Posted on 02/09/2003 6:54:26 PM PST by MindBender26
An Open Letter To USAF – RAF – RAAF Iraq Task Force TacAir targeting planners.
Ladies and Gentlemen, a moment of your frenzied time, if you please.
We know you are quite busy. Trying to allocate a finite number of warloads to an ever-expanding number of targets is getting difficult. It will only get worse as there are mission scrubs, targeting failures, low-order bursts, targets of opportunity, etc. With that in mind, I ask you to give serious consideration to a target that may not be on your current list.
One of the major traffic circles in downtown Baghdad is dominated by a concrete arch of two arms with hands intertwined at the top. It is said to be Saddam’s favorite monument to himself.
Supposedly Saddam’s hands and arms were used as the models for this ridiculous waste of concrete. The symbolism here is that Saddam is the protector of the Iraqi people, that Saddam is holding the people to his bosom, that his strong arms will prevent anything evil from befalling the Iraqi people and all the rest of that HHS. (For the inexperienced, HHS is a short, very secret military acronym for Happy Horse****.)
As we all know, PsyWar is critically important when dealing with any enemy. It is even more important when dealing with a government that can be cut off from the support of it’s people. If you have any doubts, ask any Iraqi who watched all the Arclight strikes in 91, or the loyal citizens who watched the anti-war protesters here in the early 70s.
Simply put, blow the Sierra out of those hand and arm things, please. It may not topple Saddam. It may not stop some T-72 tank from moving to the front, but it will certainly teach the Iraqis that nothing is safe, nothing is off limits.
I hate those things every time I see video of them, and will love it so much, that if they become concrete dust, I’ll even buy you a round at the O Club.
Gopher It!
Outstanding! I hope that human chain of debris from the anti-American movement forms right around the monument minutes before!
The monument was scheduled to be destroyed by allied bombing during the last days of of Desert Storm, but was spared due to a legal opinion that the monument was protected under provisions of the Law of War.
To celebrate his "victory" over Iran, Saddam decided to build a Triumphal Arch. The concept of a triumphal arch is a European import, without precedent in the Middle East since Roman times.
The colossal Hands of Victory monument has dominated Baghdad's skyline since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Built in duplicate, it marks the entrances to a large new parade ground in central Baghdad, towering 140 feet above the highway. The triumphal arch is shaped as two pairs of crossed swords, made from the guns of dead Iraqi soldiers that were melted and recast as the 24-ton blades of the swords. Captured Iranian helmets are in a net held between the swords. And surrounding the base of the arms are another 5,000 Iranian helmets taken from the battle field. The fists that hold the swords aloft are replicas of Saddam Hussein’s own hands. The German company that built the monument, H+H Metalform, said it was given a photograph of Saddam's own forearms to use as a model.
When Saddam inaugurated these triumphal arches, he rode under them on a white horse — an allusion to the steed of Hussein, the Shi'ite Muslim hero martyred at nearby Kerbala. The day before the first bombing run on Bhagdad during the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi TV showed a mass of Iraqi soldiers marching beneath the huge crossed swords of the Victory Arch, to the theme music from 'Star Wars'. In April 1998 Iraq's "volunteer army" paraded for six hours in Baghdad's "Grand Festivities Square," the large outdoor arena marked by the two sets of enormous crossed swords.
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