heh heh...
Seems just 2 months ago the Obama supporters were calling it the big lie that Obama would create such a force.
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Bill Moyers examines Obama's new strategy(Bomb a country we're not even at war with) :
pbs.org
Operating under this paradigm, historians and defense experts portray U.S. Presidents as having to make the tough decision to allow civilian casualties in pursuit of peace — from the fire bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Barack Obama's recent decision to launch Predator drone strikes in Pakistan. But the problem, as Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young tell Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL, is that the paradigm is fundamentally flawed. Sprey, a long-time defense industry consultant, recently co-wrote a paper arguing that strategic bombing is an unsound airpower tactic. Sprey argues on the JOURNAL that not only has strategic bombing never hastened the end of a war, it often costs more in lives and money. And, in the case of Afghanistan, Sprey believes bombing helps Taliban interests. Noting that missiles fired by Predator drones are accurate to within thirty feet, Sprey says:
Does it kill the person it's intended to kill? Not often. And when it does, it usually kills a bunch of other people around. And that, of course, raises the problem that the Predator and the missiles become a recruiting tool for the opposition and — beyond a shadow of a doubt — recruit more opposition than we get rid of by killing the one person at the table that we wanted to kill.
Historian Marilyn Young concurs, and argues that bombing, even when successful, does not win hearts and minds, "I will not be grateful to you for harming someone I don't like in the course of which you kill my kid." |
