Re: clarification please

["L. Todd Masco" <cactus@bb.com>]

From: will@thinkmedia.com (thinkmedia.com):
>> Events like Waco and the Persian Gulf War, in which an
>> authoritarian superpower obliterates a mostly harmless and
>> largely defenseless group of people, translate with relative ease
>> to the cyberspacial realm.
>
> I remember reading a Scientific American article about two years before
> Iraq invaded Kuwait, in which it was made clear Iraq had and were
> developing missiles with ranges paralleling only U.S., Russia and China. I
> don't think harmless and defenseless quite fits the description. Maybe
> wannabe super power would be more accurate.

Harmless and defensive is how I would describe the 100s of thousands of
 civilians masscred by the United States.  The really dangerous people
 were safe inside their bunkers.
 
It's an important point: regardless of the threat that the Iraqi government
 posed, the US government chose to destory the country rather than making
 a real attack against only the government.

They were able to do this for two big reasons, both directly attributable
 to political factors (as well as the fact that there is not a large
 vocal Iraqi population in the US):

	  1) Very few US lives were lost (the "vietnam/cambodia" lesson)
		or at risk.

	  2) The US government managed to make, through direct censorship
		and disinformation, the US people identify the residents
		of Iraq with the government of Iraq.  Thus, the wholesale
		bombing of civilian centers that posed no direct to the
		United States became acceptable as long as it was reported
		in emotionally comfortable terms.

It's really not so different than the War On Some Drugs or half a dozen
 other power-plays... and this is the propaganda machine that we will have
 to face if we're unlucky enough that Clinton/Gore actual get their act
 together enough and get the rest of the government behind them to make a
 real PR effort (as opposed to the clumsy scare tactics we've soon so far).
--
L. Todd Masco  |  Bibliobytes books on computer, on any UNIX host with e-mail
cactus@bb.com  | "Information wants to be free, but authors want to be paid."