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By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Mar. 23, 2006 Before you question what a physician knows about explosives, let me remind you that I served in the military off and on over 30 years and was a soldier in Vietnam. I carried 2 pounds of C4 plastic explosive in a Maxwell House coffee can and had inserted a hand grenade detonator I had unscrewed from a grenade, and taped it all up nicely with olive drab duct tape. Ive been near—too near!—high explosive artillery rounds going off, and I’ve seen plenty of other high explosive detonations. And many of the “car bonb” explosions seen on TV news are NOT high explosive car bombs. They are propaganda bombs. I was watching the cable news a few nights ago and there was a scene of a white compact car parked alongside a road, and the camera focused on it for several seconds, and then it exploded in a great expanding yellow and orange flame and a huge billowing cloud of black smoke. My initial thoughts were: 1) The cameraman had been tipped off by the terrorists so he could film this explosion; and 2) This was not a high explosive car bomb designed to hurt people. The news commentator reported that this was an explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan, and that the insurgents there had learned from their counterparts in Iraq. But the Iraqis had learned their caft from Hollywood! This was a Hollywood production all the way. High explosives do not produce huge fireballs and billowing black smoke. They are not low-pitched rumbling affairs. They are short, sharp, high-pitched, and produce relatively minimal grey or faint tan smoke. The “car bomb” on the TV news was produced by a relatively small amount of explosive which had been surrounded by a few cans of diesel fuel to produce the flames and smoke that are so impressive to news reporters and uncritical viewers. This was a propaganda bomb. It was designed to look violent, as Hollywood explosions do at the end of a car chase, and it was designed to influence the mindset of the citizens of the USA. The terrorists know they can’t win on the battlefield. They have learned the lesson of Vietnam, which is that, to defeat America, one just has to sway the minds of the voters back home. It helps, too, if one can enlist a political group back in the States to work on your behalf. Our withdrawal in Vietnam led more or less directly to the genocide of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the imprisonment and deaths of tens of thousands in South Vietnam, and the stifling of economic development in that part of the world. Our withdrawal is still impoverishing Southeast Asian people 30 years later. We don’t want to make the same mistake in the Middle East. The terrorists have learned a lesson of Vietnam, but have we? Have we learned that cutting and running is not the proper tactic in the face of the enemy? As Sun Tzu the famous Chinese general said, “When you wish the enemy to attack, appear weak.” Do we want to appear weak and encourage more attacks? Recently General Odom, former head of NSA, has suggested we cut and run. He says this will stop irritating the Iraqis and they will then turn to throwing out the terrorists. The disadvantage to the Odom approach is that it has never worked when tried. We pulled out of South Vietnam and the communists took over and they haven’t left yet. I submit that the only proven method of winning wars is to defeat the enemy. We didn’t pull out of Europe and the South Pacific in WW2 and expect the Nazis and the Japanese to be overthrown by their victims. If we had, I suspect Hitler’s Nazis would have conquered all of Europe and would have developed the atomic bomb and would likely be still menacing us. The Japanese would still be in the Philippines and elsewhere around the South Pacific. No, we didn’t try the Odom Strategy in WW2--we fought the enemy and kept at it until they were defeated. It is a strategy which has the advantage of having worked in the past. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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