Special Analysis: Casualty Allocation in Modern Warfare

The deaths of dozens of civilians in Qana, Lebanon, on July 30, 2006, underscores the complications facing modern military planners and field commanders in prosecuting wars against entrenched opposition forces. To date, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has relied heavily upon a combination of artillery and aerial bombardments of Lebanon to weaken Hizballah, principally to the purpose in the latter, air campaign of degrading infrastructure, destroying bunkers, killing enemy soldiers, and demoralizing remaining enemy combatants. The artillery campaign—comprising as it does mechanized cannon (tanks and other mobile artillery pieces), rockets, and other assets—destroys both infrastructure and tactical targets, including mobile missile launchers being used by Hizballah fighters to fire rockets into Israel.

The reliance upon stand-off military assets, particularly fighter jets and bombers, has been criticized in a number of quarters: indeed, some argue that the United States and its Coälition partners believed that the initial "Shock and Awe" campaign and subsequent air and missile attacks on Baghdad and other parts of Iraq in the Spring of 2002 would substantially, if not utterly, remove Iraqi resistance to the subsequent ground invasion. But while the Coälition might earnestly have believed the air campaign would conclusively and swiftly resolve the war, it is certainly the case that aerial bombardment by bombs, rockets, and missiles did not do nearly as much as expected to bring combat to a swift end. Among the ranks of modern war planners and advocates—particularly those lacking actual experience in war—there does seem to exist a belief that air power can not only define the architecture of dominance in military campaigns, but also be decisive in wars, themselves. The IDF has in its current campaign against the Lebanese Hizballah shown considerable subscription to this belief, having already flown hundreds of sorties in just the few weeks its attack on Lebanon has been underway, while at the same time fielding only token, if highly publicized, infantry forays into Lebanese territory.

In a ground force projection begun on July 25, 2006, IDF soldiers quickly encountered resistance from Hizballah fighters whose ferocity seemed to take Israeli soldiers by surprise. The ensuing skirmishes clearly established why the air campaign had been and remained far preferable, at least in the short run: nine IDF soldiers were killed in a relatively short period of time during combat engagements in southern Lebanon. In the broad history of warfare, such a death toll is minimal and insignificant, but it comes as a shock nonetheless to both troops and the public at large since neither group is used to death in combat at any level, despite having national experience with far higher tolls in earlier times and previous wars. For the public especially in recent times in modern societies, months or a rapid series of high death rate encounters are required for general concensus to accept death toll numbers above one or two in a given day or a given encounter.

At left is a picture of a GBU-28A/B in flight: the "GBU" stands for "Guided Bomb Unit," otherwise informally and generically referred to as a "bunker buster." The GBU-28 was developed for and used in Desert Storm and is now being provided by the United States to the IDF, which is using this weapon in Lebanon to destroy what it describes as some of the 600 or so hardened, underground munitions and personnel bunkers under the control of Hizballah forces. The bomb is mounted under the wing of an F-15I "Eagle," depicted in the first graphic near the top of this article. (The Israelis call the F-15I "Thunder," and they gave the earlier, F-15C/D version the rather ominous—or perhaps insensitive—name "Buzzard.") Because a GBU carries a massive explosives package, in earlier versions its delivery jet would often have to make a critical upward maneuver, releasing the weapon in a lofting trajectory that allowed it to come more or less straight down on its target, this being necessary so the device did not have to navigate around intervening buildings and other structures on its way to the target, which might be underneath a building or otherwise buried and hardened. In the GBU-28, a Paveway III GPS/INS guidance package (which usually removes the need for the lofted release) takes the bomb on the final leg to its target, where its payload of 4,500 to 5,000 pounds of explosives detonates on top of the underground bunker, breaching overlying earth, concrete, and other protective materials.The explosion of the bomb then kills personnel in the bunker and sets off or otherwise destroys any munitions stored there. The force of the explosion is sufficient to destroy any building atop the bunker. Surrounding buildings for dozens of yards left standing around the target are structurally compromised both at the level of their foundations and in their load-bearing walls, making the effect of a GBU-28 detonation particularly destructive in urban and suburban environments. The graphic at right above shows buildings that were near a destroyed target in Beirut.

Effective, mission-specific alternatives to these bunker busters are few and uniformly problematic, as are alternatives to other air-to-surface rockets, bombs, and missiles and surface-to-surface, large-calibre ordnance. In fact, the principal and general alternatives reduce in reality to only one: ground forces. This would include infantry on foot and in armored vehicles penetrating urban and peri-urban environments, fighting house-to-house, building-to-building, degrading enemy assets and killing enemy soldiers during the advance and securitization operations. In the words of Israeli Knesset member and Minister of Justice Haim Ramon, "What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in... Our great advantage vis-a-vis Hizbollah is our firepower, not in face-to-face combat."

As the Israeli Justice Minister's statement demonstrates, the disadvantages of 'face-to-face combat' are rather more obvious than the advantages. Infantry fighting in close quarters entails a very high probability of significant casualty rates among troops; stand-off weapons, on the other hand, by their nature keep troops far away from ground fire and booby-traps. Furthermore, stand-off weapons will—provided they actually hit their intended targets—degrade enemy assets much more rapidly than infantry and mechanized infantry possibly could, even when the airborne ordnance does not live up to the "precision" frequently used to describe its accuracy. Slogging forward across a hostile country takes days, and target-rich environments can be few and far between along the way. Aerial bombarment from jets and artillery projects destructive force miles and scores of miles forward, thereby offering considerably greater access to widely dispersed targets of interest. For ground troops, after moving forward through sparse encounters on the way to a city of strategic interest, the drop into urban and peri-urban combat environments causes a sudden shift of the target/threat environment from one relatively thin to something so rich and multi-faceted that it can quickly overwhelm even the most trained infantry and mechanized units, leaving soldiers and other war assets vulnerable to everything from snipers to booby-traps to ambushes.

And these are just the beginnings of the problems for the early phases of urban combat environment engagement, even before genuine occupation forces can arrive and establish some degree of order, tense and violent as such might be. Urban warfare is where soldiers of both sides come into contact at close range. Most likely, both sides will attempt to employ small arms fire to neutralize enemy combatants sited or suspected; but the availability of rifles, side arms, and grenades does not entirely remove the possibility of the worst of all possible battlefield scenarios, hand-to-hand combat: those 'face-to-face' fights mentioned above are bloody and violent beyond description, and their nature mitigates at least to some degree any technological superiority one side might have over the other. Extremely close-quarters fighting is where the most ancient roots of warfare rise to the surface in brief encounters that end with the near certainty of deaths of some of those so engulfed.

But ground forces also present an interesting and little noted opportunity: because of the close quarters in which such combat occurs, and because of the human, real-time, visual nature of identifying enemy threats, there exists the capacity, at least in some cases, to determine whether or not potential targets actually merit attack. Unlike stand-off weaponry, which by its nature can only remotely distinguish civilians from genuine tactical targets—forward observers, prior intelligence, remote video monitoring, and target painting notwithstanding—ground force combatants can and do tell the difference between dangerous adversaries and civilians.

This is by no means a perfect trade-off: infantry and close artillery can cause civilian deaths, either by accident or deliberation: the former is a tragic consequence of non-combatants killed or wounded in cross-fire or through misidentification; the latter is a monstrous and very real possibility, with only some of the many small and large massacres of civilians ever becoming widely known as was the case, for example, of the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila in mid-September of 1982.

The accidents and treacheries committed by infantry troops having been noted, the trade-off between force casualties and those on the other side of a conflict is genuine. In an air and artillery campaign, fewer soldiers will be exposed to enemy fire, but more civilians on the other side will suffer as a result. Stand-off weaponry—regardless of the sophistication of technology employed in its guidance, targeting, and detonation systems—will not always nor particularly frequently ensure the safety of those who are not a threat, and this grim fact is unrelated to whether or not enemy soldiers are using civilians as "human shields," as is so often claimed when civilians get killed in bombings. Civilian casualties are an inevitable consequence of the nature of the chosen matrix of weaponry and tactics. When the enemy is at distance, clarity in identification is sacrificed at the same time troops are protected from close-quarters combat with its attendantly higher kill rates.

The trade-off is such: rely on bombardment campaigns to protect one's own troops, and thereby re-allocate the composition of absolute casualty count toward those upon whom the bombardment is being wrought. The greater numbers of dead and injured on the other side will necessarily reflect both genuine targets and innocent civilians.

Readers uncomfortable with or disgusted by this allocation calculus should strive not to wage war in the modern age because technologically sophisticated societies will do whatever is necessary to minimize their own casualties in order to maintain popular support. Deaths of soldiers and civilians on the other side in a war are not nearly as corrosive to that public support as would be large numbers of casualties on their own side.

That means air warfare—despite its limitations in successfully resolving conflicts and despite its inevitable, occasional killing of civilians—will continue to be the first and principal means by which the Western world and its more sophisticated proxies prosecute the grim wars of this century and beyond.



The Dark Wraith trusts that readers have been enlightened—while perhaps being disheartened or even enraged—by this informational article.

Special Graphic Post: Highway in Darkness

Special Analysis: The Sacrifice of Pawns

At left is a picture from the USS Liberty Memorial Website. The USS Liberty was attacked but not sunk on June 18, 1967, while on a spying mission off the coast of Egypt. Israeli aircraft, then torpedo boats, laid waste to it in what the Israelis and 10 official U.S. commissions described as a tragic accident, a case of mistaken identification of the American ship as a much smaller, horse transport boat of Egyptian registry. The picture was taken the day after the attack: the boat is listing, burnt to brown, and pock-marked with holes from ordnance up to and including 40mm cannon shells. Not visible is the damage from several torpedoes. Also not visible are the victims, 34 of whom were killed, another 174 wounded.

In the heat of growing signs of war in the region—what would come to be known as the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—the United States had sent the USS Liberty and other surveillance sea assets into coastal waters off Egypt. According to accounts from crew members of the doomed ship, Israeli Defense Forces aircraft made as many as eight recon passes over it. From The Politics of Anti-Semitism (Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire, Eds., AKA Press, 2003), comes this narrative (supplemented here by graphics) based upon statements by the men who were on the USS Liberty the day of the attack:

"A few hours later... Israeli Mirage III fighters [came], armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

"A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystére jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.

"The Liberty's radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called 'a buzzsaw sound.' Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.

"Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. 'Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,' he barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: 'You get those fucking airplanes back on deck...'

"After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull [see graphic at right], flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

"As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.

"After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: 'Do you need any help?'

"The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: 'Fuck you.'

"The Israeli boat turned and left."

Virtually none of the survivors of the incident characterized it as an accident, affirming repeatedly that it was a deliberate, concentrated, prejudicial, unprovoked attack to blind a United States asset that could otherwise have detected the military operations Israel was about to mount against its Arab enemies. Official reports say the attack lasted no more than 15 minutes. Survivors claim the attack lasted well over an hour.

From the Jewish Virtual Library, which stands on the conclusion that the incident was a grievous accident cause by both Israeli and American errors, Mitchell Bard writes this: "None of Israel's accusers can explain why Israel would deliberately attack an American ship at a time when the United States was Israel's only friend and supporter in the world."

From the other side of the dispute come explanations ranging from the quite reasonable to the perilously inflammatory. Interested readers may derive a sense of the bitterness of some former service personnel in the scathing critique of official investigations, originally published in the January 16, 2004, edition of Stars and Stripes, by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer.

Why the USS Liberty incident occurred that awful day in 1967 will never be known. What happened that awful day in 1967 is without any doubt: an American military ship was attacked, the vessel was destroyed, 34 of its naval personnel were killed, and 174 more were wounded.

As much as the survivors, their families, and other interested parties might want it to be otherwise, the reason behind what happened is not particularly important in light of the compelling lesson to be learned from the incident, a lesson for all time in matters of war and even of peace. The lesson is this:

No rational nation acts against its own interests: intentions are irrelevant; all that matters are capabilities. Wage war and build peace upon this premise, and both the accidents and the treacheries of your allies will be neither frequent nor unexpected.


In memorium for the four United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon soldiers killed by Israeli artillery fire at the UNIFIL observation post at Khiyam on July 25, 2006: may your respective nations—may all nations—learn from your final and ultimate sacrifice.




The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Special Blog Post: Middle East Geography Quiz

While preparing several articles for publication here at The Dark Wraith Forums, your host realized it might be worth the time to whip up a quiz sure to challenge and inform everyone. Actually, compared to that Missile Quiz last week, this one should be a somewhat less than a head-banger. Whether you score high or low on this one, you'll enjoy it. Without further ado, take your best shot. At the end of this post is the link to a modest map of the Middle East. If you get desperate, you can open it to see some of the answers to the quiz questions. I know you won't do that, however: you'll slog through the quiz, find out your score, then you'll click on the link to the map. Yes, indeed. That's the sporting way to do it.

Click here to open the Middle East Geography Quiz.


The Dark Wraith invites you to see the map of the Middle East and, as always, thanks you for taking this nice quiz.

Special Analysis: In Response to 'An Irresponsible Question'

I have yet to directly address in a major article here at The Dark Wraith Forums the latest Middle East crisis involving Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. As noted in comments on a previous thread here, the trajectory and end-point of the violence is obvious to me, yet something seems different this time around: even though the dynamics have not materially changed from previous confrontations, and even though all indications point to no major turning point in the ways and means by which international and inter-ethnic conflicts are resolved in the Middle East, something not yet entirely quantifiable to me is not quite the same.

Answering a request by Moody Blue for my analysis of the situation, I responded in part as follows:

Here's my problem. The current situation in the Middle East has a dynamic that is so obvious to me that I could literally close my eyes and type for 30 minutes, laying out exactly what's going to happen. The particulars of the events on the ground from moment to moment and even from day to day are largely irrelevant to the trajectory and end-point.

Yes, certain members of the G-8 are trying to broker a backroom deal; yes, the Israelis are following a well-worn path of obliterating their potential adversaries at the very level of capacity to carry out the duties, rights, and responsibilities of sovereignty or, in the case of Palestine, future sovereignty; and yes, the Israelis, for doing all of this, are going to leave in place the symbols of their generations-old nemeses in the Middle East. They never killed Yasser Arafat, even though time and time again they could have, and they will do the same with the nominal head of Hizballah, Hassan Nasrallah, or one of his most capable lieutenants. The whole conflagration will cool down in a while, and the brokers of record will move in, help clean up the mess in Lebanon, and feel like they were the agents of quasi-peace who finally got the guns to stop roaring.

Israel will then negotiate a final border solution with a fully and permanently castrated Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza, relieved as he will be of the overwhelming power that Hamas had held in shaping Palestinian policy toward Israel.

Israel will, in the meantime, establish a security buffer zone in southern Lebanon, probably something about 20 miles wide, up to just south of the Lebanese city of Tyre.

Then we'll see negotiations and playing around with the idea of replacing the Israeli troops with a United Nations peacekeeping force in the security buffer zone. That will go on for some time.

A nervous calm will eventually settle over the region, with hot rhetoric and a relative absence of gunfire. Ultimately, status quo ante will return, with the ante being weaponry poised at enemies everywhere, but relative peace and quiet... until, of course, the next round.

It's so easy to see.

Now for the problem: something in my gut is telling me that it's not going to play out this way. It's a tiny voice, and I simply cannot put my finger on exactly what's nagging the Hell out of me.

Mind you, there's always background noise, intrigue, and little sparklers of weirdness in these flare-ups in the Middle East. Small mysteries are like a persistent weed that grows on the landscape of deterministic outcomes in politics, and the current crisis has no small share of oddities.

But I honestly don't think that's what's behind my uncertainty. I don't mind uncertainty: I can always qualify my calls with some ifs, ands, ors, and buts; however, this time, I just cannot lay claim to the well-spring of my concern.

No, it's not Syria. The government in Damascus is relatively weak militarily, and its leadership is not nearly as willing as it would have been a generation ago to engage in full-blown hostilities with Israel; and that government, despite having a mutual defense agreement with Iran, is less than thrilled about having Iran come to its rescue in a show-down with Israel.

As for Iran—setting aside the fatiguing, constant barrage of anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic propaganda emanating from Tehran—the theocratic leadership has no intention of giving Israel a pretext to terminate the Persian state's nuclear program, which in my judgment is considerably closer to deployment (not 'development'—deployment) of nuclear weapons than most other analysts believe.

None of that is what's bothering me. It's something else, and I do not yet know what it is.

My sense of frustration with giving a name to my concern is becoming moot. This is probably just the same story, now cast on the stage of the 21st Century: war, destruction, appalling levels of civilian casualties, behind-the-scenes political wrangling, and lots of inflammatory rhetoric. To the mix we can this time add a maddenly incompetent U.S. Administration incapable of doing anything other than giving the thumbs up to Israel.

The peripheral nations in this latest drama, so often cited by media analysts, do not present serious threats to a wind-down of the conflict in the normal course.

Syria is not a major threat. Its current government, led by Bashar al-Assad, the son of Hafez al-Assad, is far less prone to violence than it would have been under the late Hafez: its military is not strong, and its mutual defense treaty with Iran is actually a deterrent to any interest it might have in joining the fray in Lebanon.

The Syrians are not stupid. While they are more than glad to have the buttressing strength of Iran's considerable military might behind them, they know very well that Iran is a nascent hegemon; therefore, any action Tehran would take on behalf of Damascus would come at a dear price to Syria's sovereign autonomy.

As noted above, Iran's leadership is not keen on turning Israel's attention to it, either. The only way to stop Iran's nuclear program from becoming a nuclear weapons stockpile is through destructive intervention. No, diplomacy is not going to work; and in the absence of the world's great powers being willing to adopt a policy that allows all nations to develop and stockpile weapons while assuring that their use would bring a coördinated, reciprocal nuclear attack, a pre-emptive military strike is the only way to resolve Iran's nuclear ambitions. Whether or not the ambitions should be stopped is another matter entirely; if, however, the goal is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, the only way the goal can be achieved at this late hour is through the wholesale destruction of its nuclear fuel refining facilities. But the United States is wholly incapable of carrying out such a military strike for two reasons: first, the resources to do the job just are not there at the assured level and, more importantly, at the assured sustainability to engage what could turn out to be a months-long bombing campaign; and second, Iran has become far too economically powerful, now delivering as it does crucial fossil fuel to Turkey and other putative U.S. allies. The U.S. cannot afford to literally cripple major parts of Asia Minor, nor can it afford the wrath of China, which would in the event of military action against Iran be financing through its routine, massive purchases of U.S. Treasury instruments the destruction of one of its emerging trading allies in the Shanghai Coöperation Organization.

In the absence of the United States using military force to neutralize the Iranian nuclear weapons program, only one nation on Earth could and would do it. The leaders in Tehran know this, and they are simply not going to give Israel the pretext to deal with the problem while a grateful Western world looks on and an infuriated China is paralyzed to action by lack of leverage on the Jewish State.

With all of the above as backdrop, as it stands now, a return to that above-mentioned status quo ante within several months seems not just likely, but downright certain. Any remaining doubts I might have—doubts I still simply cannot shake—I shall address in a subsequent post.

Many are the topics concerning the Middle East now being discussed in the Blogosphere. Both long- and short-term solutions are offered, questions are asked rhetorically, shock and outrage are regularly expressed. By way of example of the quality and character of inquiries being posed, the Green Knight published, "An Irresponsible Question," which was as follows:

Given that Hezbollah is both an external threat to Israel and an internal threat to the legitimate government of Lebanon, and

given that the government of Lebanon has information on Hezbollah but not sufficient military power to deal with them, and

given that Israel has plenty of military power but not as much information on Hezbollah as they might, and

given that it's in both Lebanon's and Israel's interest to have peace on their border and Hezbollah gone or at least disarmed --

was there ever a possibility of, you know, some kind of joint operation between the two nations to deal with their mutual problem?

Or is outright war the default option in the Middle East no matter what? Is the "rational actor" theory of the nation state really just inapplicable in that part of the world?

My response, edited and augmented, was as such:

Let us make a minor change to the question set: replace "Hezbollah" with "Druse"; or replace it with "Kurdish."

Hezbollah has been but one of a handful of provisional entities operating in the Middle Eastern theatre. Generally speaking, each has its base of operation—be it a territory, a town, or an enclave—and from that base it fields what are essentially patrolling squadrons of armed militiamen.

These militias vex border areas, provinces, and/or groups of villages, where they kill people, exact extortions, and cause other problems. Some are well financed, others are not. The Christian Druse, for example, have long been rumored to be provisioned by Israel, which uses their services as a counter-balance to Islamic militias and other irregulars. Kurdish militias can be found from Syria to the border regions of Turkey and Iran, in some cases making what nearly amount to regularly scheduled, cross-border raids that inflict casualties and infuriate the rulers in the countries they target.

But these militias create and enforce a curious balance of power; as such, when one of them is removed, the power shifts. This is exactly the same process that occurs in biological systems: take out one "problematic" infecting organism, and its place is filled by one or more of the remaining infectious agents, which then sometimes grow without control.

When Israel eviscerated al Fatah in the earlier years of this Century and the last, two groups arose: a nascent, very militant wing of al Fatah, and Hamas. Both of these groups had been there, but the center of al Fatah—largely by virtue of the standing of Yasser Arafat—had held sway.

Once the political center of al Fatah had been destroyed, all manner of trouble-making groups had their moment of opportunity. Gaza Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has no power to stop Hamas, and enlisting the aid of Israel is simply out of the question. For one thing, Israel has been withholding tax revenues from the Abbas government, money crucial to building a central, powerful military that could deal with provisionals and trouble-makers.

Israel regularly commits the same mistake made on a grand, catastophic scale in 2002 by the United States. By wiping out the Baathist regime in Iraq, and by obliterating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, we completely removed the twin bulwarks that had kept Iran in check. Absent the vice grip on Tehran, the Persian state grew in regional and even extra-regional influence like wildfire.

We had no capacity to create an instant government in either Iraq or Afghanistan, so we had no capacity to fill a vacuum before the Iranians did so on their own behalf and to their own interests.

Israel similarly has no capacity to fill a vacuum it leaves when it destroys a pestilence, so it guarantees that the most aggressive of remaining pests will rise and dominate the territorial, and then the political, landscape of a country or turf crippled by military action.

Both Israel and the United States act to ensure a short-run solution yet have nothing even close to the resources or wherewithal to project long-term, enduring stability in the absence of the militants of the hour.

As such, whether it would be in unilateral military action or in some program coördinated with a tolerable central authority, eliminating one threat simply ensures that a greater threat will arise subsequently. The current effort will have no different result.

And then the question becomes, "Who really wants a different result, anyway?"

The Dark Wraith will offer further analysis should events warrant.

Special Blog Post: Missile Quiz

With war raging in the Middle East, recent news stories have included any number of references to missiles and rockets being used by the combatants. The quiz below tests your knowledge of a few of the many ways that death and destruction are being delivered from the sky to both fighters and civilians in this latest episode in the never-ending story of bloodshed to which humanity is condemned.

Click here to open the Missile Quiz.

Enjoy.

Special Graphic Post: New Bumper Sticker by the Dark Wraith

Above is the latest bumper sticker created by your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums. This one's a beauty if I do say so myself. Maybe no more than a year ago, putting one of my bumper stickers on your car probably would have immediately earned you a set of slashed tires in many parts of the country. Times are different, now: most likely, your tires won't be slashed for at least a couple of days.

Wait...

Okay, I just read this marketing book that said something about not mentioning the downside of your product if you don't have to. I'm not sure what that's all about, but those guys are the experts, so you need to ignore that first paragraph.

Now, below is a graphical layout of all the bumper stickers I've designed and offered over the past year or so. Although the normal cycle I must follow is to pull one down before I offer another, anyone interested can order directly from me (not through the e-store) any bumper sticker in lots of 100 or 250 at a decent discount from the e-store retail price. If you would like to do so, contact me using the Feedback Form, which is always available over in the sidebar. Tell me which one you want (mouseover the desired image, and you'll see the inventory reference number), and specify how many you want to order in increments of 100 or 250. You'll get a quote within 24 hours.

   
   

Remember, this is a mid-term election year, so bumper stickers are mighty important. You can share them with your friends so they, too, can get their tires slashed by Right-wing thugs.

Wait...

That marketing book says it's not a good idea to mention how the product can bring harm to lots of people.

Lordie. Marketing certainly has its share of nuance.


Consider this an open thread as I gear up for publication later this week of the second article in the Dark Arts Politics series, along with a few other articles, including a rant on education, one of the very most rantable of subjects in my arsenal. (And I have no idea whether or not "rantable" is a word, but it should be. Of course, given that it has now been published here at The Dark Wraith Forums, it is.)


Say what you have to say. Sing praises, complain bitterly, speak obtusely, or bitch excessively. It's all part of a good thread on a quiet night here on the outskirts of civilization on the frontier of the 21st Century. Grab a chair and enjoy the company. In just a few short months, we'll know whether or not the neo-conservatives will rule for another two years with majorities in both houses of Congress, or whether they'll rule for the next two years with Democrats asking if it's really, really safe once again to have a spine. For God's sake, no one say, "BUSH" to them, or they'll vanish into a cloud of wuss-hood like they've been doing for the past six years. (And yes, "wuss-hood" is a word. See the parenthetical exposition above on "rantable" if you don't believe me.)


The Dark Wraith starts up the industrial-sized coffee pot for the evening's festivities.

Special Blog Post: An Open Letter to NARAL Pro-Choice America

To the President of NARAL Pro-Choice America:

According to the Endorsed Candidates Webpage of NARAL Pro-Choice America, your organization has endorsed incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman for the United States Senate in his race against challenger Ned Lamont for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut. Although I shall not make a counter-endorsement here principally because I have yet to determine to my own satisfaction the qualifications of Mr. Lamont to serve as a United States Senator, I must criticize your decision to endorse of Mr. Lieberman, given the mission of your organization.

According to a post at Pam's House Blend, NARAL Pro-Choice America has stated, "[Mr. Lieberman] since clarified his position, to our satisfaction" with respect to several matters, including his vote for cloture to prevent a filibuster of the Senate vote on the appointment of Judge Samuel Alito as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and his support of hospitals that refuse to provide morning-after contraception to rape victims.

Although such may exist and be widely known, I can find precious little reference in the way of clarifications that Mr. Lieberman is supposed to have made on the aforementioned matters; however, whether or not Mr. Lieberman made such clarifications—and in particular, whether or not he made them to representatives of NARAL Pro-Choice America—is irrelevant.

In the case of the Alito nomination, any statement he would have made after his vote is moot: he cast his vote, he did so with full knowledge of the opposition of his constituent base, and the consequence of his vote is that a jurist with radical views far outside the mainstream of public opinion and judicial review now sits on the bench of the highest court in the land, able as he now is to affect the political, social, and economic landscape of this nation for generations to come. As I made clear in a letter I sent to the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and which I republished here, the vote on Samuel Alito was a defining moment not just for America, but for the United States Senators in office at that momentous occasion.

Many if not most votes that a Senator makes can be mitigated, at least to some extent, after the fact. A Senator can come to understand the error in judgment or can seek to create a political smokescreen by approving in principle but not in subsequent funding some piece of legislation. Even in a matter as grave as authorizing military action against Iraq, a Senator can diminish the shameful fact of his or her favorable vote in subsequent condemnation of the war and the lies that led to the catastrophically wrongful vote. This is not to say that a Senator should be forgiven for the initial vote; but retrospective and introspective contrition can be demonstrated by forthright and firm resolve in subsequent votes on the matter.

Such is not the case with a Senator's vote to end a filibuster on a radical Supreme Court nominee. Nothing can be done to repair the damage of the action, and no amount of "clarification" will alter the trajectory of American jurisprudence at its highest level arising from such a damnable act. That you believe Mr. Lieberman can somehow repair the wide-ranging, inter-generational consequences of his cowardice belies a fundamental lack of understanding of just how grave, decisive, and permanent Mr. Lieberman's vote was on that melancholy day of January 30, 2006.

Now, concerning Mr. Lieberman's statement about "conscience" rights of medical service providers, he demonstrated a fundamental blindness to the essential and foundational nature of objectivity in the dispensation of the results of science. Mr. Lieberman does not grasp that public policy cannot be formed on the parochial interests of a handful of common carriers of medications and procedures; in fact, public policy must stand firm against any and all selective medical care delivery, and it must do so precisely because the individual seeking care is asymmetrically at permanent disadvantage in relationships with doctors, hospitals, and even to some extent pharmacies. This is the nature of what is called "fiduciary duty," which is robust to sentiments, opinions, and provincial judgments of those accepting such duty.

If Mr. Lieberman spoke to NARAL Pro-Choice America officials and satisfied their concerns, that's all well and good; but NARAL Pro-Choice America is not the gatekeeper to public trust. Private citizens render judgments with the advice—which we hope is sound—of other individuals, private organizations, and public entities and their responsible representatives. However, no such body external to the individual has any business attempting to secure the trust of information consumers by simply stating that it has received in confidence information to which its constituents are not a party.

NARAL Pro-Choice America might be satisfied, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not I am, and NARAL Pro-Choice America diminishes itself markedly by anticipating otherwise. More importantly, NARAL Pro-Choice America calls into wide-ranging question the judgment in more fundamental assertions, representations, and statements it makes if it is of such a mind that it can in secret discuss matters affecting others' lives in the absence of persistent and thorough transparency.

Your endorsement of Mr. Lieberman renders evidence that NARAL Pro-Choice America is nothing more than a consummate Washington insider, an organization that finds quarter wholly and without concern in its configuration and closeness to the power structure within the Beltway. In the 21st Century, progressive causes will not be won there: what little remains salvageable in this degraded era will be won in street-level political operations arising from the grassroots, a territory NARAL Pro-Choice America has not visited in a long time, standing as it has on press releases the mainstream media barely notices, lobbying that has not prevented the erosion of a woman's right to choose, and the altogether useless mantra that "It's the law of the land—end of discussion" that now proves to have been a bureaucratic apology that became a death trap for the pro-choice forces.

The fight for privacy rights moves on into the grim, year-by-year, election-by-election, vote-by-vote battles across the land. The fight moves on, and it moves on past NARAL Pro-Choice America.



The Dark Wraith has spoken.