Targeted Bombing... Really Targeted

I've been blogging about the use of white phosphorus in Falluja for a while now. After repeated denials, the US Army is finally admitting it:

The Pentagon has confirmed that US troops used white phosphorus during last year's offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Falluja.

"It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants," spokesman Lt Col Barry Venable told the BBC - though not against civilians, he said.

The US earlier denied it had been used in Falluja at all.

There apparently are some technicalities over whether or not white phosphorus is a banned chemical weapon. There are international treaties restricting its use (for example, Protocol III of Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons), but the US is not a signatory to any of them. To which I say, who gives a shit. White phosphorus is a flammable chemical normally used to light up a battlefield. Its explosion causes a white cloud that melts the flesh. It will burn until it runs out of oxygen; water has no effect. And now, according to the US Army, it was used as a weapon. Chemical, weapon, I'm going to go ahead and say it's a chemical weapon.

(Col. Venable) said it had been used in Falluja, but it was "conventional munition", not a chemical weapon.

It is not "outlawed or illegal", Col Venable said.

"When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round or rounds into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke - and in some case the terror brought about by the explosion on the ground - will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives," he said.

Of course, we know that we were firing it solely at enemy forces. We just do. Just ask them... oh wait, you can't, they've been melted to the bone.

Another way the army accomplishes the determination of whether or not an Iraqi is an enemy combatant is by the time-honored technique once known as "ducking the witch." We submerge the enemy combatant in water. If he floats, then he is in fact an enemy combatant. If he drowns, well, then, he's innocent. And free to go.

The sick thing about that little bit of satire is that we actually are submerging suspected enemy combatants. Satire is dead.

The government (and that's who to blame here, the policymakers) can hide behind technicalities, but they're using chemical weapons on human beings in a war, one of the main objectives for which was to disarm a dictator of chemical weapons. THAT'S sure to go over well in the region.

Of course, this has barely been reported in the United States so far. It was broken in a television documentary in Italy, and this latest admission of guilt is from the BBC. Wonder when the Beltway chattering class will get around to discovering that we're melting the skin off of human beings in Iraq.