Imagine for a moment that you live in the nation’s capitol, by the Pentagon or minutes away in Quantico, the Marine Corps headquarters, or one exit down the parkway from the National Security Agency (NSA) in nearby Maryland. Imagine farther out, places where our Navy fleets are stationed – Norfolk, San Diego – or the main Air Force satellite control center in Colorado Springs. Any military installation across the country.
Now imagine what it would be like to hear over radio waves and on your television set that one of those places might be bombed as punishment for something your president did. This punitive measure is to be meted out against "military assets," and guess what? You live right down the street from one.
Good luck.
You could stand in line with thousands of other neighbors at the local Safeway or Stop & Shop for bread and water and Chef Boyardee. You might hustle your family and most of what you own into a car, and join the traffic glut headed for Canada or the southern border. Ironically, Mexico might just make you twist in the wind before letting your brood cross the line.
For people whose threshold is about 12 minutes before whining for a new checker when the grocery line is too long, a queue that wraps around the store, out the door and into the parking lot would be a new and most unwelcome misery. Throw in the cloud of collective punishment, frightened children, the prospect of elderly parents not being able to travel, banks and gas stations closing and stocks diving, and you’ve got panic.
Welcome to Damascus. As our leaders and phony baloney pundit class talk about "surgical strikes," "punitive measures," and "limited attacks," the Syrian people are grimly preparing for the worst. For us, safely ensconced in our little world that hasn’t seen a full-scale war of any kind on domestic soil since 1865, we hear something like this and think well, it sounds pretty darn reasonable:
"I think it would be more like Kosovo-lite, with a smaller target set and limited air involvement," says Jeffrey White, defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, referring to the 1999 NATO air campaign against the former Yugoslavia. "Perhaps a heavy initial round, followed by [battle damage assessment] and then additional strikes or re-strikes to make sure the targets were well hit…. But it all depends on what the president thinks is enough to achieve the goals of punishing and deterring."
Syrians in Damascus hear this – and a hundred other fatuous commentaries on the subject – and they think, "we may die today," and head for the bread lines, which, according to reports last week, were interminable. "We didn’t manage to get any (bread)" said Nour, 22, to a reporter for The Washington Post last week. "Usually you can wait for two or three hours, but today, the line stretched across the street endlessly."
[...]
Here’s another blithe comment on U.S. "muscle," this one from naval expert Norman Polmar, who told the paper that four U.S. destroyers could easily fire 80 Tomahawk cruise missiles at President Bashar al Assad’s assets.
"The 1,000-pound warhead can destroy the palace, ministries, command centers, storage depots, hangars, bridges," he said. While that would not end the fighting, "it could make life very uncomfortable for Assad."
How "uncomfortable" it’ll make a Syrian family, too, if one of those bombs misses a target or if that family’s home might be uncomfortably in the way of flying debris when one of those "assets" are blown to bits. About this, most news outlets are deafening in their silence, especially after Friday’s speech by Secretary of State John Kerry and an announcement by President Obama that he has made a decision to strike and will be approaching congress with a plan. This is what it looks like, by the way, when a 1,000-pound warhead does its stuff:
Of course, as we sat safely on our couches watching the 2003 "shock and awe" show from Baghdad, media embeds from all over the spectrum practically jumping out of their ill-fitting Army issued gear with excitement, little airtime was given to the Iraqis hunkered down for the worst. Dahr Jamail was an independent, unembedded reporter in Iraq from 2003 to 2005. He spent time in Fallujah during the 2004 siege and bombardment, and talked about it with Antiwar in an interview last week:
"I can’t really stress enough – for people who have been through it, words can only go so far. There’s nothing ‘surgical’ or ‘sanitary’ about it, that’s hogwash. I was in Fallujah … there were drones flying non-stop 24-7 so there was always this constant buzzing in the background and you never knew what they were going to do. We knew that at any time the U.S. could be bombing the hell out of Fallujah. And they did.
What I realized in the aftermath, the type of bombs – using that large of bombs in civilian areas – was horrifying. They were dropping 500 to 2,000-pound bombs in cities, I remember seeing a crater in the concrete street, about 10-feet deep, about 50 to 60 feet wide, and then the debris from that (size) bomb would travel so far it would shred and go through anything in its path, anywhere to a half-mile away.
How absolutely horrifying it was. And it’s unfortunately looking inevitable again...
Originally Posted by Lucille
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