Posted by
CowboyNeal
on from the jumping-the-gun dept.
giampy writes "New Scientist reports the creation of a 'smart bullet' that can be fired at a target and then transmit back informations via wireless connection. The range is 70m. The project is funded by Lockeed Martin and its official goal is the detection of hidden TNT."
Apologies to slashdot moderators, I'm going offtopic here - these are interesting comments, and worth the time to reply.
Disclosure, I'm not a US Citizen, although I suspect you've already realised this. When people speak about the effect the United States has upon the world we're not just discussing military operations.. in fact about the only thing we're not talking about is Joe Public.
I specifically referred to "foreign, industrial and social policy" as I don't see a real distinction. The United States as an economic superpower has significant sway, both in pure market terms and of diplomatic leverage, both of which have as much need to be used carefully as her near-unbeatable military might
There is significant anger at the US' diplomatic policies which support and defend Israel, a state which is in defiance of more UN Resolutions than Iraq ever was, and one which unlike Iraq was founded illegally and in defiance of commonly-accepted rights.
Your reference to events in Arabia at the end of the Gulf War is factually correct but can be seen from other angles as well, one of which I shall take.
The Iraqi army was nowhere near so well matched against the combined forces which liberated Kuwait as they had been against Iran several years earlier, it would not have been an impossible task for Operation Desert Storm to maintain its inertia and sweep through Iraq to the gates of Baghdad.
Few are those who would have complained at seeing Hussein toppled in 1991, just a few short years after his massacres of the Kurds and Turkomens in the North, of Iranian child soldiers and prisoners of war along his borders and in his camps, and his draining of the marshes of the Shi'i areas in an attempt to starve out the Marsh Arabs
However, the point of view of many is that the West did not want Saddam removed. Similarly recent were the humiliating sieges of US embassies in Teheran, Iran, and that country was, to a far greater extent than today, under the grips of a religious council of hardline Shi'i clerics. America saw Ba'athist government in Iraq as a shield to subdue fundamentalist shi'i islam which otherwise might have spread.
Osama bin Laden, then fresh from the Afghan campaigns against the USSR, was naturally opposed to Hussein - Ba'ath represented secular government untiting the people long racial rather than religious lines, to a hardline Moslem whose followers were drawn from throughout the Islamic world this was unwelcome... so bin Laden offered to provide military forces to keep Iraq at bay.
This would, of course, have been a disaster, but it was compounded by the house of Saud's decision to invite American forces into what Moslems see as holy territory.. and which fundamnetalist moslems saw as an outrage. To them, the US was allowing the continued oppression of many Shi'i Arab, Kurd, Turkomen and Iranian peoples by Saddam Hussein, while at the same time provifing military and diplomatic aid to another pariah state (Israel) which was engaged in a bloody 45-year campaign to hold land taken on pre-biblical grounds from Palestinians who viewed it as their home.
This is, of course, all interpretation, and many other interpretations are possible, but I believe that these were the roots of the rise of al-Qaeda as an international terrorist organisation and of course of the events of Sep 11th 2001. It doesn't just come down to military forces and short-term operations.
I'm quite aware my views won't be to most readers tastes - please reply and challenge me on facts rather than just moderating down. I meta-moderate daily and always mark seemingly political moderations as "unfair"
-- I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Slashdot Mirror
Apologies to slashdot moderators, I'm going offtopic here - these are interesting comments, and worth the time to reply.
Disclosure, I'm not a US Citizen, although I suspect you've already realised this. When people speak about the effect the United States has upon the world we're not just discussing military operations.. in fact about the only thing we're not talking about is Joe Public.
I specifically referred to "foreign, industrial and social policy" as I don't see a real distinction. The United States as an economic superpower has significant sway, both in pure market terms and of diplomatic leverage, both of which have as much need to be used carefully as her near-unbeatable military might
There is significant anger at the US' diplomatic policies which support and defend Israel, a state which is in defiance of more UN Resolutions than Iraq ever was, and one which unlike Iraq was founded illegally and in defiance of commonly-accepted rights.
Your reference to events in Arabia at the end of the Gulf War is factually correct but can be seen from other angles as well, one of which I shall take.
The Iraqi army was nowhere near so well matched against the combined forces which liberated Kuwait as they had been against Iran several years earlier, it would not have been an impossible task for Operation Desert Storm to maintain its inertia and sweep through Iraq to the gates of Baghdad.
Few are those who would have complained at seeing Hussein toppled in 1991, just a few short years after his massacres of the Kurds and Turkomens in the North, of Iranian child soldiers and prisoners of war along his borders and in his camps, and his draining of the marshes of the Shi'i areas in an attempt to starve out the Marsh Arabs
However, the point of view of many is that the West did not want Saddam removed. Similarly recent were the humiliating sieges of US embassies in Teheran, Iran, and that country was, to a far greater extent than today, under the grips of a religious council of hardline Shi'i clerics. America saw Ba'athist government in Iraq as a shield to subdue fundamentalist shi'i islam which otherwise might have spread.
Osama bin Laden, then fresh from the Afghan campaigns against the USSR, was naturally opposed to Hussein - Ba'ath represented secular government untiting the people long racial rather than religious lines, to a hardline Moslem whose followers were drawn from throughout the Islamic world this was unwelcome... so bin Laden offered to provide military forces to keep Iraq at bay.
This would, of course, have been a disaster, but it was compounded by the house of Saud's decision to invite American forces into what Moslems see as holy territory.. and which fundamnetalist moslems saw as an outrage. To them, the US was allowing the continued oppression of many Shi'i Arab, Kurd, Turkomen and Iranian peoples by Saddam Hussein, while at the same time provifing military and diplomatic aid to another pariah state (Israel) which was engaged in a bloody 45-year campaign to hold land taken on pre-biblical grounds from Palestinians who viewed it as their home.
This is, of course, all interpretation, and many other interpretations are possible, but I believe that these were the roots of the rise of al-Qaeda as an international terrorist organisation and of course of the events of Sep 11th 2001. It doesn't just come down to military forces and short-term operations.
I'm quite aware my views won't be to most readers tastes - please reply and challenge me on facts rather than just moderating down. I meta-moderate daily and always mark seemingly political moderations as "unfair"
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU