War American-Style
26 March, 2004, Nick Turse, TomDispatch.com
With the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq just past and millions of demonstrators back in the streets of cities across the world, are we any clearer on the reasons for going to war? We know it was about energy and empire; but, as we also know, the official claim (until recently) was that it was about those non-existent WMDs. Or was it to remove a tyrant? Or to democratize the Middle East? Or to wage the war on terror? Or to finish Papa's Gulf War I? While at least some of these reasons are endlessly debated by media talking heads, the functions of the war-- among them the way Iraq has been used as a weapons laboratory-- have received far less attention.
Since the invention of weapons, man has been attempting to improve them; and since World War II, the United States has been the leading global actor in the research and development of weapons meant to incapacitate people. In terms of intensive research in the fields of "wound ballistics," "rapid incapacitation weaponry," and fragmentation "kill mechanisms" to create ever more lethal antipersonnel weapons-- what might best be called "scientific slaughter"-- the U.S. has left the rest of the world in the dust.
Back in 1965, Jack Raymond of the New York Times wrote a piece aptly headlined, "Vietnam Gives U.S. 'War Laboratory.' " And in that era, there were a couple of American commanders who publicly said as much. For instance, General Maxwell Taylor, who served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, noted that "we have recognized the importance of the area [Vietnam] as a laboratory. We have teams out there looking at equipment requirements of this kind of guerilla warfare." But as Raymond pointed out, most American officials were loath to make such boasts for fear of comparisons to the Nazis, who had, only three decades earlier, used the Spanish Civil War as a training ground for World War II.
These days, the American military evidences no such fear. In fact, America's recent small wars from Grenada in 1983 to Iraq in 2003 have tumbled upon each other so regularly that the military and its industrial partners have come to rely on them as living laboratories for battle-testing and improving their weaponry.
Living Weapons Labs - War American-Style
