The term ‘Bush apologist’ only got used two times prior to november 2002; here and here.
SamClem holds the honor of being the first to use it in the modern, post damn fool war, sense; here .
Rjung first used the phrase in June 2003, and he wasn’t specifically talking about you.
Maybe you’re thinking of some other evil Rjungian insult.
Unlike rjung you seem to have me cold there Squink. I was wrong it seems…rjung didn’t use that particular insult 3 years ago. :smack:
-XT
Yeah, sorry for the aside, but you got me wondering about when people started using it. It does seem like it’s been longer than that.
Yeah, I thought it had been (I obviously didn’t bother to look it up). I’ve just seen him fall back on that (or similar drive by’s) before and thought it had been longer ago (and that he used it more often). Makes me wonder though what other things about this board I ‘know’ that are incorrect.
-XT
Well, you are wrong, and so are many other people. Once again, from my earlier link
WP is not a chemical weapon. It is an incendiary weapon.
From Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III). Geneva, 10 October 1980., bolding and editing mine.
Even if you have signed up to the relevant protocol designed to control the random barbecuing of civilians (which the US apparently hasn’t :rolleyes: ), there are lots of exception - so even signatories presumably aren’t that concerned about the effects, just whether there is a reasonable excuse for said incineration.
So whether you are a Bush apologist or a loony lib’rul, it’s still a matter of whether or not it was OK to cause the accidental civilian casualties, rather than exactly how they were caused, IMHO. If they weren’t accidental casualties, then that’s murder, as has been pointed out already.
WP, Napalm and so get seized on by the media - presumably because death by fire is horrible enough to elicit a very visceral response. However, given the number of civilian casualties caused by small-arms fire, artillery and air strikes, I think it is a total red herring. Is it really more reprehensible to kill a few dozen people with incendiary shells than to kill thousands by ‘conventional’ means? Civilian casualties are up in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands - the rules of engagement at checkpoints would be far more worthy subject for all this debate, as they kill far more people, with arguably less justification.
Damn that Italian press for getting the taxonomy wrong concerning the burning alive of people. Remember, folks, the taxonomy is what counts, not the people.
You’ve convinced me! Yessir, since WP is not “specifically designed” to cause death or other harm, then any death or other harm that it causes cannot be from a chemical weapon! And since this chemical has another primary use, this makes it okay to launch on civilian populations. And as they lay suffering from their injuries, they can take comfort in the fact that by strict reading of the definition, their wounds were not caused by chemical weapons. Yessir, they might just get up and dance with that knowledge.
Who needs KGB disinformation operations when we have the Italian press and our homegrown “useful idiots”.
Toxic properties. TOXIC. Not caustic. Not kinetic. Not incindiary, toxic. Serin, mustard gas, chlorine, phosgene, VX, soman and tabun are chemical weapons, white phosphorus is not. Nor is C4 or thermite. The fact that you find the damage it does to the human body repugnant does not make it a chemical weapon.
You should know the answer to this. This board is devoted to fighting ignorance, not spreading it.
Mighty generous of you to stipulate what everyone here except for you already knows to be a fact. It shouldn’t have taken you 76 posts to grasp this.
OK gang, let’s try a new approach. From the US Army, , lower left of p 26:
Is not “munition” a weapon? Incendiary device or chemical weapon, it was used on insurgents. Its effects made it a “potent psychological weapon”. What properties of a chemical weapon did WP not have?
Toxic effect being the primary cause of death and injury? Just guessing. Do I win?
YES!
Let’s see what he’s won, Bob…
A crate of white phosphorus grenades
An all expense paid, 7 day, 6 night vacation in Fallujah
A copy of both the Merck Index and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary
and finally…
A brand new car! That’s right, straight from France we have an Audi that has only been exposed to incindiary materials, not chemical weapons. Heck, have two!
Is burning flesh a toxic effect? I
Not in this universe.
What brought that on?
I think the nature of WP confuses some folks. When phosperous burns it creates a billowing cloud of white smoke. The cloud will not melt your skin off or kill you instantly. Being in such a cloud is a thouroughly unpleasent just as standing around in tear gas is uncomfortable. It causes skin, lung, and eye irritation but is not fatal to the average human being. It is a chemical cloud in the same sense that tear gas is a chemical weapon.
If a WP cloud was as deadly as some suggest, then there would be no need to follow up a WP attack with an HE attack. The WP would do the killing. But a WP cloud is usually not deadly.
Being hit by the actual burning chemical, white phosphorous, is similar to being hit with the flaming jelly known as napalm. Perhaps worse as it is much more difficult to put out. The burning chemical is a chemical weapon in the same sense that high explosives are chemical weapons. The combustion rate is different, but neither do things that classic chemical weapons do such as shut down the nervous system.
If the US used WP to create a billowing white cloud that flowed into buildings in an effort to get insurgents to evacuate those buildings, then I don’t see a problem with its use. If they indescriminately lobbed WP shells into the heart of the city in an attempt to create an inferno, then I have a big problem with its use.
Man, BobLibDem is to white phosphorous as Bob_Loblaw is to Al Sharpton.
And you’re a racist Bush apologist if you don’t agree with me.
I would point out that tanks explode phosphorus grenades to screen themselves from attack. The old M-60 Patton used WP. For some reason, the M-1 Abrams uses red phosphorus.
In any case, the smoke produced is nasty, but not especially lethal. Heck, I have been in clouds of the stuff.