it's partisan screaming of the highest order... i still anxiously await the day when msfe posts a balanced view on something...
The New York Times - an irrelevant extreme leftist rag Editorial/Op-ED March 25, 2003 Budgetary Shock and Awe
Shock, awe and precision porkies Rod Liddle Wednesday March 26, 2003 The Guardian Our military people haven't been telling us the truth, have they? Every day they tell us stuff - either directly, through press conferences and statements, or through private briefings with our more credulous television journalists - and 12 hours later the reverse of what they've told us turns out to have happened. Here are a few examples. Day one of the war will begin with the unrestrained bombing of Baghdad, a massive "shock and awe" assault that will make the world quiver in its boots with respect. In fact, Baghdad suffered comparatively light bombing on night one. It was not, everybody agreed the next morning, quite what we had all expected. Coalition forces have taken the "strategically important" town of Umm Qasr, we were told on day two. No, actually, they hadn't, as they were decent enough to admit two days later. They still haven't taken it as I write this. Ditto those oilfields they kept on about and then, very suddenly, stopped going on about. The third night of the bombing of Baghdad would be remembered, after the war, as the most significant and punitive so far, with a magnificent flattening of the city. (This was an off-the-record briefing repeated ad nauseam by BBC News 24 throughout the previous evening). In fact, the third night saw by far the lightest bombing of the war so far. The coalition forces have no intention of taking Basra because it would involve street fighting and therefore a potential danger to civilians. So, to clarify, then: Basra is indeed, now, a target. Because, er, otherwise there would be a danger to civilians, a veritable humanitarian catastrophe. Saddam Hussein was killed or seriously injured in the initial two bombing raids on Baghdad. An ambulance was seen taking him to hospital. Well, I'm no doctor, but Saddo seems still to be in pretty good health to me. Quite chipper, in fact. Maybe he just had bad gout, or something. What's more, Tariq Aziz is dead. Or he has fled. One of the two. We're not absolutely certain, but we think so. Nope, good old Tariq's happy and well and still addressing the nation. Yesterday morning, mind, the allies did succeed in killing some Ba'ath party bigwig in Basra. So, at least they've managed to knock off the equivalent of the deputy mayor of Birmingham. And Saddam Hussein's entire government is disintegrating. It's falling apart! Is it? It has never looked more integrated, to me. Just about every government minister has, in the past five days, held press conferences for the foreign media. We've even had the Iraqi equivalent of Alan Milburn appear, which is a bonus none of us could have expected. And for which we're very grateful. Those are just a few of the porkies or examples of deluded wishful thinking. And the question that occurs is this: are they deliberately lying to us in order, one would assume, to mislead the enemy - or do they really not have a clue what's going on? My guess is that it's a mixture of the two. They're lying from time to time and they often don't have a clue what's going on. Which is a bit of a worry. Not because we shouldn't be lied to per se, but because no matter what happens on the ground, militarily, we're beginning to lose the propaganda war across the world, if it were not already lost to begin with. I'm quite prepared to believe that the war is being prosecuted with military excellence; the relatively low number of civilians - and coalition servicemen - killed would seem to provide some evidence of this. But the impression created through either deliberately misleading statements or wildly optimistic pronouncements is one of either deviousness or ineptitude or both. And by contrast, the Iraqis are holding short and apparently candid briefings enlivened, on occasion, by the picturesque shaking of a wall as another coalition bomb hits some part of Baghdad where nobody important is. Maybe it's time Alastair Campbell got more involved. Spare us from any more national days I'm still stuck at home recovering from national No Smoking Day. This year, it almost killed me, but I will continue to stick to my vow. Which is, simply, to double my usual intake of nicotine for the designated 24 hours. Usually this is pleasurable. But the trouble is, since leaving the BBC, with its horrid, smoke-free corridors, my intake has already increased to about 60 a day, anyway. So this year, I had to try to cram in 120 cigarettes, which meant setting the alarm for 0500 to give myself a head start and, during the late evening, occasionally smoking two or three cigarettes at once. I managed it, but my chest still hurts and when I woke up the other morning there was a shrivelled brown thing on the pillow next to me. I think it was part of a lung, or perhaps my oesophagus. I wondered for a moment about maybe cramming it back down my throat and then going back to sleep, but it looked too unappetising for that. So I just left it there, for the children to play with, or the cat. Still, at least I shall die in a state of grace, principles intact. I don't know what it is that makes me hate national days so much. I loathe Red Nose Day, every simpering, witless second of it, even though I'm well aware that it is doing good for somebody, somewhere. And that's the important thing, isn't it? While at Today, I tried every trick in the book to stop the programme becoming embroiled in those fatuous stunts such as having Michael Heseltine interview John Humphrys instead of the other way around, ho ho ho, or making guests wear those bloody stupid plastic noses. I liked the idea that Today might be a tiny oasis of resistance, cynicism and churlishness. But some mindless jape usually crept in under the wire. Adolescent petulance and a tinge of intellectual snobbery is behind my disaffection, probably. But there's also - if this is not stretching the case a little - a rather nasty Orwellian element to these compulsory, telecentred love-ins. So, if I find more stuff on the pillow in the next week or so and do, indeed, finally expire, you'll know that I died for you, fighting fascism. To absurdity and beyond An eagle-eyed Guardian reader, Rosemary Davies, saw Geoff Hoon being all sombre on the box the other day and noticed that, in the background, the film Toy Story 2 was playing on the television monitor. Two thoughts occur. Either Geoff was explaining the war to his kids using Buzz Lightyear and his arch enemy Zorg to represent Tony Blair and Saddam respectively. Or maybe Geoff, unaccountably, feels a profound empathy with that other Toy Story character, Mr Potato Head.
msfe, are you saying that you really expect the US/UK forces to show their cards? guess you never played poker
Hey, what is that ? "Our military people haven't been telling us the truth, have they?" OUR military people ? OUR ? Are you saying that you live in the US ? Or perhaps in the U.K. ? And here I thought all that time that you are living in Switzerland. Anyway I am pleased as punch if that is the case. It will make it so much easier for the CIA to pick you up. Now I won't even bother to remark that it is the Iraqi leadership which is losing the propaganda war rather than the US as I am well aware you don't bother to respond to anything anyone else says. But ................. , let me try this nevertheless : Considering the fact that you have so much more insight into everyhting than anyone else, here is a nice way for you to make some money. As you consider that things are going bad for the US and as I am feeling very generous I am prepared to enter into a bet and let you rip me, damn know-nothing-fool that I am, off i.e.let you sucker me into a bet that Saddam will not survive all this turmoil and remain at the helm of Iraq. Any amount you like. If, God forbid, I run out of money to take you on I am confident that you won't have any trouble getting others to take the rest of your bet. There is only one condition i.e. that either Babak or Baron be the stakeholder of the betting money. freealways
Take Down Saddam TV Rummy was grumpy. TV generals and Pentagon reporters were poking at his war plan, wondering if he had enough troops and armor on the ground to take Baghdad and protect the rear of his advancing infantry. "It's a good plan," the war czar insisted with a grimace, adding that battle is "a tough business." The cocky theorists of the administration, and their neo-con gurus, are now faced with reality and history: the treacherous challenge, and the cost in lives and money, of bringing order out of chaos in Iraq. With sandstorms blackening their TV screens, with P.O.W.'s and casualties tearing at their hearts, Americans are coming to grips with the triptych of bold transformation experiments that are now in play. There is the president's dream of remaking the Middle East to make America safer from terrorists. There is Dick Cheney's desire to transform America into a place that flexes its power in the face of any evil. There is Donald Rumsfeld's transformation of the American military, changing from the old heavy ground forces to smaller, more flexible units with high-tech weapons. When Tommy Franks and other generals fought Rummy last summer, telling him he could not invade Iraq without overwhelming force, the defense chief treated them like old Europe, acting as if they just didn't get it. He was going to send a smaller force on a lightning-quick race to Baghdad, relying on air strikes and psychological operations â leaflets to civilians and e-mail and calls to Iraqi generals â to encourage Iraqis to revolt against Saddam. (The Pentagon has downgraded Saddam, the way it did Osama when it just missed getting him. Now the war in Iraq is "not about one man," as General Franks put it.) The administration was afraid that with too many Iraqis dead, we would lose the support of the world. But some generals worry that by avoiding tactics that could kill Iraqi civilians and "baby-talking" the Iraqi military, we have emboldened the enemy and endangered American troops. As Ralph Peters, a retired military officer, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed article: "Some things do not change. The best way to shock and awe an enemy is still to kill him." Despite the vast sums we spend on our intelligence and diplomatic services, American officials often seem clueless about the culture of our adversaries. After Vietnam, Robert McNamara admitted that he and other war planners had never understood Vietnamese history and culture. Our intelligence services didn't see the Iranian revolution coming, or the Soviet Union's breakup. It's hard to know why the administration seems so surprised at Iraqi ruses. As Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military tactician who inspired the "shock and awe" campaign, noted, "All war is deception." Besides, the Iraqis used similar fake surrender tricks in the last gulf war. It's also hard to know why the Pentagon is surprised at Iraqi brutality, or at the failure of Iraqi ethnic groups, deserted by America after the last gulf war, to celebrate their "liberation" by the U.S., or by the hardened resistance of Saddam loyalists like the fedayeen, who have no escape hatch this time around. American war planners were privately experiencing some shock and awe at Iraqi obliviousness to shock and awe, which we can see on TV, as Iraqis crowd into restaurants and onto roofs to watch the bombing. Miscalculating, the Pentagon delayed trying to take down Iraqi TV until last night because it hoped to use the network after the war. But that target should have been one of the first so the Iraqis could not have peddled their propaganda, paraded our P.O.W.'s and shown brazen speeches by Saddam, or Stepford-Saddam, and the mockery of Iraqi officials over the predictions of a quick victory. The Pentagon considered last year an "inside out" strategy that would rely on dropping Special Forces into Baghdad, with U.S. forces then taking over the rest of the country. That was scrapped in favor of the "outside in" strategy that we're now witnessing. But Saddam has turned our strategy upside down with his own "inside out" strategy. Tragically for everybody, the Iraqi fiend is still inside, dug in and diabolically determined to kill as many people as he can on the way out.