Posted on 10/17/2004 9:45:30 PM PDT by quidnunc
You're a Marine at a checkpoint somewhere in Iraq, watching cars and trucks streaming by -- Iraqis on their way to work or shopping or the mosque. How do you figure out which vehicle may be another deadly bomb? And what do you do when you spot a "suspicious" car?
These unanswerable questions put the life-threatening challenges facing our troops in Iraq into grim perspective. Since the war in Iraq began we at TCS have discussed the insidious nature of car bombs and their effect on human beings.
We have emphasized that car bombings are not random terrorist acts, but simply the employment of the most efficient weapon the Islamic terrorist forces have at this stage of the war. They use vehicle bombs both to "fight" U.S. and coalition troops and to kill and demoralize Iraqi civilians.
The car bomb is by nature a dramatic weapon, combining practical and psychological qualities. It transforms a ubiquitous and useful piece of everyday technology into an object of intense anxiety, outright fear and, finally devastating lethality.
While the suicidal car bombings instituted by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations against Israel have usually been deadly acts of theater in which the perpetrators are identified and celebrated as martyrs, the vehicle attacks in Iraq are usually the work of unknowns, thus putting a peculiar twist on the term "cannon fodder."
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at techcentralstation.com ...
Simple solution: if you are involved in a car bomb, we hunt down your family; alternatively, the town where you are from is punished in some fashion(like we salt the earth).
These guys are in a hostile place, doing very difficult work, and risking their lives FOR US! Please freepmail me a letter to a soldier for Christmas. I need them by Oct. 30th. Your letter will go into packages for the troops, being sent out to our heroes in the sandbox thru Operation-Suppor-Our-Troops.org (OSOT) Check it out. Santa's Soldiers. We are hoping for 5,000 letters. It will only take a minute to write a few words of gratitude and help boost morale to these wonderful Americans! I will NOT change a single word of your letter. I will only dress up the font a bit, and print it out on Christmas stationery. Look what they are doing for you. You can at least write ONE letter to ONE soldier far from home at Christmas. Freepers are great Americans!
Are most of the terrorists Iraqi or outsiders? It appears that most of them are non-Iraqi.
Why don't we just ban all cars?
no need to excerpt from this site.
© 2004 Tech Central Station
Had an interesting suggestion yesterday from a soldier here on FR:
he said a traffic curfew would help americans avoid the car bomb. Any cars out during the curfew would be considered enemy.
Heh. I found a way to get a rise out of you.
What's the deal? Why aren't we assasinating Iranian leaders for bankrolling terrorism?
Put the captured Baathists and other fighters in a little cage by the checkpoints and recruiting centers.
Because Bush feels he doesn't have the political capital. And he feels he doesn't have the capital since the Dems and the media have been hammering him 24/7 for a year now over Iraq.
Better solution: frequently EMP the roads, and even towns as a whole. Whatever has an electrical detonator would explode in situ, right where it now is (and not at marine-manned checkpoint). If some perps in the process suffer premature ejartyrdom ... tough luck, and no 72 virgins.
Mandate car pooling and curfew........suicide bombers don't car pool !...:o)
"What's the deal? Why aren't we assasinating Iranian leaders for bankrolling terrorism?"
I hope because we're getting ready to go into Iran in force.
What a great idea -- like Julius Caesar's idea for separating vehicular from pedestrian traffic, by requiring all drayage to be done at night. (Wagons losing their loads of building marble in the middle of crowds had become a cause notorious.)
Let the Americans and police roll late at night, assisted by the advantage of their night vision (they wouldn't even need headlights, and so would be largely invisible except for brake lights), and if anyone parked his car by the roadside at night, it would be with the understanding that the Coalition people would junk it for him -- as a safety measure.
Hope this idea gets floated up to the P that B.
That's because their Main Enemy is George W. Bush. They don't give a rat's butt about anything else, fundamentally.
Just saw that WaPo media prince who was their bureau chief in Baghdad on TV the other day -- Charlie Rose, I think it was. That guy, Ravi someone, was totally ripped in a letter-to-home from an Army journalist who got a load of his act in some small town where the Army was struggling to help make things right, or maybe just better, and this guy blew in for a few hours, and then pretended to write a synoptic sitrep for his masters back in Byzantium-by-the-Potomac.
The guy's a joke, the WaPo is a joke, the media spinmeisters are a joke.
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