Wednesday, February 4, 2015

The Extreme Effectiveness of ISIS Terrorist Tactics

I've heard a lot of people in the last few days say that we need to double down on killing those fuckers from ISIS because they behead people and set some dude on fire.  Yes, both of those things are horrible, but doesn't Saudi Arabia behead people they find guilty of crimes?  And what the fuck were those dirty fucking hippies doing protesting against Dow back in the 1960s?  Wasn't it for manufacturing the napalm that was dropped over rural villages and set innocent civilians on fire?  Does anybody remember seeing this picture?


And it seems like I recently saw a post about the photo from the first Gulf war that no U.S. newspaper would publish. It showed one of thousands of Iraqi army victims of a U.S. fuel-air bomb attack:

This is a description of that scene:
The retreating Iraqi soldiers had been trapped. They were frozen in a traffic jam, blocked off by the Americans, by Mutla Ridge, by a minefield. Some fled on foot; the rest were strafed by American planes that swooped overhead, passing again and again to destroy all the vehicles. Milk vans, fire trucks, limousines, and one bulldozer appeared in the wreckage alongside armored cars and trucks, and T-55 and T-72 tanks. Most vehicles held fully loaded, but rusting, Kalashnikov variants. According to descriptions from reporters like The New York Times’ R.W. Apple and the Observer’s Colin Smith, amid the plastic mines, grenades, ammunition, and gas masks, a quadruple-barreled anti-aircraft gun stood crewless and still pointing skyward. Personal items, like a photograph of a child’s birthday party and broken crayons, littered the ground beside weapons and body parts. The body count never seems to have been determined, although the BBC puts it in the “thousands.....”
“There were 1,400 [Iraqi soldiers] in that convoy, and every picture transmitted until that one came, two days after the event, was of debris, bits of equipment,” Tony McGrath, the Observer’s pictures editor, was quoted as saying in the same article. “No human involvement in it at all; it could have been a scrapyard. That was some dreadful censorship.”
Here is a description of how those bombs work:
A Human Rights Watch report of 1 February 2000 quotes a study made by the US Defense Intelligence Agency:
The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.... If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.
According to a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency study, "the effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness." Another Defense Intelligence Agency document speculates that because the "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue…it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."
And then we have to remember firebombing Dresden and Tokyo, and both times that an atomic or nuclear weapon were ever used in war.  The horrific scenes in which ISIS beheads or immolates prisoners involves two or three bad guys killing one or two good guys.  How does that compare to a few good guys immolating thousands of bad guys?  What about three or four good guys torturing a bad guy to death?  I guess I have a hard time telling the good guys from the bad guys without any reference to skin color, religion or the efficiency of the attack.  Please don't tell me that we need to continue spending gargantuan amounts of money and wasting lives trying to "rid the world of evil."  If we do that, we will probably be killed along with those fuckers from ISIS.  God have mercy on us all.

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