the little chubby credulous female correspondents wander the streets filming "tacticals" w/ heavy soviet machine guns firing off god knows where into the distance, and film the grisly remains of black africans killed hands bound in the public squares, and intone about war.
somewhere ernie pyle is aghast. he did not return every day to the hotels to bathe and replenish his stores, and to put on fresh scent, and he would have recognized "bogus" when he saw it.
where is kadhafi? that is a matter of some interest to me?
and, where are the shattered remains of his regime?
update, 08.26.2011. hat tip, theo spark, www.theospark.net, in this film from the guardian. it shows a warehouse of tanks recently discovered, apparently undefended. the legend to the film clip says the facility is a "... bombed out ..." warehouse, but the contents, e.g., the tanks, are barely damaged & remarkably unscathed. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/aug/25/libya-rebels-tripoli-tanks-video?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3486 . why weren't they deployed? did quacks daffy no longer have the loyalty and service of his troops who would have manned them? or, did the n.a.t.o. air campaign simply convince the libyan military that n.a.t.o. would have destroyed them if deployed? but, where oh where did the tank crews go? end update, 08.26.2011. comment. and still, no evidence that the crews or the military apparatus in support of the tanks were killed or damaged in combat w/ the libyan rebels. the whole thing remains curious to me. end comment.
in the first instance, where are the dead of battle? as i watch and read about these events, i see shattered children, an occasional wounded rebel, and read about fierce protracted battles with heavy weapons.
i see no visual evidence of it. i see no dead kadhafi soldiers, i see no shattered equipment littering battlefields, no twisted and burnt out hulks of tanks, trucks, no artillery lying shattered and the dead strewn in grisly pieces amidst the shattered gun barrels and trunnions.
where are the captured and destroyed tanks?
where are the captured air planes, and helicopters?
and, where are the humiliated and fearful staff officers, and command and control bases overrun by the rebels, and where are the guns and regalia of elite units who have given up the fight? where are the prisoners of war, marching in humbled, chastised fearful lines under the glinty eyes of their captors?
in short, i see very little evidence of protracted intense fighting. or, its remnants.
and, i see very little evidence of the remnants of a shattered regime. the diplomats abjectly seeking the haven of new masters, the bureaucrats trembling in fear, the lesser bureaucrats quailing before new brooms & wondering how clean will they be swept.
and, i do not see the dead, to indicate battle has been joined.
where has it all gone? what has happened, if anything happened not intended for the visual portion of vacuous nightly news broadcasts, to satiate the lust of film crews for "footage?"
john jay @ 08.25.2011
p.s. have you ever wondered where the bullets go from a heavy machine gun when its barrel is elevated 15 to 20 degrees above the horizon? well, they are not landing anywhere that the gunner can see, i can almost guarantee you that. ... . it is not combat, it is an "event" staged for those little fat female correspondents who have never fired a damn gun in there whole lives, and have not the slightest notion of what an elevated barrel means.
just as those poor africans, bound by someone, and dumped dead or shot dead in a public square, for all to "see" as "evidence of war." this, too, has been staged, and these men have been killed in the name of theatre, ... , something which comprises a major component of all "events" in the middle east.
http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-cold-harbor-the-folly-and-horror.htm . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cold_Harbor . june 3, 1864 elements of the army of the potomac under the command of george meade attacked lee's army of virginia at cold harbor, just 10 miles or so northeast of richmond, virginia. the attack was launched at 4.30 a.m. and was poorly coordinated and not very well executed, while lee's defense was well thought out, and with the benefit of a delay in the attack lee's engineers were given the chance to shape the battlefield to their defense. in those few morning hours, it is estimated that union forces lost about 2,000 men killed, and perhaps another 6,000 or so wounded.
it is conceded by some/contended by others, that the bulk of these casualties in the first waves of the assault took place in mere minutes. only the first waves of d-day in world war ii, and some of the pacific amphibious assaults, have ever rivaled the early moments of cold harbor for lethal intensity.
this battle was fought by men using black powder muzzle loading rifled cannon, and black powder muzzle loading rifles whose ignition was by external primed nipples. that means that after each shot, the infantryman or cannoneer had to make sure his arm's barrel had no burning embers in it, sure to flash off a new charge. then, the arm was charged with a measured amount of powder, a bullet or cannon ball started into the muzzle, and then rammed in "battery", the external port to the arm's chamber either primed or fitted with a new fuse, aimed and fired.
a modern infantry rifle may fire upwards of 400 rounds of "aimed fire" a minute, about 7 rounds a second. a good civil war infantryman, firing a muzzle loading rifle as described above, who kept his head in battle and was stationary, could fire about 4 rounds a minute, and if he were lucky, might have had about 40 shots or so on his person.
it is generally accepted that in order for infantry fire to have been effective in the 1860's, an infantryman needed to be with 60 to 70 yards of his adversary, and much closer was preferred. occasional resort to the bayonet occurred.
nothing even remotely approaching the intensity of the battle of cold harbor has occurred in the recent events in libya. not even remotely.
i hear and see film of battle in libya, but i see no other evidence of it.
what is the hell is going on there?
He ran to Iran.
Posted by: PacRim Jim | August 26, 2011 at 10:42 AM