I'm not sure how to reply to Shima's post - which might be why I didn't reply in the first place.
To be honest, I'm still a little foggy as to why we needed to go into Serbia in 1999. I remember Clinton going on TV and talking about it, but the specific reasons given elude me at the moment.
I can't imagine what it would be like to be under an aerial bombardment like that. Wiser men that I have commented that there is nothing more demoralizing and more hate-provoking than being the victim of an air-war. The intense feelings of helplessness and terror eat at a person until they can often feel nothing but rage towards those that would visit such horror upon their country.
Maybe that's why I'm never all that impressed with the "Shock and Awe" doctrine.
The ability to inflict death and suffering upon thousands at such a distance as to render the human faces invisible and the twisted bodies in the wreckage indiscernible is one of the darkest realities of modern warfare. Unable to see the unholy suffering our conquest has wrought, Americans are all to eager to embrace the sword yet again in yet another country with little capability for resistance.
Thousands of years ago a small resistant band clashed with a great army. They chose their battleground carefully and waited in ambush. They sprang upon their numerically superior foe and fought to the last man. They fought with spears, and when the spears broke they fought with swords. When the swords were paried away they fought with daggers, and then with fists, and then with their nails and teeth until they will killed - every last one of them - to a man.
That is the kind of visceral response that the United States brings upon itself by relying on this overpowering air campaign to crush the will of a population to resist conventionally. Today we would call people who fight like that resistant band terrorists or insurgents -- but history may well judge them differently. That small resistant band of soldiers, Spartan Soldiers, are regarded today as some of the greatest military heroes in history. It's amazing that a few thousand years of perspective can do.
I wonder how our descendents will look back upon the atrocities and crimes that America has committed in the name of "freedom." I wonder if they will be as forgiving to us as Sima is. For while he is right - and these are the actions of American corporations and the American government - the American people are complacent; and that is just as much a crime.
My apologies if this rambled – I’m afraid it’s getting late.
A History of Torture
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