By Joe Azin:
A Vietnam Vet wrote the following reason he knew Sec of Defense Gates was sending out a purposeful lie about the necessity of bombing Libya.
There can be no war without a false narrative justifying the war. So armed rebels were described as ‘protester’ or ‘innocent civilians’. Black Libyans and immigrants were called ‘mercenaries’. One bombing of an ammunition site captured by the rebels was described as “Gaddafi is bombing his own people’. An armed insurrection was describes as ‘peaceful protesters’. And a carefully planned bombing campaign was described as “necessary to implement a no-fly-zone.”
Maybe we all can learn again to watch out for such a false narrative. It has always in the past been the precursor of an big power war.
Take care.
Jay Hauben
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The American government has lied to you again. Just as I knew in 2003 when Secretary Powell showed the UN pictures of rusted trucks in the desert, that he was lying, so now, when the present Secretary Gates said on TV the other day that it was necessary to bomb Libya to maintain a “no fly zone”, I knew it was a lie, but I thought that it was an innocent lie made from ignorance. I should have known better. It was, we can see now, an intentional lie. The American government was just looking for an excuse to destroy Libyans and create the chaos that will allow their oil companies to take over the strategic assets of Libya.
How do I know it was a lie? Because it would have been a lie 42 years ago when I fought in Vietnam, and after spending several billion dollars a year for defense equipment over that past 42 years, our weaponry could not be less capable today than it was then. When we flew over Vietnam, their fighters did not dare come closer to us than 25 miles. That was because we could shoot them down head-on from twenty miles away.
Their anti-aircraft guns and SAM missile radars could track us, but they did not dare turn on that fire control radar except for short second bursts from time to time, not enough to accurately guide their guns or missiles. If they left their radar on and pointing at us, one of our escort planes would immediately fire an anti-radar missile which would fly straight down the beam and destroy their radar dish.
Yes, we lost planes over Hanoi but that was because we wanted to go in there and drop bombs on their people. If our mission had just been to establish a “no fly zone”, well we did that almost automatically just by showing up in the general vicinity. It would be much easier in Libya because everything is spread out along the coast and we wouldn’t even have to fly over land.
What would have been needed 40 years ago in Libya (and they probably would need much less today) would have been one AWACS plane to keep track of every bit of air traffic , and a couple fighters with air-to-air missiles, each flanked by a couple attack fighters carrying anti-radar missiles. None of the planes would have to fly over land.
All of this could have been done with the primitive systems that we were using 40 years ago. I won’t go into present day capability because I have not flown them, I have only seen them demonstrated in simulation in mock-ups on the ground. But if they can do anything even close to what they claim, they make my old systems look like one horse plows by comparison.
So, what did we do instead. Yesterday, in the first few minutes of the Western action against Khadafi, the Americans and the British launched over 100 cruise missiles. Within minutes of entering the theatre of operations, the Americans and the British were killing Libyan civilians. Nothing’s new. And today , RT TV reports that the American-controlled Egyptian military is shipping small arms into Libya to feed a civil war. There is nothing humanitarian about what the UN and NATO are doing.
Joe Azin is a US Vietnam vet.