War Articles

I also want to point people out to a couple of articles in the latest Harper's.

Joy Gordon explores how this right-wing outrage over the oil for food program in Iraq is hypocrisy because they know damn well that it wasn't the UN who controlled the program but the Security Council--meaning of course the United States. Gordon shows how the US and Britain came up with the program, controlled what went in and out of Iraq, allowed Jordan to trade with Iraq, and closed their eyes to Turkey secretly trading with Saddam so that the sanctions wouldn't hurt the economy of our ally.

Perhaps even more interesting is Benjamin Phelan's article exposing the pointlessness of building bunker-busting nuclear weapons. He argues that such weapons are a fantasy of right-wing government officials. And rather than just argue against them, he explains the physics of why they don't work. Basically, the steel that missiles are made can't withstand the speeds that it would take to bore through enough earth to get to the bunkers. He shows that there's no way a missile could bore more than five times its length before exploring. Plus Phelan says that if such a weapon was used, it would be more dangerous to the world than a conventional nuclear weapon because it would blast radioactive soil into the air that the winds would carry around the Earth.