Posted on 09/26/2004 1:16:04 PM PDT by Marfoe
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A month of U.S. airstrikes on rebel-held Fallujah has killed more than 100 suspected insurgents, taking a heavy toll on the terror network of Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, senior U.S. military officials said on Sunday.
The strikes have stopped attacks elsewhere in Iraq while setting off deadly feuds among insurgent groups holed up in the city west of Baghdad, said Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, deputy operations director for U.S.-led forces here.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.tbo.com ...
I would love to be proven wrong when I say that we cannot stop him without a full-scale assault on Fallujah...
That's nice to hear. Hopefully all those kidnappings and killings by Al-Zaqawi will stop.
I was raised to believe that an enemy isn't dead until a rifleman on the ground steps on his corpse.
I would love to be proven wrong, but like you I don't believe airstrikes alone will do the job
The only airstrikes proven to be effective involve nuclear detonations! ;-)
Kill 'em..... kill 'em all......
Well bombing alone did it:
1. In Japan in WWII.
2. In Germany to some extent too. It made the population tired of war and more compliant in the wars aftermath.
Our no collateral damage battle plan in Iraq made the population less fearful of the US after the battle for Iraq was done. In al Fallujah, they have demanded some bombing at least toward if not into submission.
Japan and Germany were destroyed with ordinary bombs, Japan mainly with a little incindiary bomb which weighed about ten pounds. The A bomb was a coup de grace and nothing more; 76 Japanese cities had been obliterated by fire bombs prior to that.
Keep killing the bad guys....kill'em YES
ping
1. nuking two cities and the threat of invasion by America and the Soviets did for Japan... after an extensive land-and-sea campaign
2. bombing didn't do all that much strategically in Germany - it was still a mud-slugger's war.
My point is that nukes are the only airstrikes which
ended a war 'right after they were dropped.' Not that
Germany and Japan were still formidable foes by that point
in time. Did you notice the emoticon at the end of my sentence?
Japan was alrady toast as far as being an effective offensive power long before LeMay...think of Midway, "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" and the loss of the Yamato for starters...
Many people at the time were convinced that Japan would keep resisting, long past the point of rational military effort. Hence the decision to use 'the bomb.'
History remains a non-scientific discipline in the main,
becasuse we cannot "rewind the tape and try again."
As far as Germany, I would suggest that it was the Russian Winter, the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, and the invasion of Germany by USSR that sealed the Nazis' fate, as opposed to say the bombing of Dresden, or even D-Day.
NOW!
Haven't we the aide of "the Colgate invisible shield" to our benefit?
"Oh, dude..."
The conventional bombing campaign in Japan utterly destroyed their industrial ability and as such hurt their long term war fighting abilities. However, it did little to hurt the Japanese land forces in the short term.
An invasion was absolutely inevitable without the A-bomb. No amount of conventional bombing was ever going to change that.
Notice how the nubers keep climbing after they arrested the Iraqi Ntnl Guard officer that was tipping the cockroaches off.
numbers
The war in Germany was a mud slugger's war, but would the aftermath been as easy for the US and allies had Germany not been bombed so much and the population not had to scramble to even get food. If the Iraqis were worried about food last winter, they would not have had time to worry about car bombs.
It is a trade-off we made. I am not saying it was the wrong trade-off, but it is what we chose.
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