's disgusting and sad." Not "80% of the damage is tactical, there is evidence of booby-trapping, and the body count is consistent with house-to-house fighting."

And as far as breaches of war go, I still say they really screwed up as far as rules of engagement and keeping journalists out; it would have made a far better story for one of them to get a few nails in the leg from a booby trap, because then the nature of this thing would have been far more understandable to the world.

Why have house to house fighting at all? If all you want to do is wage brutal war on a people, the Israelis have excellent means to do that. They have fighter jets and Apache helicopters and serious munitions. If the only goal is a smackdown, send in the jets. The goal here was clearly something different. I think the big picture is yet to emerge, even. I think the real goal was the intelligence information they got from those locations, which they say proves a lot of the secret Arab/Iraqi/Iranian backing of all the warfare. That changes the politics of the thing.

And as far as war crimes go, there are surely many of them, but the very first one is you don't use unmarked civilians to kill civilians, isn't it?

There's the cause of an occupied people, and then there's the cause of the entire region which prevents there from being any progress on the cause of those people. The real problem is that this is a proxy war and the Palestinians are pawns. The real war is the Arabic/Persian world against the entire west.

04-29-2002, 07:56 AM	#7
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	I should think it would be much harder to stop the kid in that circumstance. Wouldn't you? Working on their own, no announcement of what they're going to do, no evidence of what they're going to do, no Iraqi, Syrian, or Saudi payments for their family, no tracking of shipments of explosives for the organization. And since all evidence says there was no massacre, of course -- of COURSE they want military experts and not politicians to examine the evidence. (That's what this delay is all about.) Because they feel the UN has recently been used as a wedge against them. Because the first UN guy in stupidly painted the bleakest picture he could paint, participating in the propaganda war instead of ending it pointedly. "It smells bad," he said. "It's disgusting and sad." Not "80% of the damage is tactical, there is evidence of booby-trapping, and the body count is consistent with house-to-house fighting." And as far as breaches of war go, I still say they really screwed up as far as rules of engagement and keeping journalists out; it would have made a far better story for one of them to get a few nails in the leg from a booby trap, because then the nature of this thing would have been far more understandable to the world. Why have house to house fighting at all? If all you want to do is wage brutal war on a people, the Israelis have excellent means to do that. They have fighter jets and Apache helicopters and serious munitions. If the only goal is a smackdown, send in the jets. The goal here was clearly something different. I think the big picture is yet to emerge, even. I think the real goal was the intelligence information they got from those locations, which they say proves a lot of the secret Arab/Iraqi/Iranian backing of all the warfare. That changes the politics of the thing. And as far as war crimes go, there are surely many of them, but the very first one is you don't use unmarked civilians to kill civilians, isn't it? There's the cause of an occupied people, and then there's the cause of the entire region which prevents there from being any progress on the cause of those people. The real problem is that this is a proxy war and the Palestinians are pawns. The real war is the Arabic/Persian world against the entire west.