Richard Disney

When reading this British news article, I detected some angst from the author that a weapon designed to obliterate terrorists actually works. Also down further in the article, there is a sense that the author would like to see a weapon that is more humane.

War is an ugly thing, it is even uglier when wars are lengthened by “humanitarians”  who make war “humane” enough to endure for longer periods. What is so controversial about a missile that kills the enemy? Wars are virtually impossible to fight let alone win when large segments of a population cringe at killing the enemy.

Article follows:

From Times Online by Michael Smith

British forces in Afghanistan have used one of the world’s most deadly and controversial missiles to fight the Taliban.

Apache attack helicopters have fired the thermobaric weapons against fighters in buildings and caves, to create a pressure wave which sucks the air out of victims, shreds their internal organs and crushes their bodies.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted to the use of the weapons, condemned by human rights groups as “brutal”, on several occasions, including against a cave complex.

The use of the Hellfire AGM-114N weapons has been deemed so successful they will now be fired from RAF Reaper unmanned drones controlled by “pilots” at Creech air force base in Nevada, an MoD spokesman added.

Thermobaric weapons, or vacuum bombs, were first combat-tested by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and their use by Russia against civilians in Chechnya in the 1990s was condemned worldwide.

The secret decision to buy the Hellfire AGM-114N missiles was made earlier this year following problems attacking Taliban fortified positions.

British Apache pilots complained that standard Hellfire antitank missiles were going straight through buildings and out of the other side. Even when they did explode, there were limited casualties among the Taliban inside, particularly when a building contained a number of rooms.

American Apache pilots overcame the problem in Iraq with the thermobaric Hellfire.The weapons are so controversial that MoD weapons and legal experts spent 18 months debating whether British troops could use them without breaking international law.

Eventually, they decided to get round the ethical problems by redefining the weapons.“We no longer accept the term thermobaric [for the AGM-114N] as there is no internationally agreed definition,” said an MoD spokesman. “We call it an enhanced blast weapon.”

The redefinition has allowed British forces to use the weapons legally, but is undermined by the publicity of their manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, which markets them as thermobaric.

When the American military bought them in 2005, President George W Bush said: “There are going to be some awfully surprised terrorists when the thermobaric Hellfire comes knocking.”Despite the Bush rhetoric, it is unlikely anyone targeted by the missile would know much about it. The laser-guided missile has a warhead packed with fluorinated aluminium powder surrounding a small charge.

When it hits the target, the charge disperses the aluminium powder throughout the target building. The cloud then ignites, causing a massive secondary blast that tears throughout any enclosed space.

The blast creates a vacuum which draws air and debris back in, creating pressure of up to 430lb per sq in. The more heavily the building is protected, the more concentrated the blast.

Click here to read entire article Army ‘vacuum’ missile hits Taliban - Times Online

Tags: vacuummissile, thermobaric missile, enhanced blast weapon, george bush, british army, ministry of defence, taliban

Some more encouraging news about conditions in Iraq from The Economist. I read The Economist off and on. For some reason I find myself buying The Economist in airports while I am traveling.

I didn’t remember The Economist justifying war with Iraq in 2003, yet in the article below, that earlier article is referenced. This article made me want to dig a little deeper.

I am posting this article to be one of the few places publishing good news from Iraq and also to show how far we have come since 2003.

Article follows:

Jun 12th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Its people are still suffering monstrously, but Iraq is doing far better than it was only a few months ago.

AFTER all the blood and blunders, people are right to be skeptical when good news is announced from Iraq. Yet it is now plain that over the past several months, while Americans have been distracted by their presidential primaries, many things in Iraq have at long last started to go right.This improvement goes beyond the fall in killing that followed General David Petraeus’s “surge”. Iraq’s government has gained in stature and confidence.

Thanks to soaring oil prices it is flush with money. It is standing up to Iraq’s assorted militias and asserting its independence from both America and Iran. The overlapping wars—Sunni against American, Sunni against Shia and Shia against Shia—that harrowed Iraq after the invasion of 2003 have abated. The country no longer looks in imminent danger of flying apart or falling into everlasting anarchy. In September 2007 this newspaper supported the surge not because we had faith in Iraq but only in the desperate hope that the surge might stop what was already a bloodbath from becoming even worse (see article). The situation now is different: Iraq is still a mess, but something approaching a normal future for its people is beginning to look achievable.

The guns begin to fall silent
As General Petraeus himself admits, and our briefing this week argues, the change is fragile, and reversible (see article). But it is real. Only a few months ago, Iraq was in the grip not only of a fierce anti-American insurgency but also of a dense tangle of sectarian wars, which America seemed powerless to stop. Those who thought it was just making matters worse by staying on could point to the bloody facts on the ground as evidence. But now it is time to look again. Each of those overlapping conflicts has lately begun to peter out.

A few Sunnis, motivated by Islam or simple resentment of foreign military occupation, continue to attack American forces. But many Sunni tribes, repelled by the atrocities committed by their former and often foreign allies in al-Qaeda, have joined the so-called Sunni awakening, the Sahwa, and crossed over to America’s side. At the same time, Sunnis and Shias have stopped killing each other in the vast numbers that followed the blowing up of a Shia shrine in early 2006. General Petraeus’s surge is only one reason for this. Another reason, less flattering to the Americans, is that after last year’s frenzied ethnic cleansing fewer neighbourhoods are still mixed. But it is also the case that a lot of Iraqis, having waded briefly into the horror of indiscriminate sectarian slaughter, have for the present made a conscious decision to step back.

The conflict between Shias and Shias has died down too. In the past few weeks Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has belied a reputation for weakness by sending the army to take control of the port city of Basra and the Baghdad slum known as Sadr City, both strongholds until then of the powerful militia run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a vehemently anti-American Shia cleric. The fact that Mr Sadr considered it wise not to resist suggests not only that the army is now strong enough to out-face private militias but also that the state has acquired far greater political legitimacy, in Shia minds at least.

Needless to say, these conflicts could resume. The Sunnis fighting on America’s side today could direct their fire back towards the Americans and Shias tomorrow if not enough room is made for them in the new, Shia-dominated order. On the Shia side, it is not clear whether Mr Sadr has given up violence for good. And his is not the only political movement to have a private army. Sunnis, Shias and Kurds alike still see their respective militias as a hedge against an uncertain future.

To that extent, Iraq is still far from normality. But if the calm survives, politics will at least have a chance. Mr Maliki’s next job is therefore to go ahead with the provincial elections due before the end of the year. A good showing by the Sunnis, too few of whom voted in 2005, could bring them back into the political mainstream, enabling them to wield serious power in their own provinces at least. The elections can also provide a useful alternative path to power for the Sadrists, if they really have given up violence and decide to take part.

George Bush meanwhile has a further part to play, which consists mainly of not doing things that might tempt him.

Click here to read entire article.

Tags: iraq, war, military, george bush, improving, getting better, iran, general petraus, u.s. army

Because of the recent Obama Appeasement Kerfuffle, this video deserves another view. This Zucker video parodies Republican James Baker on his willingness to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (محمود احمدی‌نژاد). Substitute Barack Obama for James Baker in this video and you see what an Obama presidency would look like in reference to Middle East policy.

President W Bush gave a speech in Israel a few days back where Bush said,

“There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

In response to Bush’s comments, Presidential Candidate Barack Obama took offense at the comments even though Obama wasn’t mentioned by name. In fact Obama was so forceful in his denunciation of Bush’s words it seemed that Obama took ownership of the appeasement position and felt a great need to defend it. It is indicative when Obama and other Democrats are so touchy when a general reference to appeasement is made during a Presidential speech. As Shakespeare might have put it, “…[Obama] doth protest too much, methinks.”

Newt Gingrich coined the phrase, “Real change means REAL CHANGE!” In this video that is just over one minute long, Newt challenges President Bush not to wait until the next election for change but to announce changes to be accomplished in his upcoming State of the Union speech.

Hat Tip: Evan Coyne Maloney

My friend Evan Coyne Maloney personally interviewed Michael Moore a few years back and asked him if his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which slammed President Bush, should be considered a campaign ad and therefore subject to campaign finance rules. Of course Michael Moore said no, “that his film should be treated like an op-ed in the paper.”

“But now that there’s a new film about Hillary Clinton, all of a sudden, campaign finance laws do apply to political perspective films…”

Click here to read the rest at brain-terminal.com.