I’m not familiar with Bob_Loblaw so I don’t quite get the comment. Bush apologists are not necessarily racist, I just find them a bit callous in believing that burning civilians is an acceptable military procedure.
There is no need to torture the language to the point of incomprehensibility to make a point. WP is not a chemical weapon in the ordinary meaning of the word. If you wish to take exception to the use of WP, well and good, but be honest about it.
(You may now score points on me by changing the subject to torture.)
Detective 1: Colonel Mustard, in the conservatory, with the candelabra.
Detective 2: Yup, he poisoned her!
Detective 1: Huh???
Detective 2: Surely you’ve heard of blunt force toxicity?
It was a joke. **Bob_Loblaw ** made a post where he called anybody who was even the least bit critical of Al Sharpton a racist. After several pages of people telling him he was full of shit, he was (last time I looked) sticking to his guns.
Much like you and white phosphorous. The Bush apologist was just thrown in to help rjung out. Anybody who doesn’t agree with him is a Bush apologist.
I’m just in one of those wacky moods today.
Red phosporus is a much more stable configuration for phosporus. I believe black is even more stable but prett inert as to be useless for combustion. I have no experience with yellow phosphorus, but I suppose I could look it up one of these days.
Yellow phosphorus taste like mustard.
I can’t really back that up…
Bob, you aren’t getting it.
Yeah, US troops used WP. We know this. They also use bombs, guns, knives, and pointy sticks. Those weapons killed people, sometimes in very nasty ways. We know that civilians have been caught in some of these attacks, and killed in nasty ways.
What we didn’t do is use poison gas, or poison bullets, because those are prohibited. Why are they prohibited? As you point out, dead is dead, why is it OK to shoot a guy, or bomb him, or incinerate him, but not poison him? I agree, napalm is nasty, poison is nasty, pointy sticks can be nasty, dead is dead, suffering is suffering, why are chemical weapons prohibited but not guns? Why are chemical weapons prohibited but not incendiary weapons? Cynically, mostly because chemical weapons have limited utility against a prepared military and are almost as likely to affect your own troops as the enemy. The main use of chemical weapons is against uprepared civilians who don’t have protective gear and wouldn’t know how to use it if they did, which is why Saddam used it against the Kurds.
So the US has agreed not to use chemical weapons, as have most other countries. You story alleging that the US used chemical weapons is a cynical attempt to imply that the US is violating the ban on chemical weapons, and to suggest an equivalence between Saddam and the US. Saddam used chemical weapons and he was bad, but look, the US is using chemical weapons too! Except that it isn’t true, it’s a lie.
The Italian TV station falsely used the term “chemical weapon” as a crude propaganda attempt, and you posted the story for the same reason.
Deliberately burning civilians to death is murder. Deliberately shooting civilians is murder. Deliberately bayoneting civilians is murder. If there is any evidence any of those things happened, then the people responsible need to be held accountable. Except the only allegation is that WP incendiary weapons were used, and that means the US is using chemical weapons. Except WP isn’t a chemical weapon. And only an idiot wouldn’t understand why the attempt was made to define WP as a chemical weapon.
…I can’t speak Italian, and I’m afraid I can’t be sure of all of the subtle variances in translation, but from the “babal fish” translation, it seems apparent that the Italian TV Station never claimed that WP is a chemical weapon, only that it was “chemical weapon like.”
http://www.repubblica.it/2005/k/sezioni/esteri/iraq71/rainews/rainews.html
Is White Phosphorus classed as a chemical weapon? Nope. If your baby has just had their face burned off (warning, Not Safe For Work, may disturb) , would you consider White Phosphorus “chemical weapon-like?” The Bush administration has quibbled over lesser definitions…
…an article from April 2004, the first seige of Fallujah:
…there seems to be no doubt that White Phosphorus was used in Iraq as I also think that its clear that WP is not a chemical weapon. Is firing on a “cluster” of buildings with WP indiscriminate? I bet you if this pilot had been given the order, he would have refused…
But does that matter?
Fallujah is now a rallying cry, not only for the insurgents in Iraq, but for terrorists worldwide. As of March of this year, only about 30% of the residents of Fallujah had returned to the city. An estimated 150 000 people can’t go home, living in tent cities as “internally displaced persons”. About 9000 of the 50 000 buildings were destroyed, with an estimated half to two thirds of buildings suffering some sort of damage. Reconstruction is slow.
In the meantime, 30 Coalition troops have lost their lives in the last ten days-rising to 3 per day after a long lull at only two. Iraqi deaths and injuries from insurgents have risen from 30 a day in the first half of 2004 to 60 a day in September of this year. Operation Phantom Fury has not made Iraq safer, it has made it worse. What was the greater strategic goal of Phantom Fury? Did the planners not think beyond a week?
http://icasualties.org/oif/
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7503610/
The White Phosphorus is just another nail in the proverbial coffin for the people running the war against insurgents. Remember the Al-Qa’id Primary school? The allegations of abuse at Abu Gharib before the photos were released? The Palestine Hotel incident? How about any press release from Centcom that have the words in accordance with our rules of engagement ? Incident after incident of Pentagon denials followed up by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Remember when killing Sadamm’s son’s was supposed to break the back of the insurgency? How about capturing Sadamm? Then it was the siege of Fallujah? Well, since that didn’t work, how about we invade Fallujah instead?
Because the way I see it Lemur866, it is you who isn’t getting it. There is little to no evidence of deliberate targeting of civilians. There is overwhelming evidence that American troops don’t nessercerily confirm the identity of their target before they open fire. The American’s are using a reactive strategy as opposed to a proactive strategy against the insurgency; putting out fires instead of installing fire suppression systems. And with every denial in the face of the evidence, like this one, and with every new Operation Kick Some Ass that the US decides to launch to break the back of the insurgency, more and more people are recruited towards the insurgents cause. These incidents happened in November last year: so for the last year rumors and stories and pictures have been circulating around the world. While I’m sure that “remember September 11” are words close to every American soldier’s heart, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine what two words keep the insurgency going: “Remember Fallujah.”
Detective 2: Surely you’ve heard of Colonel Mustard Gas.
Once this tiresome matter is resolved, it behooves us to make the facts widely known amongst the Iraqi people. I have little doubt that they will be mightily comforted to know that their friends and relations were rent asunder by good old organic shrapnel, rather than by unwholesome methods.
[QUOTE=Banquet Bear While I’m sure that “remember September 11” are words close to every American soldier’s heart, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine what two words keep the insurgency going: “Remember Fallujah.”[/QUOTE]
I’m sure the insurgents had a rallying cry before Fallujah. “Kill the infidels!” or “Defend Iraq!” or whatever they could come up with that would help convince ordinary Iraqis that dying so certain Sunnis could regain power or that certain militants could grab power to start a fundamentalist take over in Iraq.
The real problem was that the best chance to win this war was right after the US arrived. If we’d had an actual plan that would have made use of existing Iraqi government forces, a plan to get electricity and basic service restored, a plan to show Sunnis that the new government wasn’t going to screw them over, a plan that established an economy and jobs for Iraqis rather than jobs for outside contractors, then it would have been difficult for the insurgency to take hold.
But now that the insurgency has taken hold, the fastest way to victory would be to use the tactics that Saddam used. Saddam showed that you could keep rival forces in check. He wiped out entire villages, made his enemies dissappear and created such an aura of fear that no one dared to oppose him. But I don’t think that Americans actually have the stomach for that. If we did, accusations that our forces did something immoral wouldn’t bother so many of us.
That leaves the long slow uncertain path. Train the Iraqis that want a new government and when they look like they have a chance at holding it together leave and watch the civil war unfold at a distance. Too bad for Bush, US troops, and the Iraqis, that keeping the country together until that happens is taking a while. Course the Iraqis are in for a terrible time even after US forces leave. Meanwhile US forces use just enough force to anger local Iraqis but not enough force to actually win the war. It’s just enough war to make us feel ill and not enough war to resolve the problem, not that we’d want the resolution that more war would bring anyway.
Oh for Og’s sake. Lets try this one more time.
[ul]
[li]OP makes claims about CW use, and mentions WP[/li][li]WP is not a chemical weapon, never has been considered one, and probably never will be, because WP sets people on fire rather than poisoning them.[/li][li]OP was mis-titled, and should have been something along the lines of “Italian TV: US negligently burned civilians to death”[/li][li]All the intellectual energy expended in this thread squabbling about WP would have been better used on discussing whether or not the tactics and rules of engagement employed in Iraq are causing excessive civilian casualties and whether they are helping or hindering the security situation.[/li][/ul]
Spend some time looking around on the internet and you will see injuries caused by conventional high-velocity smallarms or explosive ordnance which are far more gruesome than the one linked above, and the number of casualties caused by such means number in the tens of thousands. The fact that no-one even seems to be keeping count is one of the most disturbing things about the Iraqi situation, IMO.
Squealing about WP being a CW or ‘CW-like’ does nothing except cause :rolleyes: amongst those with even the slightest understanding of the topic, and is therefore a waste of time. It’s like printing a headline about Bush serving boiled babies at a White House prayer breakfast - sensational, factually inaccurate, and so easily rebutted it’s effectively handing the administration a free pass.
There are many areas where one can make factually based, considered, hard-to-refute accusations of incompetence, brutality, corruption or breaches of the rules and conventions of war, so why not go for those instead? It’s not if it’s difficult to find real things to criticise in this huge moronic drawn-out clusterfuck of a war.
Exactly.
It is remarkable. I have never seen so much bandwidth and keyboard time devoted to such a non-issue. People simply want it to be true.
this is not the same thing as skin and muscle getting eaten right off the bone.
ask yourself how you would feel about civilian deaths if the war were being fought here. civillians should not die in war, but they do. about half the casualties in ww2 were civilians. think about the current war’s civillian to combatant death ratio. it makes me sick. also, if civilians are intentionally shot, then yes i think it is a war crime.
Eaten? We’ve got cannibals in the war? Or are you just talking about the crows? Crows aren’t chemical weapons, they’re natures way of keeping highways clean.
Wrong question still. Try “Did the use of this weapon contribute to our winning the hearts and minds of the local populace? Did it contribute to our goals of stabilizing and democratizing Iraq?” Hint: That doesn’t depend on the terminology in any treaty.
I’m coming late to the parade here. I’m sure most of what I have to say has been said in one way or another. Anything I do happen to add won’t make a dent on those who disagree.
Some, like BobLibDem, continue to state that semantics are unimportant here. Dead people are still dead. I agree with the second, but not the first. This is very clearly a case of attempted sensationalism. As others have said, using the term, “chemical weapon”, is very polarizing and damning. It’s also just incorrect. Let me try to find a quote from above for an example.
No. The skin and flesh is getting burned off. Well, the bone is probably getting burned too. Is it any comfort to the victims? Probably not, but it doesn’t change that white phosphorous is not considered to be a chemical weapon.
Want some personal anecdotal evidence? I was a bomb disposal tech (EOD) for three years in the army. This was just before gulf war one. I was stationed at a very busy post where we ran a lot of incidents each year. Most (99% at least) just involved unexploded military ordinance. If we had to do something with a WP round we would not wear chemical gear. One the other hand, I was involved in one incident involving a suspected chemical agent during a post cleanup. We dressed in full chemical gear (TAPP suits, full beeswax impregnated undergarments under a heavy rubber protective suit with a protective mask) and were processed out through a decontamination station after we were done. See the difference in severity there?
So why are some in this thread clinging to the “chemical” line? Maybe in a few cases it started as misunderstanding, but by now it can only be sensationalism, plain and simple. It’s just an anti-GW agenda (more on this in just a bit). Want an example?
No. White phosphorus is nothing of the sort. However, some of the posters here and doubtlessly some of the press, politicians, and probably the insurgents would like everyone to believe it to be so.
Make a claim that civilians were killed needlessly and provide proof and I’m right there with you in outrage. Making claims that insult what I know and what has been shown here does nothing for your argument. Fight ignorance, don’t encourage it.
Back to the anti-GW agenda thing, let’s talk about my beliefs for a minute. Am I a Bush apologist? Hardly, I voted for the blue guy for President last election. I’m to the point now where I loath GW. I think even less highly of Cheney. Their leaving can’t come soon enough. I didn’t believe there were WMD before the war started. I felt that was an excuse. I would like to see Bush and Cheney face consequences for their actions. White phosphorus isn’t the smoking gun that will let that happen. It’s just sensationalism and twisting of information.
…I think that me and you are pretty much in agreement. I’m a strong believer that the lack of planning and troops at the start of the occupation led to the problems with the insurgency that we have now. I also believe that the only way to get out of the mess we are in is to massively increase the amount of troops we have in the country, and reconsider the way we are funding the reconstruction of the country. Security of Iraq must be gained before we pull out-and Iraq has to be fixed…
Loath as I am to cite blogs, this one makes some interesting claims regarding what WP can and cannot do to a body. Bottom line: those burned bodies with their clothes intact probably were not hit by WP.