This War is a Sham!

AT the moment 70 % of USA army is not in the homeland...its somewhere else..

be it Japan, Philliphines, Indonesia, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq.......and the list goes on..

ali87

You are now resorting to desperate emotional arguments.

I don`t know whether Americans will follow the Geneva convention or not if they are outgunned. What I am saying is that it is safer for the lives of noncombatant Iraqi people if Iraqi soldiers did not pretend to surrender and then start shooting.

Unless you are more interested in blaming the US than in saving noncombatant Iraqi lives.

#38 by Manjit on March 31, 2003 9:17pm PT
I did not bring it in. Just laughed at the comparasion.

Just for record I dont think the americans will follow geneva conventions either especially in a situation like this. When you are powerful and capable of winning then it is easy to lecture others about the conventions.

They did not follow geneva conveintons in showing the prisoners in gutamela bay. they did not follow convention in using depleted uranium. They did not follow convention when they started this preemptive war to get rid of a person who followed their bidding for decades.

I have very little trust in the Americans in falling anything ethical. They are as unethical as the worst of the regimes in the world.

The true picture of americans will emerge when they are outgunned and face total desolation in defeat and no hope of ever coming up above their victor if they loose the war. I belive they will be worse than the Iraqis.

Since that will be quite some time coming till then the myth of the the humble, for freedom, rule following Americans will persist.

ali87

I don`t support this war. I believe that Iraqis who are fighting the Amercians are following their duty. However, Iraqi soldiers who pretend to surrender and then open fire on Americans are endangering the lives of other Iraqis. That is why the Geneva convention forbids such behavior.

Your and studebaker`s bringing in Shivaji was deliberately provocative and inappropriate. I can bring in the practices of Muhammad but that too will not be relevant to what we are discussing here.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

This is the biggest load of Islamic fundamentalist apologia:

``The military efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have, in turn, produced a whole new generation of `terrorists`. Children who have lost family members in bombs, will form a base of a disenfranchised people, who like any other sovereign population in this world, will become vehemently against a foreign occupation force. The hatred of the US will run so deep, that Osama Bin Laden will have a field day in recruting new members.``

Germany and Japan were bombed. So was Vietnam. Why are their kids not running around blowing up buildings? What about thousands of innocents killed by the Soviets in Hungary, Poland etc? Why are there no terrorists there? Is there something unique about the Arab/Muslim world that produces terrorists whereas other victims do not?

#32 by Manjit on March 30, 2003 8:43pm PT

If US invades India I know what I will be doing. Using every means possible to repell them. I dont know about you.

on Shivaji people only imprisioned Shivaji and gave him permisson perform puja etc and infact did not pull his limbs one by one as befits the principles of people who dont follow the Geneva Conventions. But as per all facts he was hale and hearty at his point of his escape. Also notice he escaped with his virginity of his back end intact another practice attributed to those who dont follow the geneva convention.

What are you trying to imply Manjite?

That you think other people are as weak in the head as you are?

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Ali87 and studebaker

Comparing these people to Shivaji is silly. In those days Shivaji was fighting against Muslims who had not heard of the Geneva convention and were more likely to rape a woman than observe any rules of war.

Nonetheless, I oppose this war.

Fahad,

I really liked your concluding remarks.

Any hippie from Berkeley is a welcome sight in my book.

Ras

#29 by Studebaker on March 30, 2003 10:38am PT
LOL

ali87: I agree that the term terrorist is sometimes losely applied, and I agree with you that to call Mandela a terrorist is clearly absurd. I dont think the WTC attack and Hiroshima are comparable in any reasonable manner - the former was an unprovoked attack by a bunch of murderers (OBL talk about the sufferings of muslims is belied by the fact that millions of muslim Afghans fled Afghanistan when OBL was the house guest of the taliban, and there are no indications of anything he and his gang did to alleviate the suffering of Afghans), while the latter was an action undertaken during wartime and resulted in the saving of tens of thousands of lives. The latter was undertaken to bring an end to war, while the WTC attack was geared to trigger a retaliation from the US and as such was undertaken to start a war (since OBL must have known that the US could not afford to ignore such a devastating attack on its people).

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Romair just want your inputs (if you can let your expected prejudices be supressed for a while vis a vi Indian Army) on this aritcle in Indian Express

Since Shekar Gupta isnt a Military person I want to hear what you think of his position on this war.

--------

It isn’t about saving Private Ryan



Shekhar Gupta




One of the most memorable, and most repeated, scenes of the ongoing war so far was the one showing the “fierce” resistance put up by a small band of Iraqis hiding in a small building on the outskirts of Umm Qasr.

A large body (at least a company, if not more) of British Royal Marines, with tanks, lay pinned down, around it. Journalists embedded with the unit spoke, for hours, on the deadly resistance being put up by the Iraqis. Marines crawled and manoeuvred themselves from one safe vantage point to another, but never got any closer to the house of the defenders even after mortar shells had gone through it. They waited, instead, for the Harriers to arrive and put a 500-pound bomb into it.



It was stirring television, particularly so early in the war which was never expected to be fought. But it wasn’t stirring warfighting. If an army with a superiority of 20 to 1, with total air dominance, the finest in smart weapons, bristling with technology and body armour which would make it impossible for the enemy to kill you unless he actually hit you on your nose or some place like that, has to wait a whole day to clear out one little machine-gun nest, it would be a long time before it can neutralise any significant challenge from the defenders. And this, mind you, were the British who have shown greater spunk in the firefights so far than the Americans.

Now, imagine, how would a relatively low-tech, low-paid and quite literally pedestrian Indian army have handled a situation like that? Most likely, at the very first sound of firing from the house some young captain would have been asked to take a platoon of men and assault it. They would have bought a bunch of casualties, but the obstruction would have been cleared within the hour. But the army that packs more firepower and technology than any in history so far took a whole day doing this, and inflicted on itself a massive propaganda blow as the world (and you’d bet the Iraqis) saw for hours how easy it was for a couple of riflemen to hold up an allied advance. On the other hand, they were able to clear it without taking any casualties.

One look at an allied soldier and you’d suspect the war is not so much about fighting and winning as about marching into Baghdad without paying any price for it. From body armour to oversized helmets, the vast array of armoured vehicles and crunching air power using only stand-off weapons, this army would be the envy of the average Indian (or Pakistani, for that matter) soldier.

Yet, given the same kind of overwhelming superiority over the defenders, a subcontinental army would have covered a lot more distance than this one has done. And one reason they would have been able to do it is that they are not shy of taking casualties. You can say they are callous, cynical, that human life does not matter so much in the third world — all of which may be partly true. But it is also true that you cannot go to war and expect to win without losing any lives.

From Grenada to Haiti to Kosovo to Kabul, the Americans have come to mistakenly believe that technology, smart weapons, air power have taken the most crucial element in warfighting out of the equation — physical contact with the adversary.

Their post-Vietnam campaigns have strengthened the misconception that once you have overwhelming superiority in technology and firepower and total control of the skies, warfare is reduced to nothing more than an old-fashioned, punitive colonial expedition: A tribe misbehaves, so you send a column to subdue it, kill its men, burn its homes, and they will behave better in the future.

It has worked so far, it even worked in Iraq in the last war. Chances are, it may even work to some extent in this war. But this war is not about teaching somebody a lesson or punishing a regime you don’t like. It’s about taking a country.

And if you want to take a country of 26 million people with two great rivers and 192 billion barrels of confirmed oil reserves merely with smart, stand-off weapons, without physical contact with the defender, without the blood and gore of a real battlefield, you’ve forgotten what the business of war is all about.

The fact is, the Americans were accurate in their assessment that Saddam’s army would not come out and engage them in classical do-or-die defensive battles which could be quickly settled by air power.

But they did not imagine little irritants like the Umm Qasr riflemen. Also, the rest of us did not imagine how tough the allied soldiers would find to deal with what is at best harassing fire here and there.

I bet there are so many officers and men in our own army who laugh when they see large bodies of these troops with more body armour on them than on an Iraqi tank, pinned down by some sweeping, inaccurate small arms fire. The subcontinental armies were trained by the British to bash on regardless in such situations.

The quarter-million strong allied force over a battlefront stretching hundred of kilometres has lost just 28 men in eight days of fighting and everybody thinks they are facing such stubborn resistance.

The much-maligned Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka lost 271 men in half that time with just five depleted brigades (around 2,000 combatants each) but they took Jaffna meanwhile.

The LTTE had no tanks or air power, but nor are Saddam’s defenders using any of that now. And in guerrilla warfare, the LTTE had no peers. They had snipers in temples, emerging from manholes or strapped to coconut palms letting off volleys of murderous fire.

Indian troops moved with no air cover. Three of the four columns were denied even the protection of a small detachment of helicopter gunships for fear of civilian casualties.

Only one brigade commander, Jogi Dhillon, insisted on a softening helicopter strike on the hamlet of Chavakacheri, where the Tigers had built formidable defences on the way to Jaffna. The Mi-25s killed nearly two dozen people, and human rights organisations (mainly Indian) screamed blue murder but his brigade made it to Jaffna with a fraction of the casualties the other three suffered.

One more significant piece of statistics: 10 per cent of all Indian casualties in taking Jaffna peninsula, with a population greater than Basra, Nassiriya and Umm Qasr put together, were officers, including the deputy commandant of one of the brigades.

The allied forces, in contrast, have yet to lose a single officer in the fighting — the only ones to die so far were caught up in friendly fire (the Tornado pilots’ captain in the Kuwait camp bombed by a fellow American).

If the Americans really want to know what is going on, they should be speaking to some of the veterans of the Indian army. It took the Golden Temple complex in 72 hours in Operation Bluestar but took nearly a thousand casualties, with 141 killed.

A fighting force one-tenth the size of the allied armies now, suffered 522 dead and 3,000 wounded taking no more than a score of peaks from the Pakistanis in Kargil. But they took the peaks, even if it meant marching uphill, fully exposed, under withering fire. The world’s strongest armies, on the evidence of this Iraq campaign, would have waited until the B-52s had reduced the mountains to sea-level.

In contrast, the Americans want to take a whole country with a sizeable army and are panicking with 28 battlefield deaths in eight full days. The networks are talking of fierce fighting all over the place: around Basra and Nassiriya, Najaf and Karbala, on the approaches to Baghdad. But if the fighting is all that fierce, where are the casualties?

That is the real story of this war the networks are not telling you. Or maybe they don’t know enough, having got used to covering the one-sided expeditionary campaigns like Kabul and Kosovo. Each time some Iraqis as much as fire from a distance, they call it fierce resistance.

Then their armies are not conditioned to do what old-fashioned armies do in such cases: send out a patrol led by a young officer to check out the source of trouble and neutralise it.

Soon enough the allied generals will face this moment of truth. Their air power will run out of targets and the B-52s will not be able to clear out every little machine-gun nest in an Umm Qasr or Nasiriya.

At some point, somebody will have to call young officers, give them their platoons, get them to take off their body armour and take out the threat the old-fashioned way. This will mean casualties on a scale several times greater than seen so far. That’s why the frowns on the faces of Bush and Blair.

#22 by tahmed32 on March 29, 2003 9:08am PT

As I recall OBL had given plenty of warnings to both US as well as Saudi govt.

I was just commenting at your definitons.

Also I remember ANC was labelled a terrorist orginazation and Nelson Mandela a Terrorist Leader.

The world court held US(only held guilty so far)guilty of Terrrorist (some time back in the eighties) action against the citizens of Nicragua.

Some people endlessly belive that the US is a repositry of all truth in the world and its judgements and prouncements as the only right opinion in the world.

The US and the UK did not fit it right to Bomb Northen Ireland to catch terrorists. For more than a decade US hosted the Khalistani organisations even after they were accused in the Kanishka Bombing case(after 9/11 after the punjab terrorist voilence is totally wiped out and the khalistani movment discredited and even some of its accused leaders being allowed to come back to India and not being arrested) the US declared the Two khalistani organisations as terrorist nearly a decade after the khalistani movement. The kanishka bombing case which was languishing for nearly a decade in canada suddenly got a philip and great progress was made in it in just a span of 2-3 months.

Today Norway and other europeans countries are in driect touch with LTTE and make apprecative noises about its leaders and are trying to bring about a solution to the Sri Lanka population. So the world views one terrorist organization as fit to negotiate and others fit to bomb. What are the critiriea that bring about the distinction?

Similarly US had no Qualms about bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki`s which were not military towns to bring about a quick end to the war.

Strangely OBL gave the similar reasons for bombing the Towers.. Ie to scare the americans into giving into his demands.

if some one kills civillians inguise of shutting down say metal factories or drops huge bombs on residential complexes to kill one person knowing fully well that the other people in the complex were neither sheltering the person nor probably aware of his acctivites. How come this is not a terrorist acctivity. Nobody is arrested if a bomb comes from a f16 but if it comes in form of a car bomb or human bomb then it becomes a terrorist act.


Just thinking what we define and how.

Jay: The USSR equivakent of the stingers is the SA7 (A or B or C or D) models. The experience of the Afghanistan war was that you need to train troops properly to use Anti Aircraft weapons in ambushes, not in direct fixed troop positions. Pakistani troops were also provided stingers and the UK Javelins. But there success rate was nowhere as high as the Mujhaideen against the Russian Hinds in hit and run attacks.