You Are A Military Target

Posted on April 4, 2003 in Pointers War

Damn those Iraqis! you hear the apologists say. “Why they care so little about their own people, they place military objectives right next to where people live. It’s their own damn fault that civilians are dying.”

When one reviews the list of military objectives in the First and the current Gulf War, you find among the targets things like post offices, telephone exchanges, power substations, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, police stations, fire departments, and factories suspected to be manufacturing chemical weapons. (Speaking of which, the defense of Saddam Hussein International would have been a prime opportunity for using them. Where have they been?) Look around your neighborhood and you will see that you are surrounded by military targets. It’s not the Iraqis fault that they live so close to these things. It’s the fault of the American military for using high explosive weapons to destroy targets from a distance that is safe for the pilots but very unsafe for other human beings. You’ve been sold a bill of goods.

Here in the United States, military targets aren’t usually located out in the middle of the country. This week’s cover story in The OC Weekly (our local light of progressivism) points out:

Come to think of it, aren’t most military installations—and whatever they’re packing—usually a part of the neighborhood? Don’t bases tend to be like prisons, causing whole towns to flower around them to serve them? I mean, less than an hour down the road at Camp Pendleton, they have civilians living on the base and working at fast-food joints and daycare centers on the base. Less than an hour south from there in San Diego, the military and its hardware not only operate among civilians but also are tourist attractions. Aircraft carriers dock near smart shops, not-so-inexpensive restaurants and luxury hotels, so much so that if one of those carriers were to be attacked, the collateral damage would likely include a fabulous brunch in the Prince of Wales Room at Loews Coronado Resort Hotel.

The moral of the story is think, think very hard about the line of propaganda that you’re being fed. The whole purpose is to deflect blame. Not so many years ago, feminists successfully put to rest the notion that women were responsible for the rapes being committed against them. Now, except for the occasional male frozen in adolescence, most adults reject the idea of blaming the victim in that kind of crime. When you realize that the excuse that the military is using for civilian deaths is based on the exact same logic, what is happening in Iraq becomes appallingly clear: the country is being raped.