Main

What?

Why?

Nouns

Old Stuff

Mail

I just realized that given the timing of this, the title of this little bit could be somewhat misleading. I'm not writing about the school shootings in Colorado.

Instead, my little brain cells got tweaked a little this morning by the news that, in NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, we dropped three laser-guided bombs on Slobodan Milosevic's house last night. What I found rather fascinating was NATO's comment that they bombed the house because it had been functioning as a command center, and not in any sort of attempt to assassinate Milosevic himself.

This is standard policy for a lot of nations in war. You don't attack and try to kill the presidents/dictators/leader types, but you drop bombs on grunt troops instead. Well, you also bomb bridges, factories, buildings, ammunition depots, and those sorts of things, too, but if you're targeting people, you target grunt field troops.

Now, from the coverage I'm getting (and I know it's heavily biased toward "us", but it's all the information I can get), quite a lot of these grunt troops are real monsters, who seem to have no problem following orders regarding massacring villages at the drop of a hat. So, really, I'm not upset that they're getting killed. Not too much, at least.

But I've been thinking a lot about the policy of not trying to kill opposition leaders, and I'm beginning to think that it royally stinks. Here's why.

Milosevic isn't really at any risk in this conflict. As far as I know, he's not charged with war crimes, and even if he was, since we're not allowing ourselves to go arrest foreign leaders, it doesn't amount to a pail of piss. He's able to sit back and give orders to "cleanse" villages without any concern that he'll actually feel any consequences for making such an inhumane decision. He's already proven himself to not have a conscience. Do we really think that by killing a few of his soldiers, or destroying a few bridges, we're going to get his attention? Hell, no! This is a tyrant, motivated by self-interest and a desire to carry out his country's stupid prejudices to exterminate an ethnic group that -- heavens to Betsy! -- beat them in a battle in 1389. I'll do the quickie math for you, that's over 600 years ago. Not only is it a stupid prejudice, it should have fallen by the wayside fucking centuries ago. But it hasn't. So we're gonna have to deal with it.

My opinion? Kill the bastard. Drop bombs on whatever bunker that conniving, beady-eyed, rat-bastard chooses to hole up in until it's a crater a mile deep. Is it possible that someone "as bad" as him will be the next King Asshole in that squalid little pesthole? Possibly. And if he tries to keep up the genocide, we bomb him, too. And again. And again.

I can hear someone whining already. "But it's not our job to be the world policeman. Just because we're powerful doesn't mean we should go around enforcing our Western, Euro-centric, Christian-tainted, big-dick ideals on the other people of the world.".

Here's my response, short version.

Shut the fuck up.

Here's the long version. More than one paragraph, even.

Yes, we're currently the biggest guy on the block. Oh, yeah, there are still some other big powers in the world. Russia's not inconsequential, and China's not exactly anemic, but compared to the United States, and especially NATO, they're incredibly outclassed.

However, it's ridiculous to be the biggest power on the planet and sit on the sidelines while one people tries to wipe another off the face of that planet, just because we're worried that some other people might get upset if we were to actually try to stop the genocide.

I mean, HELLO?! It's not like we're bombing them because they don't like McDonalds or something inane. We're bombing them because they're trying to kill an entire ethnic group. Christ on a fucking crutch, why can't some people get that through their heads? Yes, Yugoslavia is it's own country, but aren't there a few things that maybe should be considered concerns of humanity, and not just one country's internal dealings?

It's been set that lately, especially in Desert Storm, we've been able to fight "push button wars". Wars of guided weapons, drone aircraft, and the like. But leaders can make irrational, and even inhumane decisions and not worry about the consequences, because there aren't any consequences for them. This lack of consequences frees them from having to really think about what their decisions mean in the grand scale, and enables them to commit such atrocities as we're seeing in Kosovo lately.

Anyway, that's my random scribbling. Bomb the bastard. And stop fucking apologizing.