Shock and Awe now happening / please add other reports / links about this in comments

by . Fri Mar 21, 2003 19:32

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,918027,00.html

by kev Fri Mar 21, 2003 19:34

after only an hour baghdad is in flames! carefully selected targets me fuckin hole!

also saw that when us forces captured that port city, they raised the red white n blue - but were then ordered to take it down -

"don't want to give the game away this early lads!"

by . Fri Mar 21, 2003 19:36

I feel sick

by kev Fri Mar 21, 2003 19:36

asked whether he thought the irish anti-war protesters were angry with his position on shannon/iraq etc - said basically "no, notatall, they are just angry that the war is on and the diplomatic road has not worked"

gawd

by IMC Fri Mar 21, 2003 20:49

Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?
by Mac - None Fri, Mar 21 2003, 5:28pm

"Have your heard of Harlan Ullman? Everyone in the White House and the Pentagon has. They may very well follow his plan for war in Iraq. He wants to do to Baghdad what we did to Hiroshima." - an exposition of the thinking behind this evening's 'shock and awe' bombings.

Have your heard of Harlan Ullman? Everyone in the White House and the Pentagon has. They may very well follow his plan for war in Iraq. He wants to do to Baghdad what we did to Hiroshima.

Ullman is what they call a “defense intellectual.” He was the Navy's “head of extended planning” and taught at the National War College. One of his students was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who says he “raised my vision several levels.”

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.”

When he first invented “rapid dominance,” Ullman talked about an “eight-level hierarchy of shock and awe,” with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the top. Now, it seems, that’s where he wants to start.

Is the Hiroshima model just a metaphor? Ullman recently wrote that one way to “shock and awe” Saddam is to remind him that the U.S. has “certain weapons” that can destroy deeply buried facilities. That’s a not-even-thinly-veiled reference to the newest kind of nuclear weapons, the B-61 “bunker-busters.” L.A. Times columnist William Arkin has confirmed that the U.S. is preparing to use “bunker-busters” against Iraq. That would “break down the firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else,” Arkin warns, and “forever pit the Arab and Islamic world against us.”

Suppose we drop the nuke in the wrong place? Even Harlan Ullman admits it could easily happen: “Of course, there will always be intelligence gaps, and no solution is perfect.” But that’s just the point. “The threat would be a Damoclean sword that might or might not descend.” In other words, the fear of nukes falling who-knows-where would scare them into surrendering without a fight. Let other Islamic nations get as angry as they like. We’ll just shock and awe them too.

And why not North Korea, while we’re at it? Ullman wants a nuclear threat there, if North Korean leaders don’t heel to U.S. commands: “To remind the North of its vulnerability, one or more Trident ballistic submarines could be permanently assigned to target North Korea.” Tridents carry 240 nuclear warheads each. One Trident might not be enough, it seems. When you use shock and awe, you use it big-time.

So here we are, preparing to destroy a huge modern city, kill tens of thousands, and threaten nuclear attack -- all against people who have not fired a single bullet at us. Yes, it’s about oil. But it’s also about shock and awe, putting on a terrifying show for the whole world to see.

If all this leaves you in shock and awe, you have had your vision raised several levels too. You see what Ullman, Powell, and all the Bushies see: the U.S. frightening the whole world so badly that no one will dare fire a single bullet at us. Let them be as angry as they like, just so they know who is the meanest, toughest son of a bitch on the global block.

That is now becoming the essence of U.S. foreign policy. And they seriously believe it will put an end to war. I suppose the Romans believed it too.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
chernus@spot.colorado.edu

related link: www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm

by IMC Fri Mar 21, 2003 20:50

Meet the people of Baghdad
by Brent Herbert Fri, Mar 21 2003, 6:43pm

The peace activists in Baghdad have been sending back snap shots of the people of Baghdad. Now a rare chance to actually see those the American taxpayer will be party to slaughtering. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before." Unnamed Pentagon Official. "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept.

According to the international court at Nuremberg aggressive pre-emptive wars are a war crime. "...planning and launching an aggressive war is illegal, whatever may be the factors that caused the defendants to plan and to launch. Contributing causes may be pleaded by the defendants before the bar of history, but not before the tribunal ... If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." You can understand why the Bush administration has spurned the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and International Law, and for good reason, for they are now war criminals (Shock and Awe has begun, but even the so called 'pre-emptive' war against Iraq is illegal under international law, and according to the constitution of the United States, all international treaties are also the law of the land, so they are also guilty of criminal conduct under American law.

The campaign to impeach George W. Bush...My campaign is separate from that currently underway, and since I focus on 9-11 in the end the major charge becomes obstruction of justice, the same thing that brought down the Nixon administration, in whose service many of the elderly gentlemen in this administration worked, so they would remember that sorry episode quite well...

http://www.awitness.org/journal/impeach_george_bush.html

The peace activists in Baghdad have been sending back snap shots of the people of Baghdad. Now a rare chance to actually see those the American taxpayer will be party to slaughtering. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before." Unnamed Pentagon Official. "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept.

Who is going to crush the Kurds after Saddam is gone?
Includes some media articles confirming the Shock and Awe strategy to be used on Baghdad
http://www.awitness.org/journal/opress_kurds_iraq.html

Shock and Awe, a previous story when the story first leaked from the pentagon a couple of months ago
http://www.awitness.org/journal/destroying_bagdad.html

The photos have been posted online at Baghdad Snapshot Action where you can download PDFs that can printed as posters...I am currently postering my website, and yes, yours too...

Baghdad Snap Shot Direct Action
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/index2.html

Two arrested for postering New York City
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/index.html

(NEW YORK CITY) Artist Emilie Clark and writer Lytle Shaw were arrested for posting pictures of people from Baghdad in Soho late Thursday night. Both have been released. A court date has been set to prosecute the two for showing New York City the people who will die in a possible war against Iraq.

CBC reports that B-52s are on the way to 'Shock and Awe Saddam'

According to the CBC, Shock and Awe is on for today, given that B-52s have taken off to do that Shock and Awe thing to Baghdad...According to the announcer, the B-52s have left to (their quote) 'Shock and Awe Saddam'.

www.awitness.org/journal/index.html

It had to happen sooner or later...A reporter states 'wave of B-52s took off a little over 5 hours ago', so Shock and Awe would happen within an hour of this posting...The reporter says that the leak he heard from command is that they will be delivering 'a big blast'

Bush was also just on looking 'heart broken' over those dead U.S. soldiers...Actually he seemed to be about as upset about dead American kids, as he is likely to be about dead Iraqi civilians, or about as upset as he was on the morning of 9-11. The man doesn't feel much, and seems to be a clinically defined sadist whose only pleasure is in being a bastard, just based on my own admittedly unscientific analysis. For example, I know from experience over the last year that there is no point in bringing up the mass starvation taking place secretly, silently, in Africa (the largest one ever, forty million at risk, dwarfing that paltry one million body count famine that was the object of a rock opera).

In an unrelated story, did you know that George Bush is either a Socialist or an unconsciable, probably sociopathic, liar. For example we know that he cuts taxes for the super rich, and goes out to grab oil fields for them, and who knows what next, while the extreme right wing also slashes health care and food stamps and welfare for the poorest of people, and lets tens of millions of starve to death, even though saving them would cost less than one per cent of the cost of killing people in Baghdad (life is much cheaper than death, but death brings a profit while life would be just being nice to be nice and so death it is...as I say the famine victims might get that one percent provided that they agree to piss oil and shit silver and gold so that Bush and his rich friends can get back every dime ten or twenty times over, this being the type of people they are). But to get to the point, after slashing assistance to poor Americans Bush is now promising medicaire help and food stamps to Iraq, and is also promising to socialize the oil industry 'for the benefit of the Iraqi people' whom he refers to as the owners of this oil. Remarkable. You mean unlike Americans the Iraqi people will own the oil and benefit from it, rather than large multinationals. And to think that the Americans plotted a coup against Iran and installed that sociopathic prick known as the Shah of Iran just because the Iranian people socialized the oil industry. How times change. Or then again George Bush is probably just being a lying prick again, as he has been for many months, and its unlikely that his sinful wickedness has been miraculously healed so suddenly, so perhaps he has not become a socialist after all. Imagine how mad his rich friends would be if, after spending a hundred million getting him elected, he changed into a socialist, not in America, mind you, where he would never think to promise that the oil in America 'belongs to the American people' and is for 'the benefit of the American people' and he would certainly never promise health care and food stamps to all Americans because someone might actually take him up on the offer. But becoming a socialist in Iraq, with that trillion dollars worth of light sweet crude would be just as bad, but they need not worry, because based on what I am seeing developing in America, when you purchase George W. Bush he stays bought...

Baghdad Body Count
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

by kev Fri Mar 21, 2003 20:51

can be found here

by Precision Man Fri Mar 21, 2003 21:21

Why are we accepting the US and UK phraseology?
Here is a more accurate translation:

"shock and awe" = Blitzkrieg

by kev Fri Mar 21, 2003 21:58

last night on cnn (which has taken over rte after midnight it seems) referred to shock and awe said "we were expecting a blitzkrieg". i couldn't believe it - mind you it does only mean lightning war. but still they probably got an earful for that.

and more on the rte coverage today - that goon from the irish army, the alleged 'military expert', while the bombs were raining down, and baghdad was basically a ball of flame. he goes "well, it looks like a serious attack on baghdad" - bit of an understatment there buddy. is he being paid to be that idiotic/soulless/stupid?

by david Sat Mar 22, 2003 00:16

Shock and awe my arse, Shame and Disgrace is more like it and those thugs in our so called dail now have blood on their hands. Support the March in Cork Tomorrow @ 1 0'clock at Daunt Square.

by Todd Sat Mar 22, 2003 01:22 clemson6 at hotmail dot com

Have you idiots not seen the video from southern Iraq??? The people who live in Iraq are hapy as hell that they are being liberated. I wonder whay you asshats would be saying if some Islamic fundamentalists would have flown planes into Trinty College or the Guiness brewery? Would you still be spineless, yellow rat bastards? It's idiots like you people are the reason(s) that my ancestors got the hell out of Ireland!

by hunter Sat Mar 22, 2003 02:15

well if some islamic fundamentalists had flown planes into anywhere in ireland - i would be saying the same thing. and that wouldn't be "attack a country that has nothing to do with the attack"

when the loyalist terrorists bombed dublin and monaghan i certainly didnt call for an invasion of the north, and bombing of protestant areas.

sort out terrorism at the root my friend.

honestly, why do you think the US is hated all over the world? because of their "freedom loving democracy?" if thats the case as bushy boy would have us believe then why aren't say, france, germany, sweden or even spain universally reviled? maybe its just a big anti-american conspiracy?

if you hold irish people in such contempt why bother even coming on here? why not go and mastrubate over a picture of a nice marine?

by hunter Sat Mar 22, 2003 02:16

"happy as hell" - interesting phrase you use there...

by Precision Man Sat Mar 22, 2003 03:00

"hapy as hell that they are being liberated"

Well now, young Toddy, you do really need to learn to spell properly, even if the word is totally inappropriate.
Now, with regard to choosing the most appropriate words, what you should do is realise that when your political masters use a word like "liberated" what they really mean is "liquidated".

by Seanin Sat Mar 22, 2003 09:59

And another 8000 Iraqis surrendered just lately. Ireland is full of these argumentative wankers who wouldn't know a fact from a non fact.