Topic: war in Iraq
"The first 21 months of Operation Iraqi Freedom have been nothing less than a horror-story, and following the logic of any colonial invasion, violence has been focused directly on the prime enemy of empire: ordinary civilians. The euphemism “shock and awe” was coined by ‘defence intellectuals’ within the Bush administration. As a terror tactic however – the idea being to shatter your adversary’s will to resist through a massive display of barbarity – it is nothing new. Genghis Khan used it to great effect during his invasion of China in 1213. His own version was to slaughter the entire population of cities that opposed him, while merely enslaving those cities that were sufficiently ‘awed’ to capitulate peacefully. The problem with this particular strategy is that most often it serves to inspire resistance rather than break it, as the Pentagon is now realising. As with Bush however, Genghis was a man who found a plan and stuck to it. Before the Mongol invasion, China had a population of about 100 million inhabitants. After complete conquest in 1279 a census showed it be roughly 60 million."
Guerrilla News Network here.
Posted by mediafaction
at 8:33 AM EST