Michael Bryan

The Pentagon has admitted using White Phosphorous (WP) on ‘enemy combatants’ (a term which apparently embraces anyone in Fallujah at the time of the U.S. assault on that city). WP eats flesh down the bone, leaving clothing and structures intact. It has been widely reported that U.S. forces are also using MK-77, a form of napalm in Iraq. Additionally, the Marines have recently introduced a new shoulder mounted assault weapon that uses a fuel-air thermobaric mixture, which has been compared to a micro-nuke, intended to flatten buildings and incinerate any inhabitants.

There may be sound military reasons to use these weapons – force protection, maneuver cover, even their very lethality – but what remains problematic is whether incendiaries such as these raise the same ethical concerns as other banned chemical weapons, such as nerve or blistering agents. So far, the Administration is defending the use of such weapons as a military neccesity, when used with due care to avoid civilian deaths.

The latest Zogby Interactive polling is showing Democrat Jim Pederson within the margins of error of Jon Kyl in the Arizona Senate contest. These numbers come before people are even paying much attention to this race, and before the widely-expected air war between these two well-funded candidates, in a race that may well decide control … Read more

Link: Bush Arrested By UN. President Bush has been arrested just over an hour ago. The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, put out a warrant for his arrest yesterday. A Black Ops team, sanctioned by the UN, has entered the White House and arrested both President Bush and his wife Laura, who … Read more

“They hate us for our freedoms” –George W. Bush

Most reasonable people realize that the President’s now infamous characterization of the 9/11 terrorists’ motive is drivel. But many reasonable people, when asked what does drive people to commit suicide terrorist acts will give reasons that, though less obviously drivel, are none-the-less completely wrong.

There have been many plausible and well-intentioned hypotheses about the root causes of suicide terrorism. The causes are generally held to be some combination of unstable or suicidal personalities, indoctrination in the tenets of fundamentalist Islam, socio-economic deprivations, and the history of Western, especially American, involvement in the Middle East. That is how I thought about the phenomenon myself, until I read Robert Pape’s comprehensive study of every suicide terrorist incident since the inception of modern suicide terrorism in 1980.

There is nothing better for destroying misconceptions and faulty assumptions than a fat dose of facts. Pape created a detailed database of every suicide terrorism incident between 1980 and 2003 – 315 attacks in all – to test hypotheses regarding what variables actually predict suicide terror, and what factors are actually causal. The result of his work is published in his book, “Dying to Win.” The hypothesis left standing at the end of the day is surprising and has dire import for the conduct of American foreign policy.

It is simply this:

Suicide terrorism is an effective tool of nationalism that is used specifically against democratic states engaged in military occupation of territory the terrorist group considers its homeland.

Via: Consortiumnews.com. Because the Bush administration, almost from the start, has eschewed any comparison of Iraq with Vietnam, officials apparently never read the history of the nation’s heretofore worst war and have made the same 10 major mistakes: 1. Underestimating the enemy. As in Vietnam, the superpower’s potent military has been astounded by the tenacity … Read more