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.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Collateral Damage

I think it is vital for the I think its vital because just as he said there was a building that needed to be destroyed but unfortunately it was right next to a hospital in Baghdad. The engineer does a process that allows the bomb to explode the intended target by imploding it as to exploding it. This causes the building to collapse on itself where it does not shatter and have a lot of collateral damage t the other buildings around it. These bombs can be extremely accurate. Just as the speaker said he was so angry that the laser guided bomb that was dropped in a different situation that landed three feet away from the intended target. A laser-guided bomb due to the engineering skills will be extremely accurate. Again it is not without fault in the instance of the Ali case. The engineers look at the construction density, who’s supposed to be there, the materials that its made of, the damage done and if the civilian casualties exceeds 30 deaths the attack has to be approved by the president and his administration in a collateral damage estimate. While it is horrible that there are going to be deaths that are unintended by the military it is a small price to pay for the amount of lives that will be taken by those high profile people that the bomb is intended for. I feel that it amazing that they can analyze the sun angle and the building structure, camera angles and such to find out where a target, such as
Saddam is at a certain time and how far he could have gone since then.

In my opinion it is necessary for the US military to have these engineers to determine the structure of the targets to calculate how they will fall down, thereby estimating the collateral damage. If it weren’t for these engineers there would be an inordinate number of civilian deaths that were completely unnecessary. In the cases of Dresden or Tokyo if they had these engineers determining potential damage there would have been far less unneeded deaths. The fact that the army is implementing low collateral weapons in addition to high collateral weapons makes civilians that much safer. I feel that the war while it is going to happen should only take out the dangerous targets and not the civilians that are in the wrong place at the wrong time. How would I or any one who reads this feel if the military killed a crowd of 1000 people just because one of them had a drug resistant strain of tuberculosis.

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