Archive for April, 2003
13:05 16 Apr 2003
My posting will be light through the weekend. We’re off to Texas for a few days. All three of you will have to get by somehow.
12:53 16 Apr 2003
You can order a deck at Great USA Flags for $5.95. That way you can play solitare during the “Two Minutes Hate” each day. Thanks to Sgt Strykers Daily Briefing for the tip.
12:32 16 Apr 2003
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Abu Abbas, a convicted Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro on which a wheelchair-bound American was killed, was captured by U.S. Special Forces in the outskirts of Baghdad, U.S. Central Command said Tuesday.
Or was he just on vacation? It’s not like he’d go on a cruise, you know. He knows what can go wrong. So, does he count even if he wasn’t directly involved in 9/11? Or are claims of Iraqi ties to terrorism only legit if guys who were actually onboard the hijacked 9/11 planes caught having a business lunch with Saddam?
Update 12:42 16 Apr 2003
Actually, Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers might be frequenting the same establishments these days, regardless of direct connections to the WTC attacks.
12:26 16 Apr 2003
Over at InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds notices this:
The Marines found 123 prisoners, including five women, barely alive in an underground warren of cells and torture chambers. . . .
And thinks
Yeah, but why weren’t these Marines doing something important, like looking for lost antiquities?
If he were on top of things, he’d realize that the real problem is that we didn’t have enough troops from the beginning. The 4th ID should be guarding the library, or museum, or something. Idiots at the Pentagon.
14:04 15 Apr 2003
This from a Strategy Page post about JDAMs and the fact that they don’t need cutting-edge planes to get them to their target.
But what the air force is really worrying about is the fact that most of the bombs were again dropped by older, cheaper and generally lower tech aircraft. The most prominent bomber of this type is the fifty year old B-52. Kind of hard to make a case for a new F-22 as a bomber when the BUFF is still doing the job.
The F-22 is incredibly cool, and we certainly should field some. But what is it going to fight? Remember that US spy plane forced down by China? Do you remember what type of Chinese fighters were involved in that incident? F-8 Crusaders. From the late 50s. Sheesh.
Let’s buy some more A-10s and B-25 Mitchells.
13:02 14 Apr 2003
One thing I’m a little sick of hearing, and not just from the Iraq situation, is all the blah blah blah about the end justifying or not justifying the means. Then there’s this in a WaPo op-ed by William Rasberry:
If the Iraqi people end up better off as a direct result of America’s insistence on launching the war without the support of the United Nations, it won’t be the first time that good outcomes have resulted from bad means.
Part of my problem with the means and the end argument concerning Iraq is that those who use it assume that “UN support for war = good” is a given. The same people usually cast Bush and his administration as oil-hungry politicians who don’t really care about much else, but it certainly seems that those same arguments apply to France. Not that I believe we’re in a war for oil, but it seems that France may be against the war because of oil. So why is our insistence on war for oil bad when France’s insistence on no war for oil good?
I’ll agree that the end doesn’t justify the means, but there’s more to it than that. We have proven that we can make war on Iraq without becoming Iraq. What if we would have followed the UN’s wishes and not invaded? Saddam would still be in power, probably working on WMD as we speak, ruling his population with an iron fist. He probably would have remained in power forever, and the cost in human lives would be far higher than the cost of this war. Would that be preferable, as long as we followed the guidelines set by the United Nations? Why is it that no one seems to worry that the means might not justify the end?
08:52 14 Apr 2003
According to this Reuters report, CENTCOM says that the F/A-18C off the USS Kitty Hawk shot down near Al Basrah on April 3rd was “probably” shot down by a US Patriot missile battery. The pilot was killed. This would be the second confirmed Allied plane shot down by the Patriot since the shooting started in Iraq three weeks ago. The other was a British Tornado in the early days of the fighting.
What remains to be seen is which version of the Patriot was responsible for the accident. There are two versions of the Patriot in the Gulf, the PAC-2 (state of the art) and the PAC-3 (cutting edge). As I posted earlier, the PAC-3 was rushed into service by bypassing most of its operational testing phase.
Again, this is similar to what some in the administration and the Pentagon want to to with the National Missile Defense program. Unless the threat of ICBM attack is high (exactly like it isn’t right now) this would be a BAD IDEA. Shooting down military fighters in the Persian Gulf is bad enough, but what happens if the NMD accidentally shoots down an airliner (or a space shuttle, for that matter) near US territory? I suggest that extra testing rather than less testing is the right approach with this thing, especially if software is the main issue. The hardware can be manufactured, or even put in place, so that when the computers are ready to go the system can go online. But we can’t screw this one up.
11:41 13 Apr 2003
According to ABC (Australian) US Marines have entered Tikrit.
General Tommy Franks says the Marines had met little resistance, but he cautioned against hopes that the war was about to end.
Tikrit, a city 175 kilometres north of Baghdad, is the the last major Iraqi centre not yet controlled by US forces.
So where the hell is the rest of Iraq’s army? I realize that we’ve killed a lot of it, some of it has surrendered, and many Iraqi soldiers have just gone home, but did the WHOLE ARMY JUST DISINTEGRATE? That really seems a little far-fetched. But we’d know if there were any large formations out in the desert, wouldn’t we? We’d know if large numbers of troops and their equipment retreated into Syria, wouldn’t we? This has been way too easy. We’ll see.
10:16 13 Apr 2003
According to this ABC (Australian) report, Kurdish TV says Watban Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti (5 of spades), one of Saddam’s half-brothers, has been captured by coalition forces while attempting to cross into Syria.
Also, Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti (5 of clubs) was reported killed in an airstrike. I don’t know how reliable Kurdish TV is, though. We’ll see.
21:25 12 Apr 2003
The Allied naval commander said today that the US Navy may reduce the number of aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf as air operations wind down.
“The prosecution of air-to-ground targets is decreasing somewhat as the campaign reaches a certain phase of completion,” Navy Vice Adm. Timothy Keating told Pentagon reporters during a satellite news teleconference from Bahrain.
“If the sortie requirement goes down, then we’ll be able to pull [some] carriers off the line and send them home,” Keating pointed out.
He noted the Navy launched nearly 200 air sorties yesterday. Any reduction of carrier forces, he pointed out, would be dependent on mission requirements.
The Nimitz recently arrived to relieve the Lincoln. I read yesterday that two carriers, the Kitty Hawk and the Constellation, may be ordered home. The Kitty Hawk is based in Japan, and the Constellation is based in San Diego, CA.
