Willie Pete,fact or fiction?

[Carleton Hughes]

http://www.thedonovan.com/archives/004823.htmlhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4440664.stm

[boneheaddoctor]

The BBC would take sides with the Terrorists.....and lie about things too.....whats wrong with some of the Brits these days?

[peragro]

pretty comprehensive essays on the subject

here

here

here

and here

Wikipedia has a write up on WP.

Liked your first link, the guy has real world experience with more than WP.

[cmac2012]

Anything that will burn flesh down to the bone and cannot be extinguished with water should be avoided. Using it as a weapon is not prudent, IMHO. It looks like near witchcraft to the common folk. I'd much rather be shot through the brain with a DU shell than slowly burned to death with WP.

We've got an unbelievable edge on them in weapons technology w/o WP. Half of what we did in the initial strikes on Iraq, and Afghanistan for that matter, resembled shooting fish in a barrel. I heard GIs remark at how bad they felt slaughtering the dumb Iraqis whose weapons were way, way inferior to ours.

Not saying we should tie one hand behind our backs to make it fair. Just maybe draw the line at CHEMICAL WEAPONS like WP and instead, fight like men.

[peragro]

WP would be an incendiary weapon.

Incidentally, would fighting like men involve tying people up and cutting their heads off? Or perhaps waiting till a crowd of children congregate around some US soldiers and the blowing all of them up? Or maybe cutting the heads off of some schoolgirls? Or possibly blowing yourself up during a wedding ceremony? Maybe feetfirst into a woodchipper? A short hop off a 3 story building? Some poison gas or VX perhaps? I know, maybe we could take over a school and blow ourselves and the children inside up with it! Or we could just stick to good ole sniping and IEDs.

[cmac2012]

Oh yes, I'm aware of what they do. Point is not to lower ourselves to their standards. They are unbelievable, it's true.

OK, WP burns, therefore it's an incindiary weapon. Great. Something that lands and burns on your skin and can't be put out with water would strike me as a nasty chemical weapon. You're parsing words here. We've got plenty of weapons w/o it.

This is SOP for the U.S. military: "Whatever we do, it's OK, and if it's not, we punish the guy who did it." (and then go out and do it again)

[GottaDiesel]

WP is probably considered gentle compared to the undisclosed weapons we used against the Iraqi people in the first "war"... We even killed or seriously injured, and sterilized loads of our own troops with the crap we did. Again, WP and depleted uranium are gentle compared to the crap we've done. When it comes to war, we're animals. The funny part is, even while being animals, we can't seem to win a single one since WW2.

Go figure, right?

[420SEL]

By the time you go to war you are past the point of worrying about lowering your standards. There are no standards and nothing is too low. You fight to win. As dumb as it sounds, that episode of star trek had it right. two civilizations had advanced their state of warfare to a computer similation. A computer would determine the theoretical damage to an area based on the weapon theoretically used, and those in the area would report to disintegration cambers. Painless death. Anyway, Kirk shuts them down and makes these two people fight a real war. He figures it is the only way they will ever learn that war is something to be avoided.

I really don't mean to sound trite bringing a tv show plot into this discussion, but having rules in war and blaming one side for fighting unfarily is totally ridiculous to me. People have come up with these rules, the Geneva convention, limits on torture and types of weapons all so that they can feel good about how they fight their wars, when in reality it is not how the war is fought that should make people feel sick, but the fact that there are wars to begin with. When there are wars, they should be as quick and decisive as possible, and as dirty and sickening as a war can be so that maybe one day people will think twice about going to war. After world war one most everybody involved said, "never again." I am not niave enough to think the world will ever see a time when there are no wars, but less of them is a definite possibility when people don't think they are so clean and sterile.

[Botnst]

What about Vietnam?

Bot

[420SEL]

Vietnam, I think, is a good example of the validity of my thoughts above. It had been a long time after Nam that there was a major war. People didn't want that to happen again. If you think back to the first gulf war, there was, in my recolection, a lot more apprehension about going to war (especially considering that for the average person the reasons for it were more clear cut, as were the objectives). The smart bombs and precision strikes that ended that war, seem to have made many people more comfortable with the idea of war this time around. I am not implying that nothing horrible happened in Gulf 1, and that there were no long-suffering consequences afterwards, but certainly by media standards and what the general public was exposed to it was a very clean war.