Sunday, June 11, 2006

dry as a nut

I really don't feel like writting too much anymore... i had a shitload of ideas, but I never follow up with the writting. It is quite disconcerning that
  1. besides work I bearly talk to anyone and certainly not someone that would push my noodle's buttons
  2. I am in such a disposition that I am terrified of thinking... doing so would cause both immesurable pain and frustrating questions with answers I would prefere not to hear (again) or worse, without any answers that I know of... and since I really dont have too many dialogue partners... so there! I am going to be dead for a while.
No inspiration.. no life-energy. I need a haircut.

Friday, June 02, 2006

"Drop weapons"

Is anyone still thinking Iraq is on the right track? It depends on what "right" means. If it means safe democratic country, clearly not, if it means US troops out and country in chaos... indeed in that case we are on the right track, and closer to finish line.

You see news about Iraqis shooting each other and blowing their stuff up, and taking American troops with them as much as they can in the process. But why hate the liberators? Is it their religion, their skin color, their illegitimate invasion or the consequent illegitimate occupation?
Or is it d) all of the above?

I am thinking "drop weapons" are really not helping the American popularity in Iraq. But what are "drop weapons"? Let's say a civilian is shot down willingly, by mistake or b/c it is a potential "terrorists" (this is preventive strike at the micro-level... better shoot down civilians that may buy weapons in the next years if not months.) Well... human rights associations go berserk: not good (of course the process involves several steps in which other organizations or people are involved.) However, if the dead Iraqis are found by the ambulance workers with an ak47 lying next to them... there you have it: they are combatants. On top of their tens of pounds of compulsory gear, Americans (and perhaps the British too) often carry a few AK 47’s... you know... just in case "combatants" show up. So drop weapons are the weapons dropped by (US) soldiers next to dead (unarmed… civilians or not) Iraqis in order to smoothen the bureaucratic mechanism (and we know how much the US hates bureaucracy, including the UN one) that would be set in motion by killings of civilians.
I found out about the practice from a friend of a friend of a friend. He's been fighting in Iraq for a while, and told several stories about this ingenious practice. Indeed it takes care of a problem the Pentagon had at the beginning of the war... with defining combatants... as they were saying "since they are not wearing uniforms the terrorists can just throw their weapon in a ditch seconds before our soldiers get them and demand civilian treatment. We need to redefine combatants and civilians." There you have it: drop weapons solve the problem of terro-villians... by virtue of being Iraqi they are all combatants, they just don’t know it.

This also explains why situations such as Ishaqi will be probably more common and will stop making the front page.