Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Assessing the Destruction

I think that the although it is definitely odd and a little disturbing to hear how the military can calculate how many people will die if the bomb a building, it is probably much better than just dropping bombs and not even thinking twice about the damage. Even though it is weird to hear someone talking numbers on how many people will die if a particular building is bombed, it is important to know the effects the bomb will have.

In comparison to WWII, the war in Iraq is a little different. The United States does not have the goal of just killing as many people as possible to end a war. I do not think the military is trying to end something, they are trying to start something new. We are supposedly trying to create a democracy in Iraq, and I think it is important that the United States set a good example for the Iraqis. If we just go around dropping bombs everywhere and killing as many people as possible, what good is that really doing? Destroying Iraq will not help anyone, and if anything it would just make the United States look like assholes.

So it is important for the United States to assess the damage they do to buildings, because their goal is not to cause mass destruction to Iraq, but to fix it.

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